Her name is Loli. She is young, overweight and always looks sad. Her mum keeps telling her she needs to lose weight. If she wants to get a boyfriend, she needs to be slim. And she needs to smile. Why does she always look sad? She needs to lose weight and smile more often. That's all she needs to be happy.
This book is a short story for adult learners with an intermediate or upper-intermediate level of Spanish. It will help you revise and consolidate your Spanish grammar and learn vocabulary in context.
However, Una chica triste is not just a book to learn Spanish. It is also an interesting story that you will actually want to read. A story, which, I hope, will catch your attention from the beginning and will keep you motivated till the end. A story you won´t put down easily. A story that may keep you so intrigued you may forget the main purpose you started reading it was to learn Spanish!
maryC on https://goo.gl/SjWq6N wrote:Excellent book
This book is great for learning Spanish at intermediate level. The chapters are short with help on vocabulary at the end of each one. Most of all, the story is interesting and keeps your attention up to the end.
Mr. Berwick Curtis on https://goo.gl/Z1hYJa wrote:A good story and one I could read without needing to translate all the time
I really enjoyed the story, and found I could understand and read it without needing to translate, a first for me. Helpful vocab at the end of each chapter. I would read books like this again.
Amazon Costumer on https://goo.gl/bdQTrB wrote:How to expand your passive knowledge
This is a good series - I took a step back from the C1 and found that I only needed to check out about a word per page. The repetition was unintrusive but meant that new vocab was cemented easily. More importantly this was an interesting story though I was just a little disappointed by the ending which I found a shade contrived.
Sarah Guenther wrote:Me gustó mucho este libro. A veces era muy ...
Me gustó mucho este libro. A veces era muy serio y otras veces muy cómico y como el título un poco triste. Muy bueno para aprender más Español.
Joanne Damico wrote:The story line is compelling and leaves you wanting to read more to find out what's going to happen next. There's a few unexpected plot twists to keep things interesting. The chapters are relatively short with definitions of highlighted words at the end of each chapter. It's a good value- the book isn't that expensive but it's a medium length book.
Rick of Prague wrote:This is a complex story with complex characters. Juan Fernández has a gift of storytelling, but a much greater talent in character development. Must be his background in psychology. The Spanish in this book is at a higher level, and a wonderful exercise in the past tense.
Karin wrote:This graded reader is well written and the story is very engaging . The story features a young girl in her late teens living in London whose parents come from Barcelona. This is a dysfunctional family where both parents work a lot and there is no time for the kids. The parents fail to pass on Spanish language skills to their children and neither parent is interested in their two kids getting a good education. The protagonist, Loli, is a sad case. She is literally fat, ignorant and friendless. Her aging grandfather lives with her family and this becomes the center of the story. We witness the struggle and sorrows of Loli to pull herself up. The author, Professor Fernandez, does a great job of weaving in difficult grammatical concepts like the subjunctive and other delights in the course of the story. I would highly recommend it. The author ought to consider publishing an audio version. That would help to develop the most challenging skill for the foreign language learner. I highly recommend this book.
TeacherWriter wrote:Didn't find any con in this book, only pros: every day, simple, natural language, lots of humor, good story line, sensable ideas between the lines.
I wanted to tell the main character to pull up her big girl panties and get on with her life! For that reason, I wasn't connected with the main character, and I wasn't entirely engaged with the plot. However, the way Juan Fernández repeated and reused vocabulary really helped clarify phrases that I needed to practice. For example, in "Una Chica Triste", he used "darse cuenta" in many different contexts and conjugations. This phrase was hard for me, but now I fully understand how to use it. Señor Fernández has a very good podcast and website in addition to his books. In his podcasts, he uses the same strategy of repetition to help you really learn the vocabulary he's using. I recommend you check out his resources if you want to improve your Spanish. ¡Muchisimas gracias, Profesor Fernández!
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