Elementary Spanish-American Reader/Google Books

Title Elementary Spanish-American reader
Macmillan Spanish series
Editor Frederick Bliss Luquiens
Publisher The Macmillan company, 1917
Length 224 pages
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Preface:

It is the purpose of this book to furnish material for translation for students who wish to begin reading at a very early stage of their study of Spanish. With this purpose in view, the notes are both elementary and exhaustive, and the vocabulary contains all verb forms whose stems differ from the stem of the infinitive, and all other words which might give trouble to the beginner, such as combinations of verbs and pronouns, and irregular plurals.

It is hoped that teachers will like the literal translations in the notes. In no case have free translations of difficult passages been given which do not show, at the same time, what the individual words mean. If teachers will require students to learn the literal, as well as the free translation of such passages, accuracy in translation will soon be attained.

The notes of a beginning book should not only help the student in translation, but also afford him an opportunity of reviewing the rules he has learned in his grammar or composition book. This has been kept in mind in the preparation of the present notes. Grammatical rules are stated in full at their first occurrence in the text, and thereafter attention is repeatedly recalled to those rules by cross-references. If teachers who use this book will insist on the use of the cross-references, their students will not forget the fundamental rules of grammar. For convenience of reference, a statement of the uses of the subjunctive and a table of numerals have been added to the notes.

To each selection have been added exercises for oral and written work. The Spanish questions are to be used orally. If students prepare their answers in advance, teachers will find it easy to make them the basis of general conversation on the lesson which will be both interesting and valuable. The composition exercises contain no words, phrases, or constructions which the student will not be able to find in the Spanish pages immediately preceding. He will be able, therefore, to write a little Spanish based on models rather than on rules, thus supplementing the necessary, but rather artificial, exercises of composition books. Such work, moreover, being based on the very passages which have perhaps been difficult to translate, will give him a clearer insight into the correct method of translating Spanish into English.

Finally, this Reader is intended to fill a very great need in the teaching of Spanish in this country. There are many readers which introduce students to Spain, but none which gives him a real introduction to Spanish America. One of the objects of this book is to teach some Spanish American geography and history. Such information will not only be valuable to the student, but will, as experience has shown, arouse his interest, and this cannot but quicken his progress in the mastery of the language itself. The selections of this Reader all deal with Latin-American subjects, and are supplemented by footnotes containing fundamental information about Latin America. These footnotes have been put into very easy Spanish and included in the vocabulary, notes, and exercises. They should be included in the assignments for translation.