Read books in Spanish.

Why read Spanish books in the original

Spanish has one of the largest literary canons in the world. Two continents, a dozen national traditions, four hundred years of novels, poems and short stories.

The grammar (subjunctive, ser/estar, gendered nouns) is the kind of thing that's easier to absorb from prose than from a textbook. You see the subjunctive being used to express doubt, suggestion, emotion, and slowly the rule stops feeling like a rule. It just feels right.

Modern Spanish is also remarkably stable across regions. A novel published in Madrid reads cleanly to a Mexican or Argentine reader, with a few flavours but no real barrier. Once you can read one, you can read all of them.

More on reading in the original →

What it looks like

Six Spanish books worth your time

1. Don Quijote de la Mancha

   Miguel de Cervantes · 1605

   The first modern novel. Funnier than people remember, and the reason Spanish prose looks the way it does today. Long, but you can read it in pieces.

2. Cien años de soledad

   Gabriel García Márquez · 1967

   Probably the most famous novel in any Latin American language. Magical realism, the Buendía family, the village of Macondo. The opening line alone is worth the trip.

3. Pedro Páramo

   Juan Rulfo · 1955

   Short, strange, hard to forget. A son goes looking for his father in a village of ghosts. Mexico's most influential novel, hiding in 124 pages.

4. Rayuela

   Julio Cortázar · 1963

   A novel you can read in two orders, and either one gives you a different book. Argentine writers don't do anything halfway. This is one of the reasons.

5. La casa de los espíritus

   Isabel Allende · 1982

   Three generations of a Chilean family, told through one of the most readable Spanish prose styles around. A good first novel to try in the original.

6. Ficciones

   Jorge Luis Borges · 1944

   Short stories, but each one is the size of a planet. Borges packs more ideas into a paragraph than most writers manage in a chapter.

How LinguaRead works with Spanish

Drop in any Spanish EPUB - from Project Gutenberg, your bookshelf, or the built-in store of free classics. Tap a word to see the meaning in this sentence. Tap again for the form (subjunctive? imperfect?), the gender, the why.

The trick with Spanish is that one word often has many endings. Hablar alone has dozens of forms. Reading is the only way you'll really feel the difference between habló, hablaba, hablaría, hubiera hablado. The grammar table makes it look like memorisation. The story makes it make sense.