When and how do I start reading?

At the lower levels, reading any kind of text will be too much of a struggle to be worth your time, since you’ll be acquiring much faster by watching comprehensible input content for beginners. An exception to this are speakers of other Romance languages. If that’s your case, you may be able to read quite a lot of native material right from the beginning. If you really are planning on not using Spanish for conversation and you don’t care about pronunciation, you can start reading at levels 3 or 4 on our timeline. At those levels you can read graded readers. If you want to start reading at level 5, it’s not a big deal at this point and it shouldn’t keep you from developing clear pronunciation in the language. You'll still end up with better pronunciation and fluency than the vast majority of learners. You'll be able to understand books targeted at elementary school children of lower grades, and you may be able to skip the graded readers. For an optimal acquisition of the pronunciation of the language and an easier time reading, we recommend holding off on reading until you are at level 6. The best books to read are those that are targeted at elementary school children. At this level, you don't need to stick to the lower grades. However, nonfiction will often be much easier to understand than fiction.