Free Spanish readings for learners

This section has 19 original Spanish readings for beginners, 4,336 words in all. They were written for learners rather than adapted from another source, and each one is released into the public domain under CC0.

The readings are sorted into two levels. A1 texts are short and concrete. A2 texts are longer and connect events into a story or an explanation. Topics so far: daily life (6), nature (4), fiction (3), culture (2), science (2) and travel (2).

A method that works well with graded readings: read a text once all the way through for the general idea, without stopping to look anything up. Read it again and underline the words you can nearly guess from context. Look up only the few that really block you, and come back to the same text the next day. Easy, repeated reading is a good way to make common words feel automatic.

Every reading is followed by a short lesson: comprehension questions with answers you can reveal, key words with their English meanings, and one thing to notice about how the Spanish works, with examples taken from the text itself. On the web you can read and check yourself. In the Xolingo app for iPhone you can also tap any word for a translation, save it to your word bank, and practice those exact words with cloze quizzes and flash cards.