(Review & Learning Suggestions) Funny Tales (FT) In Easy Spanish 1: Jaimito va a la escuela (Spanish for Beginners Series) (Free Kindle book)

wentong-syhhae (50)in #spanish • 6 years ago

As a language teacher with 40+ years of experience (five languages), I would definitely recommend this collection of motivating funny anecdotes to any student of Spanish. I've spoken Spanish all my life, but even I was able to chuckle at many of these stories.

Download link: https://www.amazon.com/Funny-Tales-Easy-Spanish-Beginners-ebook/dp/B00GRCQAAE/

The jokes vary in difficulty: some use slightly difficult grammar (conditional or subjunctive mood: hoy quiero que hagamos un ejercicio especial ... ¿Quáles órdenes darían?) or use some non-elementary vocabulary, but a resourceful reader should be able to figure out what such jokes are about without getting bogged down by dictionary work. If you are studying Spanish on your own, I would strongly advise you not to look up every new word in a bilingual dictionary. That would be quite tedious, demotivating and not funny at all!

Besides merely reading the jokes, you can try these two activities:

Try to retell these jokes to a student who is at a similar level, or better yet, a friendly speaker of Spanish (systematically organized language exchanges can be very helpful indeed: I have used this method to learn Chinese and Japanese with excellent results.
Cloze procedure
(A) Copy some of your favorite jokes by hand, preferably using script (psychology experiments have proven that your retention will be much stronger; typing leaves much weaker impressions).
(B) Make a second copy of your jokes. While copying, leave a large blank space for every seventh word (so that the length doesn't give away the answer)
(C) Number each blank space (say 1-10), turn your paper upside down, write a second list (1-10) and write the correct words next to each number.
(D) Now wait a week or so and see if you can fill in the missing words while relying solely on context clues
(E) Erase your (partial) mistakes completely and write the correct forms in bold red.
(F) Wait another week and see if you can write everything correctly or almost so. If you have reduced the number of errors, give yourself a reward!

There are several other joke books in this easy reader series. I haven't read any of them yet, but I assume their contents are very similar. if you can spare a little cash (they're about $3.00 each), please do buy a few to help out this Venezuelan author (the economic chaos in that country is beyond sad).