Customer Reviews

Spanish Short Stories 2/Cuentos Hispanicos 2 (Penguin Parallel Text)

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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This is an entertaining way to build vocabulary at an advanced intermediary level. The stories are fun to read, short enough to make a comfortable "homework" exercise and are deceptively easy to read. The side-by-side English translation turns out to be very useful, both in clarifying idioms and subtleties that are not immediately obvious ... and also in translating occasional unfamiliar words and slang.

Very helpful.

This collection of dual language is well-designed for the learning reader. The translations are always moving at an even pace down the page, and the English is very close to the Spanish in meaning.

Some of the stories feel thick or incomplete, as though they were chosen from some larger Spanish work. They vary in content: some are mostly dialogue, others dense, roaming descriptions. Needless to say, not all of them held my attention.

Spanish Short Stories 2/Cuentos Hispanicos 2 (Penguin Parallel Text) (Purchased on 08/17/2011)
by Various

We used this book for our Spanish Conversation group. We met weekly and read Spanish text aloud, and then translated to English. We didn't always agree with the English versions, but this provoked a lot of discussion and was great fun. It was also a good introduction into the literary style of the different Latin/Spanish writers.

The book was very helpful.

I bought this particular book a little too premature in my Spanish studies. It is a nice book for those whose levels would be considered intermediate to advanced. It's not intended reading for beginners.

Also, for those who care, the stories are from different regions of Latin America and the differences in slang and diction are profound. For example: words that are common in the story from Argentina differ greatly from the story written by the Cuban writer or Peruvian writer. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but worth mentioning if you are thinking perhaps all the stories are similarly written with the same general Spanish verbiage, this is not the case with this book. It is a compilation of several Spanish speaking countries.