First Spanish Reader: A Beginner's Dual-Language Book Book

A decent collection of short stories and proverbial phrases from Hispanic writers, complete with some exercises at the end and a glossary.

Overall I enjoyed reading this. I had learned a decent vocabulary and felt I was ready to move onto a book, but even children's chapter books are slightly beyond me at the moment. A side by side book is the best stepping stone in that case.

I'm a huge fan of dual language books' having a professional translation side by side with the text is a huge help to the student. Having to look up a word in a separate place really slows down the pace of the reading and quickly leads to discouragement. In that sense, the publishers laid out this book perfectly, even adding lines between paragraphs to make sure the Spanish and English are kept in sync.

I also appreciated how the authors organized the book so that the shorter and simpler stories come first, occurring almost solely in the present tense. Later in the book, past tense and other more complicated constructions are introduced.

Overall I really enjoyed the layout but I didn't care for many of the actual story selections. Most of the stories seem to have a meandering plot with a lacking ending. The focus here is on understanding sentence structure anyway.

Keep in mind the date of this book, published in 1964. The vocabulary seems a bit dated; the selections are all from writers of the 1800s, and the vocabulary shows it. The writing and speech feels dated (even in English), so I'm not convinced this book would help one to prepare for, say, reading a current news article.