This year I am planning to have a beach holiday over Christmas, and I'm learning Spanish. And these are the books on my Christmas Reading List:

1. Spanish Short Stories for Beginners by Olly Richards

2. El Gran Gigante Bonachón by Roald Dahl (in Spanish)

3. LA JIRAFA, EL PELICANO Y EL MONO by Roald Dahl (in Spanish)

I am interested in finding out what everyone else is reading over Christmas for learning Spanish?

In terms of syllables spoken per second, it was said that Spanish is the second fastest language in the world (just after Japanese, which being the fastest). For an English speaker for example, one always feels as if the syllables are hurled at you by a Spanish native speaker like bullets from a machine gun.<o:p></o:p>

Being a long suffering language learner myself, I always find it quite a handful (or earful) when trying to deal with a piece of audio, recorded by a native Spanish speaker with a normal speaking speed. Although we can always slow down the speed when playing the audio, it distorts the voice and makes listening really unpleasant.<o:p></o:p>

As a software programmer myself, I imagined one day technology will come to the rescue. <o:p></o:p>

Now I finally came across a PC app called WorkAudioBook (<a href="http://workaudiobook.com/">http://workaudiobook.com/</a>;) which automatically splits audio into phrases, so it allows you to deal with each and every phrase or sentence at a time. <o:p></o:p>

I found it very effective in practising listening as well as pronunciation as you can, <o:p></o:p>

·        Pay attention to each sentence, listening repetitively<o:p></o:p>

·        Speak in tandem with the audio, or<o:p></o:p>

·        Do transcript of the audio while listening so you can check what you heard against what’s in the subtitle or a pdf document which came with the audio<o:p></o:p>

This allows you to work on a piece of audio to the Nth degree.<o:p></o:p>

You can find plenty of English audios from this reference page <a href="http://workaudiobook.com/WorkAudioBook/Where-to-get-audiobooks.aspx?tag=windows">http://workaudiobook.com/WorkAudioBook/Where-to-get-audiobooks.aspx?tag=windows</a><o:p></o:p>;

For Spanish language learners, we are in luck as an iTalki community teach Miguel Lescano (<a href="https://www.italki.com/user/1563125">https://www.italki.com/user/1563125</a>;) <o:p></o:p>

has prepared some recordings, with synchronized subtitles and pdf documents on the original story, all in one web page <a href="http://www.spanishinput.com/">http://www.spanishinput.com/</a><o:p></o:p>;

Most of the recordings are suitable to Spanish learners at A2 or B1 levels.<o:p></o:p>

Since I started doing the above mentioned exercises, I found my Spanish listening and speaking skills have improved quite a bit.<o:p></o:p>