To speak Spanish fluently you will need to have a grasp of reading, writing, understanding and speaking the language. Many community college classes, online courses, or audio CD lessons will help you with just one or two of these four areas. In order to best learn the language you will need to diversify your efforts. You will greatly benefit from trying various approaches to studying and learning the language. Half of being fluent in Spanish is being able to understand what is being communicated to you. Here are some suggestions on how you can improve your Spanish comprehension through reading.

If you are a brand new beginner to studying Spanish, you will probably want to take a formal community college course or invest in some audio CDs. By studying with a course like this rather than haphazardly teaching yourself, you will build a good foundation for becoming fluent in the language. After you have learned some of the basics of the language, you will be ready to keep improving your skills. Your Spanish comprehension can be improved by practicing your reading and listening skills. If you are ready to try some Spanish reading, get a book that was written for kids. The language will be much simpler and you should be able to understand the majority of what is going on in the story. When you are reading for practice, resist the urge to use the dictionary to look up every word that you don’t understand. Do your best to figure out unfamiliar words by linking them into the context of the story. Only resort to the dictionary if there is a vital vocabulary word that keeps popping up in your story and you do not understand what is going on without knowing that word. Another option for reading in Spanish is to get a book that you have already read in English. This way, if you already know the story you won’t have to worry about little details and you will be able to read the Spanish version without missing too much.

Eventually you will be ready to progress to reading Spanish newspapers, books that were written by native Spanish authors and anything else that you can get your hands on. Reading the newspaper in Spanish is difficult many times if you are unfamiliar with the context of the article that you are reading. For example, if the topic is politics and you do not know the background of the issue you will have a really hard time understanding what the article is talking about, even if your Spanish comprehension level is very good. The culture of celebrity gossip is alive and well in the Latin community, so for some easy reading you might want to pick up a copy of the Spanish version of People magazine or any other sort of publication. Human interest articles will probably be much easier to understand than complicated news stories.

This suggestion may sound strange, but one of the best things to read if you want to improve your Spanish vocabulary is subtitles to films and television programs. If you watch a show in English with Spanish subtitles, you will begin to pick up patterns of how different verb tenses, phrases and ideas are expressed in Spanish. Of course many times subtitles are a little bit stiff and formal for real life, but your vocabulary and grasp of many common phrases will be greatly improved by reading Spanish subtitles to English programs. Again, if you are just starting an exercise like this it will be much easier if you watch a light comedy or story that is easy to follow. If you watch a complicated drama or sci-fi with a lot of lingo you probably won’t learn as much useful information.

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