Today, I want to talk about reading, which I consider to be the killer app.
It is the killer app for so many things, for education, for communicating with
people, for connecting with people in history, people in different
countries, and for acquiring languages.
So, today I want to give you my six tips on powering up your reading capability,
both for language learning and in general.
First tip, read a lot.
There is no shortcut.
People who read a lot become good readers.
They also become more proficient in the languages they're learning.
They become better writers in their own language.
Read a lot.
Recently I was interested in the subject of reading.
So I Googled different podcasts on reading, on literacy,
in different languages.
Along the way, I discovered this series of lectures from France,
from the Collège de France.
And there they described, I think, in very simple terms, what reading is.
Reading basically piggybacks on the areas of the brain that process.
Audio meaning sounds come into the brain and a certain area and the sounds
become meaning as we become familiar or are familiar with the language.
And reading has a separate entry port.
Initially you go to the sort of sound area of the brain to
follow the chain down to meaning.
And as we become more proficient readers, we can actually bypass
that and go straight to meaning at least some of the time.
Now, not all languages are equal.
Some languages are more, call it transparent.
The relationship between the letters and the sound is more
consistent than in other languages.
However, the areas in the brain that are activated are all the same.
And in all cases, the sort of simple view of reading, which is what I
described, is a process of self education.
The more we read, the more we become familiar with what the
letters represent, the better we do.
And so if we read a book like Harry Potter and
The Sorcerer's Stone, we have 76, 000 opportunities to refine and confirm
our understanding of how the writing system connects to sound and then to
meaning, a magic thing that mankind didn't have for most of history.
Now, the educators were not content with the simple view of reading, this
sort of magic self educating process.
And so they came up with additional sort of details.
One was this Scarborough's Rope, which introduces the importance of
comprehension, the importance of prior knowledge, the importance of vocabulary.
But all of those things come automatically if we do enough reading.
And listening, which I will get to.
That's why now I come to my point.
Number two, don't worry too much about comprehension.
If you are reading and you understand 60, 70%, you are still practicing reading.
You are encountering the words in different contexts.
The things that you don't understand now, you may understand later just
through the process of reading.
And I always like to quote Rubem Alves, the great Brazilian educator,
who says nothing disrupts the pleasure of reading as much as being asked
questions about what we are reading.
If we follow rule number one and read enough, we will eventually
understand more and more.
And I will get to the issue of people with reading difficulties like dyslexia.
So don't fuss about what you don't understand now.
What matters is how much will you understand later on.
Number three.
Listen, it's all input, reading, listening is part of the same process, follows the
same parts of our brain, except that the reading comes through a different port.
So you need to take advantage of listening.
I find that if I'm reading something that's difficult in another
language, if I can hear it first.
Then I have a bit of a headstart.
I have some sense of what the reading is about.
Imperfect, you know, 20%.
I even got a bit of a rhythm, some momentum on reading.
All of this helps me to read.
After having read something, if I then listen to it again, it helps to
reinforce it because the words that we notice while listening are also words
that we will notice better when reading.
So we should always incorporate audio with text.
That's the way LingQ is built.
That's my basic principle of language learning.
I always have audio and text until I'm quite advanced in the language.
Now, in today's day and age, we have text to speech.
So even while reading, if I'm not sure how something is pronounced, I can
use text to speech so I can hear it.
So that's another example of how we use...
Use audio in conjunction with reading.
This has never been easier.
We have automatic intelligence.
So even if you bring in a text which has no audio, you can convert it to
audio using artificial intelligence.
So use audio to accelerate the process of learning through.
Input and of connecting the code, the letter code to the,
uh, sound and the meaning.
So the third thing is use audio.
The fourth thing is very context, read online, read on paper, read online
in order to take advantage of online dictionaries, the audio functions that
are available online, the ability to find material online, I can read on paper.
And I think it's a good idea to read on paper.
In addition to reading online, but I find it at my current stage in
Arabic and Persian too difficult.
On the other hand, in other languages, Romanian, even Greek, Russian,
Ukrainian, I can read paper books.
And I like to vary that content online and paper, even books in English.
For example, the professor whom I mentioned at the beginning,
Stanislas Duen, I saw him online, but I also bought the book.
I've mentioned before Daniel Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain,
but I also ended up buying the book.
So I think it's important.
In reading to use the advantages of online learning, but it's also a good thing to
read paper books and it's a good thing to read a variety of sources on the
same subject rather than trying to beat yourself up in trying to remember this
word or trying to remember this date.
If you read two or three different books on the same subject, you will acquire that
greater knowledge of the subject matter that will improve your comprehension.
And comprehension is something that builds gradually and something that
personally, I don't like being tested on using comprehension questions.
Number five is use the functionality that's available in different
language learning apps like LingQ.
So at LingQ, I very much recommend.
Sentence view, because there are always sentences that we didn't quite
understand, even if we know all the words.
And I don't like going to sentence view for every sentence in a text,
but I do go for those sentences where I'm having a little difficulty.
I can group certain words together as phrases.
Some words belong with other words and it's not obvious the first time.
But if I go back into sentence view, I look at it.
I can save a phrase.
I can also do that little exercise where the sentence gets scrambled and
I have to put it back together again.
And I've always said this, you know, you need both the top down
learning and the bottom up learning.
You need the big picture and the details.
And the sentence view is a great place to go.
To get at the details, the DNA of the language, and that gives you more sort
of ammunition as you charge forward in your big picture, listening and reading.
And finally, number six, I said, I would talk a bit about dyslexia through these
different podcasts that I listened to.
I became aware of a person called Cliff Weitzman, who developed
a software called Speechify, which enables you to convert any.
Text into audio that's not so unique nowadays, and he can then increase
the speed two times, three times.
And the reason he did that was because he was dyslexic and he found that
listening to audio at two or three times the speed helped him cure his dyslexia.
Can't vouch for that.
I don't know whether it's true or not, but I have been practicing that at LingQ.
So I can go to the, what we call the karaoke mode and
crank it up to 1.5
times, two times, and training yourself to follow along and to
read at that speed does wonders.
You actually have more of a bird's eye view, it seems to me, of the text.
As you are listening to the new words come at you rather quickly, you're able to kind
of remember what you just heard earlier.
It's just a different experience.
Now, speed listening to a whole audio book, you're going to miss a lot.
So that's not the suggestion.
The suggestion I'm making here is experiment with different speeds of
listening to increase your ability to process the language, not because
while you're listening at double the speed, you're going to understand more.
You'll probably understand less, but I find that when I go back to listening at
a normal speed, and even in terms of the impact on my reading, it's beneficial,
so it's a bit like this fart leg.
run for runners, where they experiment with sprinting and then running at more
of a jogging pace and then sprinting.
And apparently this builds up your aerobic capacity.
So my sixth and final suggestion or tip is play with the speed of
listening as it connects the reading.
Build up your capability and reading increase your enjoyment of reading.
And I think you will find benefits, not only in language
learning, but in life in general.
And I'll leave you with.
Two videos that I did on the subject of reading and literacy some
while ago, and you'll see that my perspective has changed somewhat.
Thanks for listening.
Bye.