Hola! Un Poquito de Spanish is a newsletter and website I built for Spanish reading practice. I'm Jackie, and I'm learning Spanish too. I've been a Dreaming Spanish student for a few years and a big fan of comprehensible input.
As an avid reader, I wanted to start reading in Spanish but the graded readers and other books at my level never held my interest. For that reason, I started creating interesting, bite-sized articles for myself to read and I share them here.
If you're watching Dreaming Spanish or any type of comprehensible input, you already know how powerful input is, and reading is comprehensible input too.
Stephen Krashen, the researcher behind comprehensible input theory, has spent decades showing that people acquire language by understanding messages, not by memorizing rules. According to Krashen, reading is a very effective way to build vocabulary and a feel for a language naturally.
Video gives you comprehensible input for your ears. And Un Poquito de Spanish gives you comprehensible input for your eyes.
First, every article is short on purpose, about 250 words, which means you can read one in the time it takes to wait for your coffee or while you’re sitting on the toilet. 😂 It’s input for short breaks when reading is more practical than watching a video.
Those 250 words add up fast. Read one article Monday through Friday and that's 1,250 words a week. Keep it up for a month and you've read more than 5,000 words in Spanish.
Second, every article is a different topic and that daily surprise is part of the fun. You never know what to expect and there’s always something interesting to read. I don’t write about news or anything heavy, so no worries there.
Every article is written at about the A2/B1 level. I'd describe it as advanced beginner or low intermediate, where you're ready for real content but full news articles and books are still too hard.
For reference, I’m a Level 4 in Dreaming Spanish and have somewhere between 400 and 500 hours of input (I’m not good at tracking hours outside the DS app).
The easiest way to see if this is for you is to just read an article. Try this one:
If you like it, so a new article shows up in your inbox every weekday.