DIRECTIONS: Read it out loud. Then sort what you understood into the three columns. Don’t translate it.
Use the vowels, the cousins, the endings, and watch for false friends.
El elefante africano es el animal terrestre más grande del planeta. Vive en familias grandes y camina muchos kilómetros cada día para buscar agua. Su memoria es excelente: puede recordar la ruta a un río después de muchos años. Hoy la situación es difícil y muchos elefantes están en peligro.
No looking up, no wild guesses. An honest gap beats a confident wrong sentence.
Certain
Fairly sure
No idea
A Paragraph Nobody Prepared You For — Questions
Spanish · Page 2 of 3
What is the paragraph about? One sentence, from the certain column only.
Which words did you get from being cousins of English words? List four.
grande looks like grand and means big. Is that a false friend, or near enough to be useful? Argue it.
Find a verb in the paragraph and say who is doing it, using the endings sheet.
A Paragraph Nobody Prepared You For — continued
Spanish · Page 3 of 3
Which word did you most want to look up? Why that one — what job was it doing in the sentence?
You read a paragraph in a language you have had about a dozen sheets of. What does that tell you about how much of a language you have to be taught before you can start using it?