As you may have noticed, I have added Spanish to the site!
Spanish users, let me know what you think! And any feedback you have, let me know. If you encounter a bug, be sure to log a bug report in the Product Requests category . Below i’ve included some current requests which would really help Spanish flourish on Natively… help us out!
Do you know a large free graded readers series online? In both Japanese and Korean, we’ve found wonderful graded readers series which contain hundreds of free ebooks spanning from super beginner to A2/B1 level. Adding one of these to the site really helps!
I added everything I’ve read and own! Tried my best to tag them and grade them, though I fear there’s a strong chance I vastly under-graded them, haha, as unlike with Japanese, since I’ve been reading in Spanish pretty much entirely on my own, I don’t really have a strong understanding of what exactly falls into most people’s definition of beginner/intermediate/advanced with Spanish media…
I added what I’ve read, DNFed, and want to read! ¡Tengo ganas de leer más en español! Muchas gracias.
I wasn’t sure how to classify some of the books (i.e., libros por jovenes) that I would call novels for young adults such as El príncipe de la niebla or El príncipe del sol, which aren’t children’s books but also aren’t “literary” in the same way as something by Isabel Allende. I don’t know if I would call them “light novels,” even though I saw the option so I just called them all novels for now. Thoughts?
I also had a bit of trouble with this! It might be worth making a separate category for young adult novels, as they’re generally easier than many adult books, but are harder than children’s books. I ended up classifying the ones I added as “children’s books” because from a language learner perspective, I felt they were significantly easier than the adult books I’d been reading, but they’re certainly harder than some of the children’s books I’ve read…
At the very least, qualifying exactly what’s a “children’s book”, what’s a “light novel”, and what’s a “novel” might be a good idea, as those categories can be a bit subjective (and light novels are sort of Japan-specific).
Also, could we get a couple new tags for popular Spanish-language genres, such as telenovelas and magical realism?
I was thinking we just handle these variants with tags. If we find that gradings across variants causes a lot issues, we could always prioritize same accents… but for now, I think we just don’t worry about it.
The problem I see is that someone that is studying Castilian will find Latin American books harder and vice-versa.
But I guess as long as it can be tracked which is which, it can be recalculated later…
There’s also the issue with duplicates. Is going to be harder to find what edition is what with the tags, unless every book/media is tagged properly and you can filter them out.
Right. I mean, whatever we do won’t be totally perfect, but I have hope it’ll be ok… and definitely better than anything else out there! Even if it’s not completely tagged, the amount of resources we can give for specific dialects will be pretty great I think
Searching books to your variant liking.
– You have to click on the book to know which one is which, unless it’s filtered by tags.
Different difficulties
– As mentioned earlier, this is a perception issue more than anything else. For me a Latin American book is harder than a Spanish one, because some words or expressions are not used here and vice-versa.
Grading books
– With the current interface, someone that read both Castilian and Latin American would get two same titles and not know which is which (except maybe for the cover). This might be rare, but I’ve seen crazy people in this forum before reading the same book in two languages at the same time
For Amazon.es I don’t think you will have that many issues actually. Also they should have different ISBN numbers, so they can be treated as a different book.
Once there are more Spanish users, a way to tell Latin American and Castillan Spanish ressources apart would be reviews as well.
Although I do know that personally I’ll probably remember to specify if it was Latin American Spanish, and forget to say if it was Castillan Spanish, just because that’s the one I’m more used to. Likewise, if it’s only a matter of accent and vocab is pretty standard, I’m at a lvl where I don’t really care either way so I don’t tend to pay attention to it too much.
Does anyone have any good resources for differentiating between LA Spanish and Castilian? All my learning in school was for LA, so I’m not I’d know how to differentiate, honestly. Listening is easier to differentiate imo, at least.
Looks like I’ll need to pick up Spanish again.
