Good ideas for listening/reading practice in Spanish
Someone on this site gave me the idea to ask if anyone have any good suggestions regarding any reading and/or listening material that would be good for new beginners like me to learn Spanish from?
With that said, the purpose for me learning Spanish is that I have an exam in May for Spanish at level 1, so if you know of any Spanish material that isn't too advanced, that would also help.
Reading material - do you know of any Spanish short stories for kids/new beginners?
Listening material: Spanish musicians with good lyrics so would like to avoid hip hop/rnb/club genre.
Films: I have seen many Spanish films, but I am open for any new suggestions. (I like animations a lot)
Spanish series: suggestions?
Just list whatever you think may be helpful to myself and other Spanish learners.
Thanks 
2 Answers
Hi, I have been listening to classic children's stories in Spanish on www.childtopia.com. There are 7 stories and you can listen in different languages.
Hi..welcome to the forum!
This is what I wrote on another question about tips to learning Spanish:
Build vocabulary--lots of it.
- Learn the grammar rules, but S P E A K to other people even though you make mistakes.
-Listen to radio, TV, and movies
vocabulary--- I got my list of vocabulary words from listening and reading and looking up the names of things around me, e.g., the fridge, the birds, technology I used, etc. I learned to store that vocabulary by making tons of flashcards then writing sentences with the words at the end of each week. My vocabulary helped me tremendously to communicate my thoughts and to pick up words during others' speech.
Learn Grammar--- You need to study this as you go along. If you have a solid base of grammar it helps you understand W H Y she just said "quiero" instead of "quieres"...and later on W H Y he used the subjunctive instead of the indicative to say "I doubt that he'll come to the party." *As for the subjunctive, I just learned the basic rules but waited until I heard it being used by native speaker before beginning to use it myself. It's really not as confusing as I thought it was in the beginning and now I use it naturally (most of the time).
Speak!!--- The more you S P E A K the more you learn how to conjugate verbs and try out new vocabulary. I make mistakes every day, but these mistakes get less all the time because my brain now functions quick enough to conjugate without much thought. If I make a mistake in speech I almost always instantly correct myself. Someday those mistakes will disappear, so I'm not worried.
Listening Comprehension--- Listen as much as possible. You'll train your ear to understand more each time. You'll also increase your vocabulary and learn more about sentence structure. Repeat and / or write down what you hear on the radio, especially the obnoxious commercials, it will come in handy someday.
P.s. contact me about finding a paid Skype tutor if you don't have a native speaker to talk to in real life.
