Easy Spanish Reader, Premium Fourth Edition (Easy Reader) by William T. Tardy

Easy Spanish Reader, Premium Fourth Edition (Easy Reader) Reviews

• 
  Teri-K

  You really can start reading this book with no knowledge of Spanish except random words like amigos or adios. I know, because that's what I did. I just started reading until I had no idea what was happening, then started over at the beginning again next time. Every day I could read a little farther and understand a bit more of what was happening. At the same time I started learning basic vocabulary with ANKI. That worked really well for the first section about Maria and Enrique. Honestly I'd have been very happy if all of the book had continued with them. The stories were gradually getting longer and adding vocabulary, but the gradient was very smooth. I suspect it's intended for students in High School beginning Spanish, but I enjoyed anyway.
  
  Then I got to the second part of the book. It's about the history of Mexico. Unfortunately it's all about armies and battles and war and lots of people are killed. It's not graphic, but it's also not a lot of fun to read if you're not a fan of military books. Still I kept reading, (while revisiting the earlier chapters), until right at the end. I had no interest in reading about a long list of Mexican presidents, (that's what it looked like, anyway). Sorry, if the reading isn't interesting it won't really help me learn. So I skipped that one chapter.
  
  Then I tried the third section, an adaptation of a Spanish classic, Lazarillo de Tormes. I read about the book online so I'd have some idea what it was about, but I found it too difficult for my reading level right now. I had to look up multiple words in every paragraph just to have a vague idea of what was going on. I'm still a beginner, so words like "blind man", "miller" and "cunning" aren't in my wheelhouse, and there were too many of them for the story to work for me.
  
  So I went back to the beginning and read through the first two parts, making sure I always understood what was happening and working through a few tricky parts. (This means I've read those sections quite a few times by now.) Then I moved on to another book, Short Stories in Spanish for Beginners, by Richards. I'm able to read that with the same or more understanding as I did the Mexican history section, so I think that's working well. I'll go back to the Lazarillo section some time later and try again.
  
  I was very happy with the first part of this book. It really did let me read a book in Spanish every day while learning the most basic vocabulary, which I'm still working on; it's only been about a month since I started. And I appreciated the detailed lessons in Mexican history, even if they weren't as much fun to read. It's just a pity the difficulty jumps so much before the final section. I suspect it's intended to be used in schools, at the beginning, middle and end of a course or two. Still, it's the only book I've been able to get my hands on that I could read from day 1. Kudos for that.
  
• 
  Shane Ver Meer

  There is a pleasant ascent in difficulty between the 3 parts of this reader, in my opinion. Me fascina mucho la historia de México también, por eso la segunda parte es tan interesante. En la tercer parte me encanta la adaptación de Lazarillo de Tormes, la primer historia en el género establecido por un autor desconocido. ¡Lo recomiendo a todos los principiantes!
• 
  Andrés Escudero

  Honestly, this was a huge surprise for me. I didn't expect to find such a good book published by a large textbook editorial. I would say this represents perfectly the idea of 'Comprehensible Input' put forward by academics such as Krashen. The difficulty starts relatively low and gradually increases throughout the book, culminating in an adaptaption of a classic of Spanish Golden Age literature.
  
  You'll get a taste of what it's like to read modern, light fiction, history/non-fiction and even a heavily simplified extract of classical literature. The book also contains footnotes to explain some of the more difficult terms/less common vocab.
  
  The best part is that it includes audio acessible for free. My only complain is that there's not audio for the entire book. If I remember correctly, a few sections of the history segment (part 2 of the book) did not include audio recordings. But it's hard to complain when you're getting most of the book recorded in a high-quality manner for free.
  
  Highly recommended! Looking back, this was one of the key milestones on my journey to fluency in Spanish.
• 
  Sara

  I started reading after having studied Spanish for 1 year. I didn't have any trouble with the first 2 sections. The 3rd one was difficult, but I was able to understand what was happening. It was a great summer read to help me improve my Spanish.
• 
  Jed

  Good book with audio recordings, audio exercises and flashcards also interesting stories.
• 
  Diana-Michaela Shaffner

  This book could be good if it were formatted to work properly. Unfortunately, somebody apparently pasted text into the book as images instead of regular text as in any other ebook. This "image text" does not allow you to use the otherwise wonderful Kindle functions to look up words and translations. For this reason, the book can absolutely not be recommended.
• 
  Scott O

  The first section is not particularly interesting but at least it gets you reading in Spanish. The second part on the history of Mexico is atrocious. How the book managed to make Mexican history boring, I'll never understand. The third section is a classic story which was entertaining enough. 2.5 stars rounded up.