We have to read a lot in order to get better at the
language that we're learning.
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
Today, and I'm going to talk, this is the second in my series of videos about
my hierarchy of goals, the main goals that I have when I learn a language, and
today I'm going to talk about reading.
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So, uh, the first sort of goal that the, you know, I've worked towards in learning
languages is to acquire words and bear in mind that all these different goals
are very much interrelated, but these are sort of the goals that I pursue.
The second goal is reading and I'll explain.
In order to learn words, we, first of all, have to read them.
It's a lot...
I don't say we have to, we can also hear them and eventually learn them,
but it's an awful lot easier in my experience if I can also read them.
If I just hear them, it's difficult for me to remember them.
Reading gives them form.
Uh, it's easier for me to remember the word.
I identify the written word with the word that I hear.
Um, reading is easier than listening.
I can work my way through a text at LingQ, look up every word.
Let's say I'm in sentence mode, it's a brand new language and if there's
seven words in that sentence, I can look up each word and I can kind of
figure out what the sentence means.
Fuzzy, maybe not totally clear, but I have a sense of what that sentence means.
I have a sense of which words, you know, correspond to the
verb, to the noun and so forth.
So the reading is easy.
If I just heard, heard those words, I wouldn't be able to do that.
So reading is a sort of a step towards being able to understand what you hear.
This is interesting because of course, historically, and from an evolutionary
perspective, we weren't, as, as human beings, we weren't designed to read.
Uh, for the vast majority of our existence, even as you know, our
ancestors, uh, you know, in the evolutionary chain and even as human
beings, it's only in the last 5,000 years that writing has existed.
And for most of that period, a very small percentage of the population
read, books were very expensive.
It was very expensive to print.
This became, you know, it became more widespread with the development
of different methods of printing initially in China and then
in Europe with, um, Gutenberg.
And so...
but, and, but even after that, it was a small percentage of people who read.
So for the human brain to be able to decipher, to convert sort of written
lines or, uh, drawings, uh, in a text to convert that into meaning and also
into sound is an amazing achievement.
Uh, and so for us, when we learn to write even in our own language, that's
a major, um, process, uh, in terms of getting our brains to adapt to something
that they weren't used to doing.
And many people have difficulty reading.
Uh, now, to make reading easier I've always felt that it's important to
combine the audio with the reading so that, you know, it's like, if you're
playing um, a musical instrument if you have heard the tune, it's easier
to play that tune on the piano or on the guitar, whatever it might be,
because you have an idea of what it is.
You're trying to, what sort of music you're trying to make.
Similarly with reading if you can hear what it is you're trying to
read, you have a little bit of momentum going into the reading.
So I always combine audio with text.
I, I certainly in an early stage in my learning, I want to be able
to do both listen and read, but I know that in order to get good at
the language, I have to read a lot.
And if I look at my statistics in LingQ uh, even in Arabic and Persian, which
are the two most recent languages, I've read about 500,000 words in each of them,
and LingQ measures uh, not only when you read something for the first time, but
also when you read it for a second and the third time, which I do, and I'll get
into this sort of strategy of reading.
But even when I feel that I'm struggling to make progress, I know that every
time I'm doing either something new, which therefore would have a lot of
unknown words that I'm looking up, you know, blue words, or if I'm rereading
something that I've read before, because there's still lots of words that are
now yellow words that I have looked up, but I still don't know those words.
And it's just a process of reading again, reading something that I've read.
I'm consuming those words.
My brain is slowly, slowly getting used to reading in that language.
Uh, this is particularly true if the writing system is different.
And, uh, even though say the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used for
Russian and Ukrainian, Tajik other languages, um, is not that different
from our, uh, Latin alphabet.
But if I'm reading in Arabic or Persian, Or Korean or Japanese or Chinese, every
time I'm reading, I'm helping the brain get used to this new writing system.
Even if I know theoretically what the letters represent, I continue
to confuse them because there I'm still fighting to decipher them.
Whereas if I'm reading them in my own language or my own writing system,
it's instant, the, the, you know, the meaning of those letters is, is instant.
Um, and, and I think this might be similar to, you know, the situation
of people who struggle with dyslexia.
And so they're fighting to decipher each word whereas a fluent reader just
immediately converts the word to meaning.
Uh, when we're reading in a foreign language, I find that we're always
sub vocalizing, so that the sound of the word is very important to us.
Uh, when we read it in our own language, um, I think it's just an instant meaning.
How did we get that way?
Because ever since childhood, we've been reading in that
writing system in that language.
And so it's just, it's just a matter of the brain is so used to it.
So therefore we have to read a lot in order to get better at
the language that we're learning.
So if I say I'm at 500,000 words in Arabic or Persian, I had a million
and a half words read at least according to statistics on LingQ in
languages, like say Czech or Russian, this doesn't account for the reading
that I do away from the computer.
Again, I read on my iPad or in LingQ in order to look up words because I, I find
it frustrating to be reading, uh, and, and having a lot of words that I don't know.
But once I get good enough in a language, I like to read on paper because
that's, you know, you have no help.
You have, there's no audio, there's no text to speech.
You can't look up words.
You just have to fight your way through this text on paper.
And I've always felt that when I am first able to read a whole book from
cover to cover paper book, conventional book in a language, that's a major
achievement, a major milestone.
I'm not there in Arabic and Persian.
There are just far too many words that I don't know, but I continue reading.
That's probably, you know, every day I read some and either I'm looking up
words because it's, you know, there's a lot of blue words, unknown words, or
it's material that I've read before.
Perhaps moving some of the yellow words along and status
moving them perhaps to known.
So I spend a lot of time reading and, you know, because it's so often the
case in language learning once we get past that first stage where we
suddenly discover this language and we understand a few things and we can
say a few things and we're very happy, then we hit that long period where
we're slowly acquiring these, you know, lower frequency words, which we know.
So during that period, it's very important to have a sort of a reinforcement to
convince yourself that you're actually doing something and I'm getting somewhere.
And, and I've always felt that, you know, we need measures of
our activity level because if we are active, we will be learning.
And in that regard to the number of words, read, which we track at
LingQ, uh, even the number of words, you know, that you have looked up.
In other words, the LingQs create.
These are all indicators of how active you are.
And so the reading is a big activity at LingQ.
It's one that's helping your brain get used to the language and it's a measure
of how active you are with the language.
And, uh, I will get onto the other goals like listening, uh, which
is easier to do because I can do it while I'm doing other tasks.
But reading does require actually being in front of either be reading from
the book or you're reading on the iPad or on the computer or using LingQ, or
you're using some other method to read.
It's something that is dedicated.
You cannot be reading and driving at the same time.
I don't recommend that.
Uh, so, but reading, uh, you know, it's, it's it's, if we look at reading aside
from language, Illiteracy, um, people who read well by and large do better.
That's not to say that people who don't read well are bad people, many
people who don't read well are very successful in a variety of fields.
Over all people who read well do better, you know, academically,
professionally, socially, and so forth.
So reading is very important and people who read well, read a lot
and the same with language learning.
If you want to learn the language well, you need to read a lot.
And the reading can be either rereading, you know, easy material, which I
still find myself doing both, you know, uh, some of the learner books
in Persian, I still read through.
Because to reinforce certain structures of the language and a, and I'll read
the mini stories again, uh, because there's still words there that I still
can't remember, but I'm, I vary that with, you know, reading new material
that has more blue words in it.
And of course the, the feeling we have when we see that the pages, even if
I, if I bring in a newspaper article in Persian and I see that the pages
there's fewer and fewer blue words.
Uh, there are more and more white words that are known.
So you have that sense of the, the pages on LingQ becoming
lighter and lighter in color.
And that's an indication that you are getting somewhere, even
though at times you may struggle to understand you may struggle to speak.
So I guess my message is that, that in my hierarchy of goals, if the first
goal is to acquire more words, Uh, the main way of acquiring that, those new
words, passive vocabulary is reading, reading in combination with listening,
but I can't do it without the reading.
And the amount of reading we do on LingQ is easily measured.
So it's, it's sort of a measure of how active you are.
It's an indication that you are moving forward in the language, even
though sometimes you think you aren't.
And even if I'm reading something, that's relatively uninteresting.
Something that I've read before.
I know from personal experience that just being exposed to this, to the writing
system, being exposed to this need to read and to decipher what's written there.
And that's helping me.
So, I mean, we will do things.
I regularly pull down a kettle 20 minute, 25 minute kettlebell routine
from YouTube that I've done before, but I know that it's good for me to do it.
So I'm, I'm content to do it.
Uh, the same with reading material that I've read before and our system
at LingQ does keep track of that.
But at the same time, I'm motivated, motivated to read new material where I'll
acquire new words and where I'm learning about things that are of interest to me.
So you can do both kinds of reading.
You can be reading specifically to learn sort of a deliberate learning activity,
or you can be reading to acquire more information, to learn about different
things that are of interest to you.
But again, reading, uh, whether you do it a digit...
you know, with e-text or whether you do it in a paper book is is a
fundamental part of language learning.
Now that's not to say that there aren't lots of people who learn and
don't read, and I am sure there are, we read about the, you know, the
Amazon jungle, where there's so many different languages and people managed
to learn each other's languages.
I gather in Ethiopia, which is not a country with a high rate of literacy uh,
people nevertheless are quite multilingual because there are so many languages
there, so you can learn without reading.
However, it's easier with reading.
If you live surrounded by speakers of other languages, you'll pick up
those languages quite comfortably, but most of us aren't in that situation.
And so reading, which is a, it's like a recording, but it's a written
record of what someone's said.
Uh, better.
If you can hear what's there, because that gives you momentum into the
reading, you actually can hear the words that you're reading, but to have
the ability to read in combination with listening is very, very powerful.
So, uh, and in my mind, you know, in terms of the statistics that I
follow, uh, at LingQ of my reading comes right after, um, my vocabulary.
So I hope that was helpful.
And I will continue in this series about my goals when I learn languages.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.