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How much reading books is useful for you? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4849 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 1 of 5 15 November 2011 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I mean, how much helpful they were in your process of learning and after how many books have you felt at ease while reading them?
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| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5556 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 2 of 5 15 November 2011 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Just offering a little rephrasing for you - I mean, how much help were they in your process of learning and after how many books did you finally feel at ease whilst reading them? Well, I guess it depends on the difficulty of the books you're reading. After reading the first two Harry Potter books in Spanish they started to become rather easy or at least much easier for me to read, so now I feel confident that I can understand and get into the stories of those books. I'm reading Isabel Allende now, and even though I don't know the meaning of many words and it's an obvious step up in difficulty for me (even though she's considered to be a very readable and easy to understand writer), I can still follow the main ideas and points of the story. As a result however of its slightly higher complexity in comparison with Harry Potter, I feel as though I'm being pushed again, and so I feel it's rewarding as my Spanish is being stretched, pulled and expanded upon. Yet again, I'm slowly becoming used to Allende and so the lack ease is slowly dissipating. I guess I'm trying to say that each author writes in a different way, and even in English some books are a struggle for me to follow or comprehend, not because of the words used, but simply by the way the writer employs them and draws out meaning. So for me at least, I don't think that there is a point where all books become easy to read, it's a matter of how familiar you are with a particular style of writing which is more of a factor. In regards to the heplfulness of books in learning and improving a language, I think they are very important and beneficial, as the more you read the more you familiarise yourself with the constructions and grammar of the language, so making them more concrete and clear in your mind. Also obviously they're a fantastic way to pick up new vocabulary and conjunctions etc, and they give you a feel for the language, they show you how it works and flows, how things are expressed and the way things should be phrased. Books also give you the advantage of time, the ability to go over and take everything in at your own pace, as you're able to reread passages and paragraphs at your leisure, therefore allowing you to make sure that you understand everything (if that's your aim) before moving on. To my mind I think reading and using books as a way to improve a language is a fantastic method, as long as you understand the basics of the grammar of the language in question, otherwise it's just infuriating and a very slow way of accustomising yourself to the languages structures which could be much better done via a beginners grammar of the language. Anyway.. Read read read! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5371 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 5 15 November 2011 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it depends on the language.
For instance, if you read French and you understand the writing conventions, you will virtually always know how to pronounce words. There is no stress to worry about either. So reading French is probably very efficient, acquisition-wise. Spanish and Italian have stress, but it's mostly predictable and it's sometimes marked when it doesn't follow certain conventions. But if you take English, the spelling is not always a good indication of pronunciation and stress is not indicated. So, if someone were learning English, I'd have to recommend a lot more listening than reading. In other languages like German, the spelling is reliable, but the stress remains mostly unpredictable. In a language like Japanese, parts of sentences are legible in kana, but the parts in kanji are not very helpful for the learner -- either you already know how to read it or else it gives you no information: virtually no information on the meaning, and none at all on the pronunciation. Not to mention that the pitch accent system is not indicated at all in the writing either. So it wouldn't be very helpful to learn Japanese. Of course, lots of people do it anyway, but they usually neglect speaking. I personally find reading Japanese to be quite frustrating. Conversely, I suppose it would be quite useful to read Korean, for similar reasons as I mentioned about French. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| On_the_road Diglot Newbie Sweden Joined 4746 days ago 23 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish | Message 4 of 5 24 November 2011 at 11:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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For me, reading books has always been an important part of my learning process. It has definitely given me a better feel for the language and it is a good way of increasing the vocabulary and to see how words are used in a specific context. To get the most out of it, one probably should try and read as many different kinds of books as possible and try to read books that are at the right level of difficulty. Reading a book that is too high above my current level makes me loose interest, whereas a book that doesn't challenge me does not develop my skills that much. Edited by On_the_road on 24 November 2011 at 11:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6587 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 5 25 November 2011 at 6:56am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with the AJATT guy that to write better you need to read more, not to write more. It was definitely reading that got me to advanced fluency in Finnish. You also need to address other areas, like at least the listening/phonetics but preferably also the morphology (at least for languages like Finnish), but without a lot of input you'll still sound unnatural half the time.
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