Reading in a foreign language is really, really hard. I am someone who has been
fascinated by reading in different languages for many many years now.
It all started with Japanese when I sort of became fascinated by this idea of
reading novels and literature in Japanese, it was just so fascinating to
sort of hold these books in my hand and seeing all of the kanji and Chinese
characters all just like running, you know, vertically right-to-left down the
pages. I just... I loved how small Japanese novels tend to be, and holding them and I
just had this fantasy of being able to read those for pleasure in my own time
Now later, when I started French, this actually became kind of a fascination
I can't describe how many hours I spent just like desperately trying to become
able to read novels in French and the funny thing is growing up I didn't
really like to read. It's not something I enjoyed and I only did it when I was
forced to in school but now it's actually one of my favorite things to do
and I can't imagine my life without the joy of reading and this all happened to
me in foreign languages but in particular with French because French is
the first language that I actually managed to read a book all the way
through from start to finish in more or less one really long sitting
Which for me is really an accomplishment because I am a very slow reader in general and I
had never done that even in English and so honestly some of the loveliest
delightful moments of my language learning and even in my life honestly
have happened reading books in foreign languages so this is a topic I'm
extremely passionate about and one of my favorite things to do on this channel is
to try to share advice, techniques, methods, perspectives that you may not
have heard before.
As always if you like this video and if you want to see more of my
advice and tips and adventures then please do subscribe
leave me a comment and a like <3
Jumping in! So, going back a few years I had always you know
approached reading in foreign languages with kind of a brute-force method
In French it's funny, one of the ways that I found most effective to learn to read in
a foreign language was by essentially reading the first five or ten pages of a
lot of novels and it wasn't like a crafted beautiful method that I had it
was just that I was so determined to finally just get through a novel that I
would read first 10 pages and it would just be
maddeningly difficult I would write down all the words and phrases it was a very
intensive approach to reading but then I would sort of switch I would say okay
you know what this one is too difficult maybe I can actually try this one over
here that one that seems really nice it would be inviting me with it's beautiful
cover design and it seemed so nice and friendly until I read the first 10 pages
of that one and I just did this process over and over again. I kept changing
books and just reading the first 10 or 15 or 20 pages and that's what happened
is that 10 became 20 and the next thing you know, I was reading 30 pages of 40
pages until finally I managed to sort of scratch my way all the way through my
very first novel in French
And so what happened is that every time I was sort
of starting a new novel in French I was actually accumulating lots of words and
phrases and it worked!
But this is very much a brute-force method and I think
that to succeed with those kinds of methodologies you have to really be
somebody who has an iron willpower
Now a couple of years ago I started a new
series on this channel about reading my very first novel in Spanish and I have
to say it was one of my favorite series I really enjoyed it. It's a couple years
old now but I do recommend checking it out if you're curious. Now in that
series I made one of the biggest discoveries of my own language learning
career regarding reading, real time, and I want to share that with you now
So I developed a 3-step process now the process itself is not super important
you don't have to follow the process but I want to share what I learned from
doing it what I would do is I would read the first chapter of a book all the way
through without really stopping or pausing for a dictionary and I just
wanted to see how much could I understand just off of reading it all
the way through now you may be familiar with this kind of approach when people
sort of say you know you do this sort of extensive reading approach where you
just read without a dictionary and you try to guess the meaning of things and you
just hope that through lots of exposure and lots of repetition of key vocabulary
you'll eventually sort of acquire lots and lots of words now in my experience
this actually often doesn't work people very often end up getting overwhelmed by
the content it's extremely difficult and
people end up saying things like you need to understand 90 or 95 percent of the
words for that approach to be really effective. So here's the key that is not
where I stopped. I read the first chapter all the way through and in this case
with the Spanish novel I was reading I remember it was very very hard I felt
like I understood maybe 50% at best and in the video you can see that I'm kind
of just exhausted after trying it out so then came step two where I went back and
I actually did an intensive approach on that first chapter so I started with
kind of an extensive reading approach where I just read it all the way through
but then I went back and I did a really intensive study of that first chapter so
what happened is after I did that really intensive study of chapter one and you
could argue that yes it's time-consuming and this is why people don't often do
intensive reading but I ended up with a really solid understanding of the
context! I knew who the characters were I knew sort of what was going on the first
chapter is typically where the author is setting up the story, the context, the
environments. It's a really key chapter for you to understand so then I
read chapter two and that is where the magic really happened I found that when
I did my first step in Chapter two where I sort of read it all the way through
and start to finish without stopping, I understood like 80 to 85 percent it was
absolutely incredible I went from like 50 percent the first time to like 85 or
maybe even 90% the second time I remember that I was just mind blown
this is not something I expected and the more I thought about it I realized that
when you're reading a book so much of what's going on it's like keeping track
of who is who which characters are what or who and what they're doing what their
backstories are what is the general storyline and so much of that context is
built up and explained in that first chapter. Now what I have found through
trying this out many many many times is that very often when you're struggling
through a book and you just read it from start to finish or that's the goal
without ever stopping for any sort of intensive study then yes unless you're
able to understand a really high percentage of what's going on you just
end up lost and you don't really know exactly
who is who what the main story is you sort of forget or you never really knew
what the main plot even was and so you end up spending so much time just trying
to figure out the fundamentals of this book but it turns out that most of that
core information is actually set up in some way shape or form in that first
chapter and so essentially my big tip here is whatever you do whether it's an
intensive or extensive approach or some kind of combination, whatever you do at
least take the time to take an intensive study approach to the first chapter
because this means that you will know like who the main characters are what
their sort of setup is or maybe their backstory what the general plot is what
is the general scene where is the story taking place you'll know all these
important things so that when you proceed to chapter 2 and onwards you
don't have to wonder about those things you have this sort of anchor that you
can grab onto and it's amazing how much that frees you up to just focus on
enjoying the story and trying to keep track and so that's basically it I think
that one of the most important things you can do to set yourself up for
success with reading a book or a novel or even an article in a foreign language is
take that first unit and in a book that's often a chapter and really take
the time to study that one chapter in lots of detail I would even take notes
even if you take them in English or your native language take some notes on who are
the main characters what are their backstories that you know so far where
did they come from where does the story take place just take some notes that
will help sort of be a map you can refer back to all the way throughout the story
and I think that this will just really relieve your cognitive load from
constantly just trying to figure out what the heck is going on and you can
focus on trying to keep up and personally I really recommend this
approach of sort of like reading it one time all the way through without
stopping going back and trying to sort of intensively study the chapter and
then move on and sort of every now and again come back and maybe review those
notes what I would do is I actually used to use a highlighter and I would
highlight words that repeated so I could actually see over time all the
words that had come up again and again and again anyway I could talk a lot
about different methods and techniques for reading in foreign languages but I
wanted this video to really focus on just one absolutely crucial thing you
could do that I think will make all the difference in actually finishing books
in foreign language and not just starting them