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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5970 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 28 23 January 2015 at 3:38pm | IP Logged |
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With your first language, how long until you were able to read comfortably and enjoy relatively simple novels? I'm
about five months in of intensive studying, and I can understand the plot to TV shows and movies, and can understand a lot of audiobooks, but I have a really hard reading without any audio. EDIT: I was studying Spanish off and on before starting more intensive study, and now I've been doing many hours a day, and living in a Spanish speaking country. Edited by glidefloss on 23 January 2015 at 4:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 2 of 28 23 January 2015 at 4:08pm | IP Logged |
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I began to wade through popular detective novels after 3 years. Even then, I had to look up many words in the dictionary. Mind you, I hadn't been studying intensely, more a case of learning through spending large amounts of time with natives, topped up with some self study. But I was motivated.
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| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4535 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 3 of 28 23 January 2015 at 4:49pm | IP Logged |
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For my first language I remember standing at the teacher's desk at the front of the class and realising that I really could read the words in the picture book that she had in front of her. So perhaps 4-5 years. :)
For my second language, German, I read my first novel six months after I started studying, using a Kindle and pop-up dictionary. It took me a month to read a couple of hundred pages. After that things got a lot quicker, so within six months I was reading 1100-page Harry Potter books in a couple of weeks. It's only been relatively recently (after 2.5 years of study) that I can relatively comfortably read more complex books without any sort of translation - though I still have plenty of gaps in my vocabulary. Edited by patrickwilken on 23 January 2015 at 4:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 4 of 28 23 January 2015 at 5:03pm | IP Logged |
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Depends on the language and circumstances. It took me 3-4 months to start reading in
Swedish and Romanian, and not that long before I did it in German either, but French and Russian took me longer. Other languages I can't read that fast except for Norwegian and Afrikaans. But they're basically variations on a theme. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 28 23 January 2015 at 5:36pm | IP Logged |
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This depends on a whole bunch of factors. Also, honestly, I think it's better to read more easily with an audiobook than to be unable to understand an audiobook without an accompanying written text.
Since you seem to have done a lot of LR, this sounds normal to me. Also, if you're very aural, it's natural that you find audiobooks easier. I still do, at least in the languages where I did them early. As your overall level improves, so do your strongest and weakest skills. How exactly does audio help? Are there any words that you know orally but not in writing? Does it keep you from translating or worrying about little details? Are you able to have longer sessions with audiobooks? Something else? At a possibly similar level, what helped me a lot was the Destinos series. It wasn't particularly challenging, so that with closed captions I could work on understanding in detail. The speech was slow enough that rather than being satisfied with getting the gist, I could actually notice all the "little words" and what they did (I already had a good idea of what to expect due to my experience with Latin, Portuguese and simply linguistics). A similar strategy could be to listen to an audiobook and then read the corresponding text afterwards. Apart from slowing down, another option is to do the opposite and challenge yourself further. Find content where you *need* both the audio and subtitles/text, which is too difficult with only one or the other. Finally, how much does this bother you? Do you have audiobooks for everything you read and enough opportunities to listen? If it's so, don't worry for now. Sooner or later you'll find something that is not available as an audiobook, and then you're likely to see lots of improvement within a single book (assuming 130+ pages). The responses may be misleading since most people start reading before they're good at listening, btw. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5264 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 6 of 28 23 January 2015 at 5:50pm | IP Logged |
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Reading is something that gets better the more you do. Struggling makes it difficult at first, no doubt about it. Even with a pop-up dictionary on a kindle, it's not easy if you have to look up a couple of words every sentence. How long it's going to take you, I don't have a clue. We're all different. I can't remember how long it took me to start reading in Spanish, my first second language. My experience with other languages after Spanish wouldn't be relevant to you since I am an experienced learner.
So, start off small and work your way up. You don't want to start reading difficult novels. Bilingual texts are a good way to break into reading. Try albalearning and explore "colecciones". Also try the graded readers at Centro Virtual Cervantes Aveteca Lecturas Paso a Paso. The good thing about these is that they are short, have simple monoligual definitions by click and are graded as to level. There's also Veinte Mundos which does have audio and pop-up definitions/explanations for some of the text. The audio does not have to be turned on. Most of the texts are intermediate level. They can be printed to pdf. You can make your own parallel texts yourself with lf aligner or for short articles by copying and pasting into a word document with a two column, 1 row, table. Paste Spanish on the left and English on the right and manually align. Also some physical books with parallel texts are available. What I like about parallel texts for beginning reading is the ability to easily glance to the right to confirm a guess or see the meaning. With reading, the more you do the better you become at it, in my experience. With graded readers and parallel texts you can break in easily, progress and then wean yourself off of them when you feel ready. I've been making some parallel texts for a friend of mine from the Associated Press Español site by searching the English site for the same article. It's a little easier to find the English with GlobalVoices.org en Español by clicking on the article and then the corresponding translation link is on the right. My friend likes the AP parallel texts because he already knows the news and there's no need to stop and look up words in a dictionary with the English to the right. Of course, the texts can be used intensively as well. Edited by iguanamon on 23 January 2015 at 6:16pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 7 of 28 23 January 2015 at 6:10pm | IP Logged |
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I can't believe I forgot my usual rec of GLOSS! :D
Also, LyricsTraining is good for being more aware of the spelling and how it relates to the pronunciation/spoken language. I found both highly useful when my listening was already relatively good thanks to LR and football (soccer), and I used these before watching Destinos too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5970 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 8 of 28 24 January 2015 at 7:11am | IP Logged |
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I guess it's better that audio is easier for me, since in daily life I need conversation and comprehension much more.
I've never thought of myself as an auditory learner, except that in school I could remember what the teacher said-- writing it down would not help me. I've always been a reader, and enjoy reading without audiobooks. I've done a couple English audiobooks in my life, but it never felt the same as sitting with a great book--the mental imagery and the thought experience is different. So even though Spanish audio is probably helpful for accent and other things, I'd rather be spending my time just reading. You're absolutely right, I have been doing a good amount of LR, which is probably causing this, and also watching a lot of Spanish TV. (I just got a free month of netflix, which has almost anything I could want in Spanish, and a bilingual TV). Even though I like reading and literature, I still find LR very difficult in sense that it's hard for me to sit still and make myself do it. I don't have any problems matching the audio with the text, but something about the process is difficult (maybe concentration intensive?) and somewhat unpleasant, and while doing it I always want to get up and do something else. Part of the problem is that I can't find Spanish audio for any of the books I would want to read over and over again, so I've been doing a lot of Harry Potter. Now I'm only doing about 2 hours a day of LR, but for a week or two I forced myself to do 4 hours of LR every night, with about 2 extra hours of TV. After that period, my speaking ability (which is still very bad) got much, much better, and I was actually able to express some thoughts. But I still have a terrible time trying to read a Harry Potter book in Spanish--when I add in the audio, it's instantly much, much easier. I think it might be because the audio goes faster, so the sentence fits together as meaning in my mind, whereas with just the text I'm stumbling over sounding out all the unfamiliar spellings. And yeah there are also a lot of words I understand in speach but have no idea how to spell. Maybe once I get to the next LR stage this will become easier. Edited by glidefloss on 24 January 2015 at 7:24am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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