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Spanish Short Stories for Beginners: The Best Way to Learn a Language, Improve Your Vocabulary Gradually and Quickly at Home, on the Road, in Travel or ... Phrases
Kindle Edition
Published May 18, 2021
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 8, 2024
Some Issues
I normally enjoy foreign language short story books like this, but I felt this one had several problems. First, it had no section about how to best use the book. I always appreciate little hints and tips from publishers of books like this. This book has 20 short stories. Each story is similarly set up: the story in Spanish, questions and answers in Spanish, and vocabulary in Spanish... and this is followed with the same three parts in English. The glossary is unlike any I've seen in other books like this. Most I've seen in other short storybooks have a long list of the foreign language words used in the story with their English equivalents. The ones in this book are brief lists (4 or 5 words) with more dictionary-like definitions in the given language. My Spanish is not fantastic, but the errors I saw in the English stories make me wonder how accurate the Spanish ones are. Several sentences in the English stories had punctuation that in no way reflected either American or British English, at times even impeding the flow of the sentence. The language of the English stories sounded very stilted to my ear, too, like no native English speaker would talk; I wonder if these were direct translations from the Spanish or just poor writing skills on the part of the publisher. The story subject and word choices to include seemed bizarre at times. For instance, in the first story, you get a little botany lesson along with your Spanish lesson, and several words used would be ones you would never (or very rarely) use in English, let alone in Spanish for business or pleasure. The Spanish dialogue punctuation isn’t accurate to what it would be in “real” Spanish. You would definitely need to be an advanced beginner or intermediate student of Spanish to get the most out of this book, as the publisher assumes that you know a lot of vocabulary already.
I received a free digital copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.
I normally enjoy foreign language short story books like this, but I felt this one had several problems. First, it had no section about how to best use the book. I always appreciate little hints and tips from publishers of books like this. This book has 20 short stories. Each story is similarly set up: the story in Spanish, questions and answers in Spanish, and vocabulary in Spanish... and this is followed with the same three parts in English. The glossary is unlike any I've seen in other books like this. Most I've seen in other short storybooks have a long list of the foreign language words used in the story with their English equivalents. The ones in this book are brief lists (4 or 5 words) with more dictionary-like definitions in the given language. My Spanish is not fantastic, but the errors I saw in the English stories make me wonder how accurate the Spanish ones are. Several sentences in the English stories had punctuation that in no way reflected either American or British English, at times even impeding the flow of the sentence. The language of the English stories sounded very stilted to my ear, too, like no native English speaker would talk; I wonder if these were direct translations from the Spanish or just poor writing skills on the part of the publisher. The story subject and word choices to include seemed bizarre at times. For instance, in the first story, you get a little botany lesson along with your Spanish lesson, and several words used would be ones you would never (or very rarely) use in English, let alone in Spanish for business or pleasure. The Spanish dialogue punctuation isn’t accurate to what it would be in “real” Spanish. You would definitely need to be an advanced beginner or intermediate student of Spanish to get the most out of this book, as the publisher assumes that you know a lot of vocabulary already.
I received a free digital copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.
Displaying 1 of 1 review