When learning any new language, knowing how to read and understanding what's written in that particular language you're learning is essential. Learning how to read can be a daunting task especially when you have bunch of sentences and paragraphs written in a language you aren't familiar with in front of you and need to piece them together. Here are a few simple steps you can take to make it easier for you to learn to read Spanish.

First, you want to read the entire thing all the way through without stopping and without the use of any dictionary or help from anyone, whether it is an entire story, a chapter, a paragraph or whatever it is that you're reading. This is quite challenging at first as you're literally reading through something that you don't have much clue reading what it's about. Who wants to read something all the way through that you've got no idea what it says right? I know it could seem like a waste of your precious time.

But there is an important point to this exercise. By reading all the way through without using a dictionary, you'll be forced to look at the words and try connecting some of them together based on what you believe is most suitable for what you're reading.

Upon reading through everything once, your next step is to now read it over again using a dictionary in hand. Now, you don't want to look up the dictionary every time you bump into an unfamiliar word. Instead, just try to look up the keywords that you pick out of each sentence or paragraph that, if you looked up the definition, will help you make sense of the sentence or the paragraph. Oftentimes, these keywords are the verbs in the sentence or the paragraph.

Picking out the keywords is oftentimes a challenging task in and of itself or some people, especially for beginners. If that's your case, you can look up two or three words per sentence to help you understand the sentence. Yes, this is a bit of a pain but it'll yield big dividends.

Then, the next step in learning how to read Spanish is to try read the entire thing again without using the dictionary. Just do your best to piece together the whole stuff that you're reading while remembering what you've looked up in the dictionary in the previous step.

The final step is to read through the stuff all the way through again, but this time looking up every single word that you're not familiar with. Try your best to not look up the dictionary unless absolutely necessary to force your memory to serve you, but do use the dictionary if you catch yourself trying to guess something out of thin air (i.e. you really have no clue or a good guess).

These steps can be real frustrating and sometimes discouraging especially in the beginning, but I assure you the extra time and effort you spend will be worth your while. Rest assured, you'll be on your way to learning how to read Spanish. Sometimes, the shortcut is to take the longer path.