All Spanish Method Book
I want to bring up the All Spanish Method First and Second Book. It's a very cool book. If anyone knows Spanish, I'd be interested in hearing how different the book's Spanish is from modern Spanish in terms of differences in grammar and modern usage of words. The book was published before 1923.
I love old language textbooks...
Also for those interested, I found the book on Amazon for $30 dollars from a company that's publishing old out of print books. Which I thought was a reasonable amount, considering any original copies of the books would be tons of money or simply impossible to obtain. (There's now a few publishers who are printing it, from what I've seen).
The books are also FREE on archive.org. And again, I would love to hear thoughts from anyone who knows Spanish.
Ayan Academy on Youtube made some videos of reading the book aloud, so there's pronunciation you can hear, but they did not finish making audio of the book. Which is a bit frustrating, as learning without audio can result in a mental pronunciation/sound for the language that isn't close to the real thing (which is what happened to me initially when I learned French mainly by reading only).
What is interesting about this book?
It was made when the Direct Method was popular, and so it's structured in a way that a teacher/tutor reads the lesson aloud, then has students read it aloud several times, then has students answer questions based on the chapter lesson. There's a focus on speaking entirely in the target language, and doing it a LOT. This book's teaching method recommendations is a nice reflection of what Direct Method lessons tended to be like, how they were structured.
This book was also made when the Nature Method was popular, it's my favorite language learning method (and in particular I LOVE the textbooks designed this way), the method of teaching the target language IN the language. The book is written in Spanish, and explanations are mostly using images and using cognates similar to English so that an English speaker can understand lessons entirely in Spanish. The book even suggests students make dictionaries with Spanish word/picture entries, and avoid using English at all. (I'm of the opinion that using target language/native language translations works fine if you like doing it, and I certainly have done it). This books is a good example of how Nature Method textbooks/lessons were designed. I think the All Spanish Method books are not quite as 'easy to understand' for a beginner as perhaps Lingua Latina (still in use in some classes) and English By The Nature Method (and the French and Italian versions). But All Spanish Method does seem more in depth than the Poco a Poco book, another Spanish teaching book written with the direct method and nature method in mind that is entirely in Spanish and uses pictures to explain.
(The Nature Method book I've used the most is Francais Par Le Methode Nature which is how I learned enough French to read articles and then novels, along with some grammar explanation sites written in French, and a lot of practice just reading).
