A Beginner's Review - 101 Conversations for Beginners (Spanish) by Olly Richards

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TL;DR at the end

This is going to be a long review. I do want to preface where I'm coming from before you decide to read the whole thing. I'm an A1 Spanish Beginner, having taken Spanish for two classes in college. My mother tongue is English. This was originally going to be me talking about ALL my resources, but I inevitably couldn't stop writing about this one, so here's the book review...

Why would you choose this book?

Imagine. You're a total beginner. You speak English. You're sort of nerdy and interested in trying to find legitimate methods of learning langauges. No shortcuts or cheats. Just legitimate ways of learning.

There are a ton out there.

  • AJATT
  • L&R
  • Speak From Day 1
  • Anki/SRS/Cloze
  • Pimsleur/Rosetta Stone
  • Classes, Textbooks, etc.

So what makes this book different? This book is tailored to the section of the language learning community that have heard the Gospel of Krashen's Comprehensible Input (CI). Despite the decades that it has been around, there are very few resources that have been created that allow for remote learning to occur using CI as a methodology.

Lo and behold, I see an Olly Richards video interview with Krashen, and when watching it, I realize that I'm actually starting to STRONGLY agree with Krashen's methodology. And a few months after, Olly came out with 101 Short Conversations, and they follow a remarkably similar pattern of thought that his Krashen interview seemed to touch upon - namely, the stories aspect. This connection I had to the methodology was strong enough that I could convince myself to trust the process, and as a result, I chose to use this book as my jumping off point.

Comprehensible Input and How A Good Book SHOULD Work

Over the past decade or more, Krashen seems to have evolved his theory of Comprehensible Input. It's "i+1". However, there's a problem - When you're a total beginner, you're starting from Absolute Zero. CI is meant to act as a vector for acquiring material knowledge in your target language, but when you're at Absolute Zero, that process can be incredibly difficult to build as a habit. In Krashen's view, the reason stories are such incredible forms of comprehensible input is because they are great tools for acquiring knowledge. Does this mean all you'll need is a book of short stories to learn a language? Of course not.

What it does indicate is that at some point in the process, there has to be compulsion!

If I may be so bold, I would like to draw a comparison to what Anders Ericsson, the Swedish psychologist whose work Gladwell derived the "10,000 hour rule" from, said about deliberate practice. In order to truly achieve some level of mastery, one must deliberately focus with great intensity on a task in order to improve in it.

So how do we engage in language learning deliberately with a book of short stories?

Well, the starting place would be the content of the book itself.....it must be interesting to the user. Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that the story, while almost childlike in how simple it is, is actually VERY well structured and organized. I feel no shame in having attempted to read a book that, now in reflection, is actually SUCH a simple story and plot that it shocks me that I was so enamored with figuring it out. But it's that feeling of WANTING to figure out how the story goes that kept me going. It was that compulsion towards moving forward that kept making me read more and more.

"But /u/AttakTheZak, couldn't I do that with any other book in my target language?"

Yes, random internet person, you could! This is actually something that the Listen & Reading method does as well, but I think it would help for people to understand the structure of the book to realize why it's so practical

Characteristics of the Book

  • Every conversation was a scene in the story

  • Every conversation had a select few words at the bottom with translations, leaving the rest up for you to figure out

  • Some words that appeared earlier without definitions are later on defined

  • Conversations are short enough to fit one page

The instructions for reading (roughly) were as follows

  1. Read The Entire Conversation - This meant that the very first thing you would do was read the short context piece at the beginning that set the scene and then read the dialogue exchange that followed

  2. Don't Look Up Words Till You Finish The Conversation - You're not allowed to look up definitions during the first skim. The whole purpose is for you to ATTEMPT to gain the gist of what's going on. As hard as this may seem at first, you realize that as an English-speaker learning Spanish, the phonetics and diction are so scarily similar that you're usually pretty good at capturing the ideas and emotions of the scene without necessarily being able to repeat what was said between the characters.

  3. Read The Entire Conversation AGAIN....But With Help - The 5-6 words/phrases that were defined at the end of the conversation are used during the second read. I highly recommend that people refrain from trying to solve the entire conversation and/or using outside dictionaries. It ruins the mood of the whole thing when you just ruin the game of figuring out wtf "preguntamos" meant. If you treat the story as a puzzle, consider the second read to be your 'serious' attempt to try and create some educated guesses on certain words and phrases.

  4. PICK ONE OF TWO CHOICES: Re-read or Move On - There is no metric for what it means to "get the gist" of the story, so this is a user-based choice. My recommendation when you see a lot of words you don't know, do your best to try and make them have meaning and then to say "FUCK IT" and just move on to the next section. This has been beneficial in that I have avoided getting lost in solving stupid squabbles that normally might come up with grammar rules and I have been able to move at a comfortable pace and feel like I'm making progress.

This general set of instructions at the beginning, while simple, is an absolute MUST FOLLOW for beginners, even if they're not using this 101 conversations book.

Things I Like

  • The conversations are short enough to read without getting overwhelmed but also long enough that you feel like you're dealing with a lot - This is the problem I have with bigger books being used by beginners. So often, you're not dealing with palatable content that is just enough for you to digest but long enough that you feel that there has been some form of action and progression in the story through the conversation. And if you're reading a novel where nothing happens for an entire paragraph, the entire process can become WAAAY too overwhelming. Imagine trying to read Thomas Pynchon in Spanish using a method like this? It would be a nightmare.

  • Easy To Reread - Despite how big "101 Conversations" might sound, they're actually very short conversations, and that helps because you're going to be re-reading them....a LOT. One thing I didn't mention earlier was the number of times I had restarted the entire story. I've probably done it a couple dozen times at this point. I would read 2-3 conversations, work hard to get the gist of them through a few reads, and then spend a lot more time trying to determine the context. Once I felt like I had adequately gotten the new sections down, I would start from the beginning and start tracing the story. This is a HUGE benefit, because your progress through the book is mirrored by the words you learn as each paragraph continues. So while you may not know ALL the conjugations for conocer, you can recognize the word sorta and you can sorta get the gist and you can sorta feel confident as to what's going on, but then you'll go back to the beginning of the book, and you'll read the first conversation, and you'll see a word that also looks sorta like conocer, and you play around with the meaning of the sentence in your head. Suddenly you develop a more nuanced "feeling" for the material, and as you progressively re-read the material, old content becomes more familiar, less "confrontational" in terms of fighting for the meaning, and you stop thinking about the language and start thinking about the story. This, according to Krashen, is the key to acquiring a language.

  • Kindle Version - A great aspect to this is that, because I use a Kindle, I've actually adjusted the instructions to add in different colored highlights for different words. The select vocab at the end of the conversation end up getting tagged pink, while OLD words that I had PREVIOUSLY seen were highlighted blue. This became especially valuable when I would reread conversations and notice that old conversations were becoming more and more clear due to what felt like 1) knowing the story development, 2) knowing more words, and 3) having a visual representation of progress (lots of highlights means I should know 80% of what's going on)

  • Comes in Audiobook version - I managed to snag the kindle books and audio for an early release promo. The audio is essentially a much longer extension of Olly Richard's Conversations, which is another program that is meant to help Intermediate Spanish Learners how to listen. Given the price of THAT series is a little under $200, these short conversations are MUCH BETTER investments for beginners to make.

  • There are no mistakes, only discoveries - if you know anything about the affective filter, motivation and drive are strong factors for language acquisition. With this method, there is no "mistake" in translation, only a discovery of a "new understanding". There is no one to smirk or to correct you. There is no annoying SRS to repeat the mistake for you so it can confirm you know it. Because part of the process is "fast & loose", you're given the space to relax and "think" you understand something, while gradually coming to terms with what's actually being said.

Cons

  • Olly Richards Is Expensive - The dude has some GREAT content, and I respect his hustle. But holy shit, if you want to follow your Spanish journey after this book, you're better off finding similar resources that challenge you in a similar manner. With Spanish, there are a plethora of books and you could surely repeat the process even if the book is a bit more challenging but don't put a hole in your wallet. I would have loved to have tried his beginner courses, but its ridiculously expensive and I think I legitimately found a solution that is WAY cheaper

  • Dumb down your expectations - I used to try and watch kids shows to try and learn Spanish. I was never interested in the plot. Couldn't hold my attention. They all felt like they were either going too fast or were too boring. So with this book, understand that you're not gonna be reading Tolstoy. This is pretty much a 4th grade reader that's been shortened and chopped into conversations. These books deal in mystery. Not just the plot, but the method itself. Eventually, after enough re-reads, you start to understand that you're reading pretty simple ideas and the mystery sort of dies down. When you start to get this feeling, it means you should move on to the next section, where you will inevitably find more mysterious words that take you for a wild goose-chase. This book feels like it's attempting serious situations, and as a result, your ego as an adult doesn't have to suffer through boring and slow kids material out there.

  • Slow process - This is gonna be a doozy of a stretch. Patience will be key, but if you're properly involved with the story like I was, you'll forget that you're even learning.

  • This is not all-encompassing - Listening, writing, and speaking skills are not going to suddenly show up. You'll pick material up. You'll acquire some things. But language learning isn't a single book. You're going to have to diversify your practice in other ways for the future.

  • Replicability may be tough for other languages - as someone that wants to learn Urdu and Pashto, which uses a completely different script, different sentence structure, and has waaaay fewer phonetic similarities, I'm not gonna have such a well written resource like the one Olly has made. I will have to figure out a way to mimic this, but that's for another post...

Other Resources

I would be a fool if I didn't actively use multiple resources to keep my interest going.

  • Memrise: Mexican Spanish - currently going through this still. Marvelously succinct tool that does the job I want Anki to do, but in a "friendly" way. I found myself acclimating to the language a lot easier with these decks.

  • Dreaming Spanish - One of the BEST CHANNELS ON YOUTUBE!!! I have only seen 3 other creators on youtube who employ CI in their videos, and Dreaming Spanish beats all of them (granted, the other 2 were for Japanese, so maybe I'm being harsh lol). He has MULTIPLE videos for SUPERBEGINNERS that are pretty much just video extensions of the practice methods of the short conversations book. It's shocking how simple it is to transition from trying to guess words in a book to trying to LISTEN for words and trying to figure them out. I would like to remind you that you should be actively rewatching these videos over time in order to better your listening skills. I would love to see more channels like this on youtube for other languages, because they seem to have cracked the code.

  • Deliberate Spanish - I don't understand anything, but I have already come to the conclusion that this channel is where I will inevitably end up at at some point. The exercises he poses are legitimately quite intriguing. Not a beginner's channel, but one that provides exercises that could most definitely be molded for other languages.

  • Easy Spanish - The Easy Language channels are great resources for multiple reasons, but primarily for their literal authenticity. I never realized how relaxed everyone sounds when you ask how they are. The response is so genial (pun intended) and you get to hear how people stutter and use 'gap' words like "pues" or "uy". I think this is another listening resource to use as a beginner, but also as an intermediate and advanced user. Given the breadth of videos, you can get a LOT of practice out of it.

  • How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately by Boris Shekhtman - a marvelous book that gave me some of the most succinct and useful pieces of advice when it came to strategizing how I would approach the material I wanted.

My Plans

I do not currently have plans outside of the current resources I've listed here. I would love to write a post on youtube channels and how to use them efficiently, but I'm still working on that for myself.

Through the past 2 months, I have found myself gravitating away from Memrise and more towards reading the story. There's something about it that feels like a game to me. I get the same feeling with anything that's engineered well around Comprehensible Input. I watched a youtube video of CI lessons in Japanese that absolutely blew me away. I could actually "hear" words. Yes, she was describing a chicken, but I could "hear" it!!!

This method is for those who want to encourage themselves through. When you learn to enjoy the minor wins, you start to enjoy ALL the wins. Suddenly, any difficulty you face at the start slowly fades, and the trust you have in yourself to figure everything out just grows. There's no annoying flash card system you have to check constantly. You learn things you WANT to learn.

I definitely see myself trying to establish this method with more complex books, perhaps molding Listening & Reading as a secondary transitional method. I would probably start by listening to the youtube channels I like as well as listening to the 101 Conversations mp3 files that go with each conversation. This way, I can teach my brain to listen just as well as I can read. I suspect speaking will also be a goal, although I find myself being pushed more towards other methods, like one described by Shektman which involves "building your islands", which are pre-scripted, memorized materials on subjects your interested in. I did this with patient interview questions in medical school, and it worked marvelously!

I would love to answer more questions about the book itself if you have any, and I would love to hear about any particular books you used when you first started or books you transitioned to!

Is this unique? Groundbreaking? Game-changing?

No. It's just a book of short conversations.

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