Spanish Pronto Reading Practice Welcome! Groucho, Part 3 The Spanish Pronto Reading Practice is designed to help you learn Spanish and improve your Spanish vocabulary quickly! It provides you with a full glossary for the words in a portion of a real Spanish article, so you will be able to understand the article even if you a beginner who knows almost no Spanish at all. And you advanced students (and teachers!) will still increase your Spanish knowledge and vocabulary. Best of all, no grammar, no exercises; just a convenient key to understanding interesting, current, varied articles that will help you improve your Spanish. INSTRUCTIONS: Either open the article link in a another window and refer back to the glossary on this page, or else print out the glossary and refer to the printed glossary as you read the article. Today is part three, of four, of an article about Groucho Marx, on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of his death. Here is a third YouTube clip, featuring Groucho as Captain Spaulding in "Animal Crackers": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPSAu8xfmhk. ("This bear was 6 foot 7 in his stocking feet and had shoes on at the time.") Below is a link to the full article, and a glossary for the fourth and fifth paragraphs of the article.

This Spanish reading practice is brought to you by: Dictionaries, especially good ones. When it comes to dictionaries, often the bigger the better. This is especially true of bilingual dictionaries, but it is true of single-language dictionaries, as well. Smaller dictionaries just reduce your communication possibilities, leave out words you might really need and, in the case of bilingual dictionaries, give you so few translation choices that you are almost forced to translate things wrong (as in the old joke about "Entre, entre y tome asiento." ["Come in, come in, and have a seat."] being translated as "Between, between, and drink a chair."). The truly great dictionaries almost never let you down. Anyone will tell you the best one for Spanish is the Diccionario de la lengua española by the Real Academia Española (most people can also tell you things they don't like about it, but that comes with the territory of being "THE official dictionary"). The best English dictionary is the Oxford English Dictionary, but at 20 volumes for US$ 995 or one year of online access for US$ 295, I just make do with the two-volume SOED (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), but I would not be without that. The best Spanish < > English dictionary is the Collins Spanish Dictionary, at least of all the ones I have seen, and I have seen them all. To see whether you could benefit from a dictionary, there is a very cool (if this translator says so) test of how many English words you know at: http://testyourvocab.com/.

Please mail comments, questions, or suggestions to: spanishpronto@earthlink.net