Reddit reviews Short Stories in Spanish: New Penguin Parallel Text (Spanish and English Edition)

How about this
Short Stories in Spanish: New Penguin Parallel Text (Spanish and English Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140265414/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_EEgMAbNY85JW6

I used an older version of this in high school.

There are some books you can buy that have English on the left page and Spanish on the right page, or vice versa. That would be an efficient approach. You can also try both directions quickly to see what it's like. Cover one side and translate verbally, out loud, then look at how they translated it.

Here's one example: http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Spanish-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0140265414/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453631214&sr=8-1&keywords=spanish+english+stories

It's also true that you don't want to always be translating when learning a new language (as mentioned by another commenter), eventually you wanna be able to read something in Spanish and just feel the meaning rather than changing to English in your head. But for a beginner it can be a helpful exercise.

The "classic starts" series that is technically for middle grade readers can be a fun way to read a story they might be familiar with but and easier to read version. English translations of popular books in Spanish speaking countries such as The Alchemist. Also books that American teens often read in high school are good. YA books! Bilingual books that often used for teaching Spanish can be great the other way around like this short stories in Spanish parallel text form penguin. https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Spanish-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0140265414/ref=pd_sbs_14_2/134-7317556-2911664?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0140265414&pd_rd_r=5af88e04-c569-49df-ae7e-f512ee95643d&pd_rd_w=4ss40&pd_rd_wg=7oMK7&pf_rd_p=43281256-7633-49c8-b909-7ffd7d8cb21e&pf_rd_r=SSZB20APM9XTRJS5DYJZ&psc=1&refRID=SSZB20APM9XTRJS5DYJZ

The specifics will really depend on you, but I'll give an example. I recently went on a trip out of the country and I found a set of parallel texts in this series. I'd enthusiastically taken Spanish since the 6th grade (I'm pretty fluent at this point) and I'd never seen anything like that. I would have bought so many of those growing up had they been readily available...they just weren't. After doing some research most of the companies that I found that publish these types of books were located in non-English speaking European countries. There is really one Publisher that makes books like this for adults in America at any kind of scale. It is a really big company and their selection sucks. I said I could do a better job myself.

Once I started looking into it, there can be a lot of technology that goes into making a book.

• Statistical sentence alignment is an active research area
  
• There are apache projects that I could use for text parsing
  
• Ebooks are really just HTML, CSS,XML and Javascript and there are libraries that are used to validate them because they have to be checked against specific XML schemas.
  
  I live in DC, so there are a fuckton of people that work in language schools or have to learn a foreign language for their job. If you were in that position which would you rather do...read a boring text book or read one of your favorite novels with a corresponding parallel translation. I've already approached a few language schools in the area and they Love the idea. They're already making suggestions for the second book that I can publish and I haven't even launched my ecommerce site yet.
  
  Find someone that has a problem and then design a product to solve it. In this particular case, I was solving my own problem and then I did research to make sure that other people had this problem.
  
  I've found that people in this sub generally don't talk about how to design products or start companies, but if you go to r/smallbusiness, r/startups or r/entrepreneur there are actually a lot of programmers/software developers/tech people that really focus on building producs/businesses.
  
  In the future, it'll will be impossible for anybody to say that I don't have any product development experience when I have a product that I developed that customers love. :-)

This Penguin parallel text samples some of the best Spanish-language authors and has arranged them in order of difficulty. I took it with me when I stayed in Mexico for a while and was so glad I did.

Penguin books releases a series called Cuentos in Espanol. Basically, they are proper short stories by great writers but one page is in Spanish and the opposite has the literal translation in English. Really great resource and you don't feel like a 4 year old.

Here's one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spanish-Short-Stories-Cuentos-Parallel/dp/0140265414/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332104846&sr=1-8