I have been teaching English to Spanish speakers for several years, and while my spoken Spanish isn't good (because I'm focusing on trying to speak French, Japanese, and German, and I need to brush up for my upcoming trip to Germany), my reading has improved.
I've been using Inglés Esencial: Intermediación Básica to show the students grammatical explanations on the document display. Even though it's out of print, it's useful, though the culture notes about the USA are outdated.
Because I often use that book in class, I've had to read a lot of Spanish, and it's helped. Now I understand most of it. What I've noticed about the book's Spanish is it's clear, elegant, and smooth. I love it! I've tried to find other such writing online, but it's difficult. A lot of sites are doing what we do in English: grammatically correct, but more casual and conversational.
One site that is clear and not difficult to understand is BBC Mundo, and I wanted to translate this article about coffee for this blog. Then I saw that the author is Jim Reed, a British journalist, and the original article was in English. So translating it would be redundantly circular. Still, it's a good way to enjoy the beautiful Spanish language, and to see how the editors of what I'm assuming is a machine translation make it more colloquial and smooth. I'm sure they check for accuracy, because even though we can get the sense of something with the help of AI, it can be wrong and not match what humans actually say and write. I'm all for translation editors!
While writing this post, I found another beautiful Spanish site, FundéuRAE (Fundación del Español Urgente), whose "principal objetivo impulsar el buen uso del español en los medios de comunicación" (to help the media use Spanish well). Gold mine!
p.s. the e-book version of my debut novel is still at Amazon, and the price for the print version has been reduced: buy at the Eckhartz Press site.
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