At the early stages of language learning, there is much more vocabulary that you don’t know than you do. This can lead to feelings of frustration or anxiety when you encounter written Spanish, I know.

Everybody experiences this, believe it or not!

As you already know, or are about to discover, language learning requires a lot of effort. However, you can start reading in Spanish right away, and even enjoy it.

If you use a Chrome extension like Imtranslator, you’ll be able to read in (almost) the same relaxed way that you do in English or in your own language; you will have to really work at it. It may feel very challenging at first, but it will be worth it, I promise.

In a separate article, I have discussed different ways of using Imtranslator (which I highly recommend) to interact with authentic materials and create interlinear texts.

Here, however, I am talking about a more basic approach.

I want you to be able to identify the basic components of a sentence, which are sometimes referred to as ‘chunks’. You see, language is all about patterns, and if you can recognize the patterns early, you will be better able to understand how words fit together. Of course, your understanding of Spanish will improve dramatically.

How to go about it then? Well, imagination and humility play a key role here. I like to say it’s detective work – you’ll have to decide what’s essential and what’s accessory in a sentence, while staying positive.

It is important that you don’t start your session expecting to magically understand all that you read, but rather be eager to give it your best shot and exercise independence along the way. The guiding word here is ‘deduction’ – follow the clues and see where they lead you.

It’s a good idea to recognize subjects and verbs first. Most generally than not, ‘subject’ and ‘verb’ are more than one word. For this reason, what you really should be looking for is:

• GRUPOS NOMINALES (NOUN PHRASES)
• GRUPOS VERBALES (VERB PHRASES)

We tend to think that when we break a sentence into smaller pieces, we get just words. In reality we are left with groups of words revolving around a specific other type of word (a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb or a preposition).

Therefore, it is important to identify noun phrases and verb phrases first. This is how you will humblely start off. The noun will tell you who and verb will tell you what.

Verbs are the real heroes in Spanish. They even carry the information we need to make out the subject even when it’s not stated explicitly— and this is more common than not.

Verbs don’t usually look the same, as they change their forms from tense to tense, but we can recognize regular verbs by looking at their stem (the first letters in the verb) which is a great opportunity to get familiar with them along the way.

 If you can’t identify any of these two blocks of your sentence, re-read it considering the following possibilities:

• Try to find a connection between the words in the text and words you know in English.
• Guide yourself with all possible context cues.
• Choose the word which you guess will open more doors for you and look it up in a dictionary.

Also remember that a sentence is essentially made up of groups of words.

You can guide yourself with suffixes to spot the different ‘word species’.

Spot NOUNS

• -ción / -sión
• -or
• -ista
• -ía
• -ura
• -dad
• -ismo
• -ería
• -ancia
• -bilidad
• -dor
• -ero
• -itud
• -ía

Spot VERBS

• -ar
• -er
• -ir
• -ando
• -iendo
• pre-
• re-

Spot ADVERBS of manner

• -mente

Spot ADJECTIVES

• -able
• -ible
• -ado | -ido (consider if it can be a participle)
• -ador
• -al
• -ano
• -ante
• -ente
• -ar (check if it’s not an infinitive)
• -ento
• -dor
• -izo
• des-
• im-
• in-
• a-
• an-
• anti-
• pre-

You can use color coding like this if you want:

• Yellow: verbs
• Pink: nouns
• Green: words that look like words you know in English
• Light Blue: articles, prepositions, pronouns
• Red: connectors

General guidelines:

• Read short pieces (+/- 250 words)
• Avoid:
  • Wanting to understand each word in a sentence. It’s not failing
  • feeling overwhelmed by all the words you don’t know yet. Focus and feast on what you do.

You might also want to read these articles:

• How to go about with reading in Spanish
  At the early stages of language learning, there is much more vocabulary that you don’t know than you do. This can lead to feelings of frustration or anxiety when you encounter written Spanish, I know. Everybody experiences this, believe it or not! As you already know, or are about to discover, language learning requires a… Read more: How to go about with reading in Spanish
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