Think Spanish

Think Spanish is a subscription-based monthly magazine and optional audio CD for people learning Spanish. The 20-page glossy magazine (currently with no advertisements except on the back cover) features a wide variety of articles written in Spanish suitable for both beginners and advanced students who can use the articles to review what they already know or discover what they don't. The target audience is secondary-school students and adults, and the magazines would be suitable for classroom or solo use.

One of the problems with the Spanish articles you find in many textbooks for Spanish students is that they tend to be chosen more to help illustrate a grammatical point rather than to be engaging. That's not a problem with Think Spanish, a monthly magazine published by Second Language Publishing aimed at students who hope to learning using "real Spanish" through articles that are engaging on their own.

The concept of Think Spanish is just what its name implies: The magazine presents articles that are written in Spanish only, and they're written at about the same difficulty level as you'd find in magazines written for native Spanish speakers (although regional colloquialisms are kept to a minimum). Words or phrases other than basic Spanish words (such as el, que, hombre and tener) and English cognates (such as familia, talento and variedad) are printed in boldface, and a list down the side of each pages provides a translation for them the first time they appear in each article. The more advanced student who knows most of the vocabulary can easily ignore the translated words and phrases, while those who are new to the language are provided with what they need to make sense of the article.

It is assumed that students using the magazine will know enough about verb conjugation to understand the tenses of the verbs. By translating occasional phrases as well as individual words, the editors indirectly teach grammatical concepts as well as straight vocabulary.

One thing appealing about the articles for the student serious about learning Spanish as it's really used is that they appear to have been originally written in Spanish — in other words, they don't read like translations from English and thus use the vocabulary and phrases that native speakers use.

More importantly, the editors have done an excellent job of choosing articles that would be of interest to people learning Spanish: Themes include popular culture, current events, travel and history. Recent issues, for example, have included articles about places to visit in Havana, high fashion, Asian immigrants living in Latin America, the pleasure of eating tomatoes and AIDS in the Dominican Republic. You'll find also find interviews and recipes to round out the mix.

Each issue also includes a grammar lesson, written in English, suitable for beginning or intermediate students. There's also a "repeat after me" pronunciation lesson that will be most useful for those who include the audio CD in their subscription.

Cost of the subscription works out to around $4 per issue of the magazine, or about $10 per month for the magazine with the audio CD. Costs are higher for those outside the United States, and discounts are given for two-year subscriptions.

Think Spanish is a reasonably priced aid to learning Spanish that provides material that would be of interest to most students in their teen years and older. It would be suitable for individual or classroom use.