Talk:Spanish

Link for Inclusion
There's this really incredible website for learning Spanish called Online Spanish Help that I think should be included in the list of link. It has games and audio pronunciations. It's the best site I've seen out there. adjwilli

Worlds foremost Spanish textbook in the making
Dudes, you realize that this is going to become the most used Spanish textbook for English speakers out there ? This thing is going to put the traditional Spanish textbooks out of business one by one. It can continue to grow and reflect real Spanish use, and uploading the sound files is something that a printed book cannot have. This is SO COOL ! I am confident that we are making history.

Sound file format: MP3 vs Ogg
Oh yeah, one question: does anyone out there know what would be the best format for sound files ? I was just lucky that I had a de-zipper on my machine to unzip the Spanish ones. Is there an open standard format ? A most common, non-M$ one (is Quicktime any better ?) --Karl Wick 14:23 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Karl, what about MP3? That sounds ;-) ok for me.. and I have heard that is popular.. I am not sure about the MP3 licence but probably there are not problems with that. In other hand is a very useful format for learning a language. You can download the file, load it in you MP3 reader and listening the lesson in the undergroung, travelling to work. Wintermute 17:27 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Huh .. MP3 ... sounds great to me, lets see if anyone has any objections to it. --Karl Wick


 * Not really my objection but I hear ogg format is recommended within Wikipedia. Kpjas


 * Ogg ? I am not familiar with it. Is it compatible with "everything" like MP3 ? Karl Wick


 * All modern MP3 playing software on computers should play ogg just fine. If you have an older player then you might need to install a plugin. MP3 is evil and should be avoided. --mav


 * Ah. "Evil". Karl Wick


 * uuuhh.. "Evil".. Evil like.. I don't know.. M$? really? so bad?. Maybe the soft MP3 play ogg but.. what about the hard MP3 players? I have a new one! But is ok. If it is evil there is nothing to do. Wintermute


 * &lt;sarcasm>You're right. It will be horrible that people can't take the speech examples in Spanish onto their non-ogg compatable MP3 players. Such a shame.&lt;/sarcasm> LittleDan 14:59, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * Yes - Evil. The owners of the MP3 patents have been trying to force websites that stream or otherwise host MP3 files to pay the patent owners thousands of dollars per website and on top of that a per download charge. Ogg, however, is free and will always be free. We should be supporting free software and free file formats over proprietary software and formats whenever practically possible. Ogg is such a format. --mav


 * Paying thousands of dollars for licensing ? That does sound pretty evil. --Karl Wick


 * ogg is the best choice as the format & codec are patent free. Maybe we should make a special ogg page talking about the format and how to read it on different computers (mac / win32 / linux ...). There could be a guide about converting the ogg encoded sound to other codec for hard mp3 players (ogg to wav then reencode for example).

Hashar 02:14, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Speex could also be interesting, since it is a codec especially for speech. The project is part of the Xiph foundation, and it is completely ridden of patents and nasty licensing issues. Since it is geared towards speech, it can result in much smaller files, which is nice for people with expensive slow connection or for PDA usage. Guaka 23:41, 27 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Here is a revolutionary idea: hows about every soundbite being offered in mp3 (cause everything can read it) and speex (cause it is a freely avaliable, well thought out format, which is quickly becoming the standard for VoIP among other things) btw, ogg is a whole group of different formats (all of which are open-source) and of which speex is but one format (specifcally designed for voice recording). the bellman

It seems like common sense to me to just use WAV format. It's not like a sentence of speech is going to be that big anyway.
 * It would be big for me, with my extremely slow internet. I'd very much prefer the files to be as small as possible -- it might be the difference between me having to wait for a few seconds versus not having to wait at all. And when you add up thousands of downloads from all the different people using the wikibook, then it adds unnecessary network and server load for Wikimedia foundation. Jrtayloriv (talk) 21:27, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Project name, indices, non-zipped sound files

 * I think that the title "Spanish" is too general. Foreign language textbooks usually are aimed at learners at some level
 * it would be nice to have grammatical and themed indices. I was thinking that we should add the name "castellano" because that is the correct name for the Spanish being taught.
 * wouldn't it be better to provide both zipped and directly playable sound samples ?


 * I guess that more advanced learners can easily click through the first lessons.
 * Could be nice, but maybe it's better to have an overview of the entire grammatic and provide links to lessons.
 * Zipping already (lossly) compressed soundfiles doesn't (and shouldn't..) result in much smaller files. It only makes it less convenient to play the files. But it could be nice to provide different qualities, or Ogg and Speex files of the same audio. Guaka 23:48, 27 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * For your first point, the name, I think it is implied (if nothing is stated) that it is for beginners. LittleDan 14:59, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * Hi there, Native Spanish speaker over here. Just went to the German wikibook and looks superb. In my humble opinion, there are a number of thing that could be copied from that one. For example... the should be a cover. My personal sugestion for it would be the cover of the "Don Quijote" (400 years of its publication on 2005 I believe). The level divition also helps, and the more the better. Its always more fun to thing that something has been achieved like the first level out of x, than just 3 chapters. Anyway... Ill contribute to the Spanish one as much as i can. (have to find my login and password which at the moment dont remember them) Cheers.

Two comments: 1. this is great, 2. wheres the alphabet ?

 * 1) This is unbelievable. I am so happy to see this project.  I would love to see you language-learning become a subject for a "free" textbook.  I'm so impressed to hear the ogg examples.  Eventually, of course, it would be neat if you all had a bunch of different speakers from different spanish-speaking countries, so students don't become overly familiar with one accent.
 * 2) Shouldn't lesson 1 include the alphabet and how to pronounce the letters? I would think this is the most important lesson.

--Dan Keshet

I agree, pronounciation is important and should be covered very early on. I'll ask my friend Mariela if she can also give a sound recording of the alphabet (of course others are encouraged to do a recording as well, so that we have a lot of variety). Thomas

I disagree, lessons on pronunciation are boring. The pronunciation of spanish is so easy learners can pick it up on their own. -DM

Ideas for new chapters
Fun, social things
 * Parties
 * The beach
 * Dates
 * At a bar
 * Salsa dancing, La Bamba, la discoteca (anthro)

Topics common to richer/more developed cultures
 * At the office
 * At school
 * Transportation, airport, el metro, taxis ..
 * On the phone
 * buying a car
 * business trip, tourist trips
 * food shopping
 * in the kitchen
 * Beauty, barber shop
 * el gimnasio-the gymnasium
 * el cine (movies)
 * weddings (la boda)
 * Technology
 * restaurants
 * boating
 * soccer, sports

Things relatively unique in Latino culture
 * feelings toward the US
 * el quinceanero (Sweet Fifteenth Birthday)
 * Catholic Mass
 * deadbeat dads from the Spaniards to today
 * emotions
 * families
 * at home
 * poverty, Street beggars
 * el tianguis
 * crime
 * spanish-speaking communities in the US
 * discussion of various cultural spots in Latin America
 * restaraunts, taco stands
 * paracaidistas
 * historical events in LatAm history such as the killings in Mexico in '68
 * Historical figures like Che Gueverra, Selena, Pedro Infante, Cantinflas, Fidel Castro, Picasso, la dictablanda, Cortez, los Mayas, Cristobal Colon ... Don Quijote ..
 * Street vendors
 * etc etc ...

Hope this helps! --Karl Wick

Comments about the structure of the lessons
Please, see this comment like a mindstorm comment (Its possible that it doesnt make too much sense).. I would like to know what you (all) think about

I think that a lesson should contain only the matter for one period of study (one hour?, half hour?). There is not reason for limit the number of lessons in a textbook, so, what is a lesson if not a period of study? Maybe in others subjects of study you can split it by concepts but I think that, in languages, would be useful a one-day separation. It seems that for a basic language capabilities you need to know 2000 (more or less) words. 2000/365 = 5,4 words. If you can learn a few of grammar and 5,4 words every day, theorically you can write and read a language in a year (listening and speak is another thing). It seems a good mark to me for only 1 or 1/2 hour day. So, maybe, a lesson should be a few of vocabulary, a concept of grammar and a lot of exercices. Obviously, everybody could advance with the speed that he/she need or want.

Sorry by my english, I am learning..

Wintermute 22:36, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hi, I think you are right with your point that we need a lot of exercises which only cover a small amount of material (for example a maximum of 10 new words or a single grammar concept). So we should definitely try to put an exercise right after new vocabulary/grammar concepts are presented. This way we can even keep the longer - theme oriented - lessons together as a whole (doing one 'lesson' would then maybe require four or five 1/2 hour learning sessions, but as long as each learning session has its own exercise part this should be OK). In either case, I think we should start now to put in some exercises for the lessons 1-3 where we already have enough material to construct useful exercises. -- Thomas

Formatting
I think its a good idea to put everything in Spanish first and then English. This translation helps people see the similarities and differences between Spanish and English.

I also removed some repetitive words like "Lesson" and "Lección" because I think it makes the page simpler and less work to read.

Also I moved the (very cool) flags to the bottom of the page so that people see content first. I'm not sure which way I like it, maybe its better with the flags up top like the were.

Please feel free to undo any changes you hate ;-) -- Karl Wick

About the exercices format:

What should be the exercices format? I propose using a different page for every exercices lesson and another one for the solutions. That would be 3 pages for lesson. It has a few advantages. A student could print the exercices, work in that in paper if she want, and check the solutions when he/she has finished. In this way, the lesson wouldn't be so big and we could enlarge the exercicies without limit.

Another question is.. should be write the exercices like the exercicies in a traditional book?

for instance:

Translate:

house    ______________

what do you think about?

Wintermute 20:44, 25 Aug 2003 (UTC) --- Thanks for bringing that up. We should be starting to work on exercises as soon as possible. I agree that we should have exercises separate from the main lessons (in fact, as our lessons are quite long, there should be one exercise sheet for every 1/2 hour study part of a lesson). I think the solutions can be writtem far more compact (by writing only the missing words or correct answers for multiple choice). So we probably won't need one page for each exercise but just one solution sheet for all exercises (or all exercises of one lesson).

In my opinion we should also try to emphasize collaborative learning in the exercises. So maybe we don't even want to give solutions to each exercise but rather leave some of them open so that students and teachers have to come together to discuss exercises. More importantly I would like to see a lot of exercises that can be done only with partners or in a group. For these exercises we will definitely need to use (voice!) chat. Even though the development of Wiki tools for realtime interaction are discussed as part of the 'Wikiversity' project it will probably take a while until they become available. So to get started with that (which will hopefully be soon) we should just go with available chat tools like irc,icq,aim,yahoo,...) -- Thomas Strohmann


 * No, I think people should still be able to learn spanish by themselves with this book. I think we should have a subpage for group resources, if anyone wants to do that, but it shouldn't make it so that people feel like they have to have a teacher to use the textbook. LittleDan 14:59, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)

---

Hi guys. I'm new to wiki, but actually I was thinking about starting a similar project to this one for a while. I'm using javascript to allow you to test yourself by hiding either the English or Spanish half of the vocab list, click to reveal, shuffle, there are two stylesheets to make the printed version good for paper, readings are similar to vocab in that you can click to reveal translations, and the content is in XML and parsed to html (or latex) which should make the content useful for people wanting to parse it to other formats. Take a look and let me know if there is any interest in seeing this done. [It's all here.] Click on the reading, click on Practice: Recognition and then words in the vocab list. Print preview should be formatted for printing.

crail

New format looks fine to me
Hello,

I really like the work of Karl and others to put all the headers first in Spanish and then in English. Omitting the 'Lesson' word for all the lessons is definitely reasonable. For where to place the flags I'm not sure either. I think it would be cool if we eventually come up with a cool title plus a nice picture for our book to put it at the very start of the page. This could be the combination 'Aqui se habla espanol' (title) & flags (picture) but maybe we can come up with something more creative ;)

Thomas Strohmann

P.S. I've been away on a conference most of last week, this week I'll have much more time to work on the Wikibook...

Help
Hi, I was wondering if some people here are more familiar with Spanish than I am & are willing to look at some of the lessons we have so far and correct the mistakes that are in there. As the lessons get more advanced I try to make more elaborate examples, but since I'm just learning Spanish I'm not so sure if they are all grammatically correct / stylistically good. So if anyone wants to help out on this issue I would really appreciate it! -- Thomas -- UTC 05:55 Wednesday, October 15, 2003


 * I just downloaded all the lessons and I'm going to check them, but I won't be able to correct them for a while (dial-up connection, expensive telephone bills in the third world). Also I could contribute with some sound files with Guatemalan accent, just tell me what should I record.

(update) I just checked them. Look at the comments here


 * Oaso 13:49, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * I've looked at them. Great suggestions Oaso! I'll put in the changes as soon as I can. Thomas Strohmann

Colored Tables
Following the good examples in other Wikibooks, I've starting to put in colored tables. I suggest the following colorcode: yellow for pure vocabulary (single words), blue for grammar tables (e.g. conjugations), and green for examples (whole sentences in dialogs, or sentences illustrating grammar rules). Thomas Strohmann
 * I was just going to suggest the same thing, but with different colors. Current colors look too strong. I think it's better to use pastel colors, like the Wikipedia's front page. If you were wondering, I was going to suggest pale blue for vocabulary, pink for grammar, pale yellow for examples, and gray for exercises.
 * Oaso 15:49, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment Oaso. Lets put together some suggestions on the talk page. Once we've decided on a format we can make it a 'standard' for the book. Thomas Strohmann


 * Current version


 * Alternative 1


 * I edited alternative 1 to show the precise colors I meant. Oaso 20:32, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Grammar
We ought to have a lot more grammar here! Gender! Agreement! Articles! Demonstrative adjectives! Prepositions! Verbs!!! The best way to learn Spanish is to learn the rules, so that you can create just about every sentence in existence. These situation-oriented lessons only allow you to say things appropriate for...well, that situation. If we were to exclusively use that approach, we would have to have an exhaustive list of situations, which would blow up the wiki server. If you learn grammar, you can interact in any situation. --Grammar bug


 * Yeah, thats a good point. --Karl Wick


 * Hi, I stumbled on this project. It's very interesting. I noticed you have past participle in Lesson 9, but kept the present progressive until Lesson 10. The way I learned Spanish, progressive was the first tense learned after present indicative. It's a simple way to vastly increase the number of phrases you can create, and I would suggest addressing it earlier.
 * What you say makes sense .. if you could play around and try to make the changes yourself that would be very helpful. Let me know if I can be of any help to you - Karl Wick

When learning Spanish I tried a lot of books and courses. The only thing that clicked with me was Madrigal's Magic Key, which is a very old text book, but teaches the language by rules and shortcut aids to memory. In fact it teaches grammar, but in a very palatable way.

I find all these "how to order a meal" type lessons OK, and superficially appealing but will never move the learner past the phrasebook stage, and ultimatly they will lose interest, this is not the way to master a language.

Once you have the grammar of Spanish, all the rest is plain sailing, you just have to practice and add to your vocabulary.

I don't have a user name, but I hope this comment helps. I'll look in here from time to time and see if there's anything I can add, but if it does develop into a phrasebook, then I don't think there's much I would contibute.

It would also be helpful to decide how to handle the question of which version of Spanish will be taught. Castillian is the standard, but Latin American is of equal importance. Maybe some method of highlighting the Latin American differences by color code, or a sidebar of important deviations by country would allow the book to be more useful. The alternative would be to create a Castillian main book with a Latin American appendix.

Where's the subjunctive mood? Where's the preterite and the imperfect?? Where's the conditional??

I think this book needs new sections to be added. This book is not at all complete. El subjuntivo es muy importante. TrueDat (discuss • contribs) 05:58, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

-

Wiktionary
Could this be in some way related to Wiktionary ? (Or, maybe it is, but I haven't noticed).

I'm thinking about something like a bilingual dictionary for language learning. The contents itself would probably look more like that of a textbook than that of a dictionary, but the purpose is to have the dictionary browseable / referenceable format.

I'm trying to put similar ideas together at Wiki Language School Flammifer 19:27, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Standards
I think in the long term intrest of this book, we should all consider starting the plans for restructuring this book so it conforms to textbook standards in a Spanish I, II, III, IV format. I know that currently, this will probably be quite unpopular, but in the long term intrest, we should at least consider it, maybe even splitting the book, one for serious education and study, and one for conversational situation reference. I'm just saying we should consider it. That's all.

New design proposal
Could you look at pl:Hiszpański: Lekcja A1 and pl:Hiszpański? Here you can see the proposal of new design for this Wikibook. Sblive 19:16, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Helping...
I'm Spanish but I find it difficult to help in this book. Make a clearer index or a page with things to do. About a wictionary: I think we should have ONE page for all languages. There you could see the word and then translations to all languages with definitions in that language. You could use any language to sort words alphabetically. Please ask for it in meta or in wikipedia!!! Or let's do one book here. I'm Barcelona in catalana wikipedia if you want to talk to me: http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuari_Discussi%C3%B3:Barcelona


 * I'd love to help as well (don't even have a user name yet), but it really seems difficult, besides I'm from Argentina and lots of the lenguage used sounds weird, different latin american countrys have different vocabulary, specially Argentina (and Uruguay I think) were verbs are even conjugated differently. Some examples would be "vos" used instead of "tú", and others like "Sos de México" instead of "Eres de México". Skimming through the pages I've seen many references to Mexico ("You are from Mexico"), so I guess the idea is to mainly use vocabulary from Mexico (that is the spanish that people from the US is more familiar with), is there a standard way to add words used in other countries with a note clarifying it, or it would be too complex and confusing? 200.89.153.204 6 July 2005 13:46 (UTC)


 * You can always make some additional pages (or another course within this textbook) about Spanish used in south America. That would be great! Sblive 13:32, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Mouth Mechanics
I would like to request a section on the mechanics involved in speaking another language. I couldn't nail spanish R's correctly until I did a lot of digging. English produces an "r" without the tongue touching any part of the mouth, like a vowel. The spanish R is pronounced behind the upper teeth. Most try to approximate this by telling one to pronounce it something akin to TH. I am not an expert in the subject, and don't even know Spanish, so I can only ask for at least some links.

Like "TH"?!? I've always heard it described as "rolling" the R. I beleive one rapidly moves the tongue behind the upper teeth. Its easy to overdo, but when starting to learn its probably OK to "roll" the R's in an exagerated way. If unable to do so, I would think a "T" or "D" sound might be better than "TH," which seems more likely to lead to nasty tongue injuries than anything else.

There is some information here: http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/ The stated use is for: It is intended for students of phonetics, linguistics, and foreign language. Maybe he would like to donate it to GFDL and we could hack it up? Although they do not follow words or letter they only give the phonetic alphabet. -Indolering

Opening Paragraph
I'm reading this to learn Spanish, I don't have enough ability to actually contribute to the book in any substantial way. However, I found this initial paragraph absolutely baffling, enough to make me wonder whether I should even bother reading further in the book:

The fundamental norm of Spanish grammar is the sentence, structured as follows:

Subject - Verb - Object

''This is so until the point that, in technical Spanish, you can consider an equivalence between the concept 'Grammar' and the concept of 'a sentence arranged according to the rule Subject-Verb-Object'. At this level, paragraphs, articles, and other sorts of grammatical groups are not considered. So, at this level, Spanish is an impossible language, because if it existed according to its theoretical definition, that is, if Spanish were used correctly according to its technical standard, then all the words from the Spanish dictionary would have been used just for an only eternal sentence, valid for past, present and future. Maybe this sentence is still to come, but, meanwhile, normal Spanish conversations are constituted by groups of sentences.''

Unless somebody can seriously rework and explain what is trying to be expressed here, i'd just as soon see this paragraph removed. The fact that we go Subject Verb Object is enough for me. Doesn't need much explanation, since that is a typical pattern in English, and this book is written in English and therefore assumes English knowledge.

Yikes. That certainly is a difficult paragraph. I have no idea what it's trying to say. I think that whole section needs to be reworked. I'll get on it. Fenoxielo 03:52, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Those paragraphs on grammar need to be moved off the main page. They don't look right sitting in the middle of what is essentially the contents. Any suggestions on where to stick it? Perhaps delete it from the main page and paste it in here until it gets a home? --Zapateria 09:39, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Cover and Contents
Does anyone think that we should change the cover title from "Spanish (Cover)" to just "Spanish" and change "Spanish" to "Spanish:Contents"? This will make it more in-line with other language textbooks. Geoking66 22:46, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Former Page Spanish: Contents
The titles in the "Lecciones" list do not match the content of the lessons. E.g. the second title, "El viajar", takes me to grammar of the noun... 18.19.0.183 19:47, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Originally, the lessons consisted mainly of vocabulary (you will find that lesson 2 has a part for vocabulary that you need for travelling). We started adding grammar topics later and they are harder to put under a specific title. If we find better titles for the lessons we can certainly change them. Thomas Strohmann

I changed it to "De viaje" because it sounds much better. Maybe it should be noted that verbs may work as masculine nouns, but certainly "El viajar" sounds too strange. Sabbut 12:08, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Incorporating verb tenses into the lessons
As I research the language I realize that Spanish has fourteen verb tenses, seven simple and seven compound, as well as a couple extras. We could use that information to work new tenses into the lessons systematically. --Karl Wick

Sound file format
Now I just had a teacher trying to use the site and he could not use the sound files because his hardware was not compatible with the sound file format that we are using. Would it be so wrong to offer the files in one "free" format and one proprietary one ? --Karl Wick

Naming policy
The Spanish book is now 100% naming policy compliant. Check http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AAllpages&from=Spanish&namespace=0. All left non compliant pages are redirects. I also replaced most of all links to these redirect pages. E^(nix) 10:01, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Lesson Setup
I really think the lessons need to be setup in a different way. As it is you get tons of words at once with little to no practice. If there were large chapters broken up into smaller sections with an excercise at the end of each it wouldn't be so overwhelming. For example, the first chapter after doing the alphabet and pronunciations could be over Introductions. It would teach people how to say hello, nice to meet you, and my name is xyz in the first part with an excercise at the end. The next part could be over saying your age and numbers. After that could be a few adjectives and a lesson on noun-adjective agreement. I would be willing to reorganize the current lessons or start a string of alternative lessons if people like this idea, but I don't want to do it if people won't like it. It's just that I think it's quite overwhelming as it is.--Leostrife 21:19, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

suggestions
This is a wiki, it can be non-linear learning (sorry if I make mistakes, I'm Spanish speaker): suggest projects and exercise to USE language. Show words in use, link to images, texts and dialogues. Words couls also be linked to wiktionary for definitions and so on, so translations are not needed here (they always depends on the context). I 'll explain it better:

Imagine we are talking about food (in lesson 6). We can open the section with some pictures to match eith words instead of boring lists. Users can also click on words so they see the defintion in wiktionary. When exercise is finished, they have the basic vocabluary to start using it. They can read some dialogues: "in the shop", "in the restaurant" while they listen to them. Then they will be asked to complete a multuser dialogue. For example, there's a discussion between 2 people arguing about 2 different cooks. Each user adds a line or corrects mistakes, or ask for help in wikiversity page. Because the main point of a wiki is to edit it!.

Can somebody add a numbers lesson?
Can somebody add a numbers lesson, like how to count to 100? thanks
 * Wow. I can't believe we left it out.  Well, I added it here. --Think Fast 20:28, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Exercises for Vocabulary
It might help readers learn the vocabulary if there are exercises for it as well. -- Video Game Fan 01:46, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

User:Celestianpower/Spanish
I have been working extensively on this new Spanish Wikibook. What do you think? Should we merge it with this one? Do you like the name? I'd like some feedback. Regards, Celestianpower 22:40, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Fragmentos para fusionar

 * Las personas &mdash; Describing people and opinions about them.
 * La escuela &mdash; School, ser versus estar.
 * El tiempo pasado &mdash; The past tense- All about the past tense in Spanish: Preterito, Imperfecto, Differences between the two.

These are some random contributions that don't seem to fit into the grand scheme yet. When I need them, they'll be here though! :). Kind regards, Celestianpower 17:51, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Pronouns missing?
I couldn't find anything in here so far about pronouns. The section on regular verb conjugation would be a good place to mention them. Also, some places that describe conjugations have 2 column tables where the first column in "Ingles" and lists only the English pronoun, and the second column is "Espanol" and lists only the conjugated Spanish verb. I think that instead of showing "I" "Soy" it would be better to show "I am" "(Yo) soy".

More audio
Do you think it would be possible to record dialogs an offer more audio?--Juan de Vojníkov (talk) 12:31, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Wiktionary
Why does this book link to the English Wikipedia article about the language, but doesn't link to the English Wiktionary Category:Spanish language, which includes a huge Spanish vocabulary defined in English, as well as appendices on conjugation and other tools? There doesn't even seem to be a template on this site! --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:06, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Archived
I am adding some of the related archived material onto the main contents page; the previous work the previous writers mustn't be put to waste! Some important ones can also be used! Minor User (talk) 09:59, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Translation
I suggest a version to learn medicine Spanish --Mac (talk) 09:56, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Neutral point of view
How neutral. The logo shows the coats of arms of Spain and Mexico. What about the other two thirds of Spanish speakers? Esmito (talk) 14:39, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I added the Argentinian coat of arms just to show how ridiculous it is to have coats of arms at all. Esmito (talk) 14:47, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Very good (Muy bueno)
I like this wikibook, that's very good. I speak spanish and this book looks great.

¡Gracias al creador de este libro de español! Thanks to the creator of this book in Spanish! --201.210.45.46 (talk) 23:22, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Agree
I want to thank all the contributors of this Wikibook. On 2008 I dived in for my first Spanish class. Our professor was from Madrid and it intimidated me greatly, as she expected us answer her in her language all the time. And then there was this Wikibook. I remember I would get up early every morning to diligently study as much as I could, memorize words, practice verbs. This book helped me immensely as though it were the only book that mattered, largely because it was the only book I could read simply by being connected to the Internet, and could be accessed at any time of the day. This went hand-in-hand with Wiktionary, being the only multilingual dictionary (a mighty vast one too) I could browse through the net. I started editing there too, adding words and learning about others, and it made me realize I liked this: writing, words, languages. This has made a lasting influence on me.

The Spanish language also gave me an opportunity to form relationships with awesome Spanish-speaking people who have touched my life forever, like with the professor I mentioned. This is another story, but my point is that it all started here. This Wikibook had been a catalyst. Changes in life from an online project pitched in upon by people I may never meet! Now learning languages is still an enjoyable hobby for me. And you know what? Despite not studying Linguistics full-on, Wikibooks on many other subjects still help me today.

So, thank you. The gratitude goes deeper than words can express. --Icqgirl (discuss • contribs) 13:57, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

How old is the PDF file?
I was pretty disappointed to find that in the PDF file of the Spanish Wikibook, it has the following answers for the first exercise in the first lesson:

What greeting would you use...
 * 1) At 8:00pm?
 * 2) At 10:00am?
 * 3) At 3:00pm?
 * 4) When you're going to bed?

Answers:


 * 1) Buenas tardes
 * 2) Buenas mañanas
 * 3) Buenos días
 * 4) Buenas noches

Buenas mañanas? Really? And buenos días for 3 PM? I don't really know what else to say. It's a shame because the PDF version is beautifully done and one of the best-formatted free resources available. Is it known when the PDF version will be updated to match the online/live version? I also just noticed that the link to the live version for lesson 1 in the PDF is broken.

What about the printable version? Is it the same text as the online version? I don't know if it takes that version and makes it ready for printing or if it's a separate file like the PDF.

Elsrbest (discuss • contribs) 18:48, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

Actually, I looked twice, and this looks correct. I'm not sure what is wrong with the answers. These responses look correct. Peyton09 (discuss • contribs) 22:55, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Photos
I do not understand why do we have photos of various cities of Spain? This is not a book about Spain but the Spanish language, which is spoken in American countries as well. I think a) Photos of Valencia or Córdoba is not fruitful b) Even if there is a good reason, why are we not adding photos of Chichen Itza? acagastya 💭 19:03, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Please, get help on this project from Wikiversity.
I hope the people on this project will seriously consider the Wikiversity pages, also a resource for people learning Spanish. Their page is a improvement. I hope noticing their contributions will help to improve other people's Spanish. Peyton09 (discuss • contribs) 22:50, 20 May 2020 (UTC)