Easy Spanish news: where to read it and how
News is the best reading practice a learner can get. It is short, it is about things you already know from your own news, and the words in it are the most common words in Spanish. The problem is finding news you can read at all. Here is how.
Graded news, and its limit
Several sites publish news rewritten for learners at fixed levels. Hola Qué Pasa, Spanish in Levels and Easy Spanish News are the ones you will find first. They are a fair place to start: short articles, simple sentences, a level label.
Their limit is the rewriting. A graded article is Spanish someone simplified for you, so it does not sound like the Spanish on the radio, and it stays at its level however much you learn. Use graded news for the first weeks, and move to real news as soon as you can follow half of it.
Real news that is open to read
Some Spanish-language publications release their articles under open licences, which means they can be republished for learners with the words made tappable and the reading tracked. These are the ones on the Vozelu shelf, all updated daily or weekly:
- El Salto, a Spanish daily covering politics, work and culture, published under CC BY-SA. Long-form, current, from Spain.
- Global Voices en español, reporting from across Latin America and the world, CC BY. Shorter pieces, varied countries, a good range of accents in the vocabulary.
- SciDev.Net, science and development news from Latin America, CC BY.
- SINC, the Spanish science news agency, CC BY. Clear, factual, lots of repeated vocabulary.
- The UNESCO Courier, essays and reporting in Spanish, CC BY-SA.
Between them that is a few hundred current articles, with new ones most mornings. All of it is Spanish written for Spanish readers, which is the point.
Picking an article for your level
You can tell whether you can read an article by a simple measure: what share of its words you already know. In reading research, 95 to 98 percent of the words known is the range where you can read without stopping, and the numbers are in how many words you need to read Spanish.
Open an article and read the first paragraph. If you can follow what it is about while missing some words, it is yours. If every sentence has two words you do not know, it is not yours yet. Science and factual reporting tend to be easier than opinion, because the words repeat and the sentences are plain.
How to read it so the words stay
Read to the end without stopping at every unknown word. The first pass is for the story. You will understand more than you expect, because the shape of a news article is the same in any language.
Then go back for the words. Look up the ones you stopped at, and only those. Three to eight words per article is normal. Put them into whatever you use to practise, in the sentence you found them in, because you find the meaning in the sentence.
Read every day, short. One article a day is better than an hour on Sunday, for the same reason as with all language practice: you see the words again before you forget them.
The number that goes up
If you keep the words you look up, something measurable happens. The share of the next article you can read is higher, then higher again. After a few months you open the news and read it, and stop noticing that you are reading Spanish.
On Vozelu, the articles on the news shelf are sorted by how much of each you already know, you can tap every word for its meaning, and the words you look up go into your typed practice and come up again on a schedule. You can see the share you know go up. That is the whole loop: read the news, keep the words, read more of the news.