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It's trucking along nicely. With reading (and this is also true for people learning to read in their own native language), there is a tipping point where you as the reader can actually get meaning out of the text. Like, there's a story in there and you can winkle it out of its shell with a reasonable amount of effort.

Textual awareness helps. It helps A LOT, like shitbuckets of A Lot. I am scaffolded in my Spanish reading efforts by having an absolutely stellar grasp of how stories work, sort of a what to expect when you are reading. I know how dialogue works. I understand the way a coming-of-age epic swords-n-sorcery story should work. I can map riffs onto Harry Potter and other similar franchises. I am not at all going in blind.

But still, actual reading. (I am very excited about this.)

Wanna see? )
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The new spanish-language book is La Sombra del Viento (the shade of the wind, I think) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I am not sure if this is a book I will be able to get through, but I am going to give it my best shot. It's real literature for grown-ups and not a for-youths book. It may be beyond me.

I'm not sure what it's about yet and there are a lot of words that stick me, but when I actually *get* it, it is beautiful.

Todavía recuerdo aquel amanecer en que mi padre me llevó por primera vez a visitar el Cemeteraio de los Libros Olvidados. Desgranaban los primeros días del verano de 1945 y caminábamos por las calles de una Barcelona atrapada bajo cielos de ceniza y un sol de vapor que se derramaba sobre la Rambla de Santa Mónica en una guirnalda de cobre líquido.

"I will always remember that dawn when my father took me for the first time to visit the Cemetery of the Forgotten Books. It was one of the first days of the summer of 1945 and we walked along the streets of a Barcelona trapped below skies of ash and a hazy sun that spilled over the Rambla of Santa Monica in a wreath of copper liquid."

So it's more... flowery than La Ciudad. There is figurative language. (I am not sure what work "desgranaban" is doing ... it seems to mean "shell" or "harvest" or "select" with a side of "being picked or sorted from".)

We have a hero Daniel, who starts the book as a ten year old boy. He lives with his father, a dealer in books (collector's editions and used books and rarities and such). His mother is dead from catching cholera when he was four. They go to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and Daniel selects a book. The book that he selects is called La Sombra del Viento.
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I took Spanish in high school. My dad has a beach house in Mexico. (Not on the beach but you can see the beach from the house.) In the US, probably Spanish is the most useful language to learn. And so I am learning Spanish on my phone via Duolingo. It's OK, drills the verb tenses and stuff. I'm going along with it (something like 250 days in a row now) and chugging away at things like "Tu no respondiste mis cartas" and "No lo viste?". And that's fine. I kind of remember some stuff from high school and two semesters of college Spanish. Not tons, but some.

Por favor, me dijes más )

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