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Effectiveness of readers | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 9 of 25 21 September 2012 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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The English-based ones are all available for free. Most of the Russian-based ones can be bought as e-books.
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| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 10 of 25 21 September 2012 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I used the "Easy Reader" series of graded readers (in German), way back when,
when I'd got to the stage of getting fed up of reading language text books, and wanted to read "proper books", and wasn't quite ready for them. I found they filled a gap, and I happened to like their appearance, rather old- fashioned by modern standards, but I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy. :-) There was no audio (or none that I was aware of), and maybe there isn't to this day. I'd still recommend them. This was before the internet, as we now know it, and all the resources that we now trake for granted. I suppose they seem a little pricey for what they are, but you have to realise that quite a lot of work has gone into them. I think "real books" would put off a lot of people if introduced at too early a stage, whereas "Easy Readers" encouraged me, and made me want to get hold of more, the opposite of putting me off. They have a place in my heart, somewhere between my last teddy bear, and my first girl friend. :-) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 11 of 25 22 September 2012 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with Montmorency that the graded readers can fill up a gap and I like them for
it. (Even though it is usually said a horse is what comes between girl's last doll and first boyfriend :-D ) If the question is "are the graded readers useful"? Than my answer is yes. If you're asking "are they overpriced"? My answer is the same. Fortunately, I can borrow a lot of graded readers in libraries (for English, they are in municipal libraries, for French in the Institut Francais, for Spanish in Cervantes, for German in Goethe, etc) but I live in quite a large city with many libraries, as you see, and not everyone is so lucky in that. So, try to have a look in your nearest libraries (you might be even surprised by their supply) and if there is nothing for you, either buy them or skip them (they are useful but far from necessary) or get them on the internet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eebeejay Newbie Canada Joined 4479 days ago 34 posts - 43 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Latin, French | Message 12 of 25 22 September 2012 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know how good your local library is but depending on the language you're looking for you might be able to find good resources there. Mine has a reasonable selection of graded readers and kids books in various levels in a variety of languages. But even if yours doesn't some might be available through inter-library loan or in your provincial library online collection.
You could also try looking for used readers on alibris or abebooks. Might be a little cheaper for you. Edited by eebeejay on 22 September 2012 at 11:39pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| WillFuqua Newbie United States willfuqua.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4687 days ago 11 posts - 17 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 13 of 25 23 September 2012 at 9:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know how many of you have an iPad, but there's a great app on there called
"iReader for Study". It works best with epub books and after you tell it what language the book is in and what to translate into, you can then have the ereader app tell you what individual words mean or even whole paragraphs. I've been getting children's and young adult books to read on it and love it so far. Also, I've gotten lucky at large used bookstores that have language areas. I can buy a decent amount of books made for learning a language at a low level for 1-3 dollars a piece. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| pinutzz Diglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 4514 days ago 6 posts - 16 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2 Studies: Spanish, Cantonese | Message 14 of 25 23 September 2012 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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The usefullness (and with that the justification of the price) of a reader depends a lot on the learning method you use. I rely solely on readers at the very beginning of learning a language and I think they are well worth their money.
Why do I use readers? I personally hate language courses because studying grammar doesn't help me to speak. On the contrary - it inhibits me. After all: Then I know how to do it right without making mistakes in a classroom setting - my brain is just too slow to do it in a real life situation. And even if I could speak: Quite often I would not understand the response of the person I am speaking to, simply because I wouldn't know enough words. So now when I am starting to learn a new language I try to get as much COMPREHENSIBLE input as possible and readers are the perfect way of doing this. I go through a very long silent period where the only things I am doing are reading (with looking up words I don't know) and listening / shadowing until I am at about C1 at both. Up to that point: No grammar books, no language course, no attempts at speaking (only with myself or my cats ^_^) and usually also no telling other people (a forum somehow seems ok, though) about the fact that I am learning the language at all. After that I will slowly start becoming active. Of course I could just start learning a language from scratch by only reading novels and going through the excruciating phase of either understanding 0 for a long time or looking up every word and understand everything in which case I would manage to "read" one page or so per day. With this method I would for sure give up learning languages for good after about one week of trying. And that is were readers come in handy. They have about 50-100 pages each and the chapters are usually quite short. That means that every time I finish either a chapter or even better a whole book(let) I feel a great sense of achievement. Honing my listening skills also gets a lot easier with audio that has a transcript of which I already understand every single word. Then I can really start paying attention to what I am hearing. This especially helps me with romance languages where the words in a sentence are usually a lot less separated than in English or German - in Russian and Finnish I have this problem a lot less. I start out with readers that have simplified grammar and word choice at the A1 level and as soon as I manage to read one page with only five or six words I have to look up I switch to the next level - so I never get to the point where I can go through a reader quickly. This means that one of those 50 page booklets with audio will keep me busy for about 10 hours. They cost ca. 10 Euros (incl. audio) here in Germany and I think 1 Euro per hour of learning is not too bad. When I am at about B1 I start with easy texts meant for native speakers (often short stories which are also used in school - usually after about 3 or 4 years of classes... - and can be bought with vocabulary annotations) and translate every single word I don't know - which is about 5-10 per page. At about B2 I switch to longer parallel texts and don't look up vocabulary any more but just keep reading and look what the translation into my native language says. When I don't need to "cheat" this way anymore I switch to long novels which at that point I should be able to read without mayor hiccups. If you directly go to 500 page novels the danger is that you get very used to the style of one author. You think you understand everything. You go to your next novel and suddenly you understand only half of whats going on. In order to get an evenly distributed vocabulary it is advisable to change your reading material every 100 pages or so - in my opinion readers have just the right length for that. To give you an example of the readers I use and the comprehension progression that is possible: I started learning Spanish about 8 weeks ago and I don't know any other romance language - only German and English. So far I have read and listened to (without using any other study material): Tu primer beso - Suavemente (Mónica Hagedorn, Castro-Peláez) (40 pages, graded Reader A1, vocab help in German, no audio) Easy Spanish Reader (William Tardy) (240 pages, level: from total beginner to low intermediate, vocab help in English) Amnesia (Jose Luis Ocasar Ariza) (60 pages, graded reader, nivel 1 elemental, vocab help in English, no audio) Lola Lago - Vacaciones al Sol (Lourdes Miquel Lopez, Neus Sans) (48 pages, graded reader A1, vocab help in Spanish with audio) El misterio de la estudiante (compact Lernkrimi) (64 pages, graded reader A2, German vocab help, with audio) Sepúlveda - Historia de una gaviota y del gato que le enseño a volar (ca. 120 pages, first text wich is aimed at native speakers, yay!, with vocab help in German, no audio but a movie about the book can be found on youtube and the book costs less than 3 dollars!) Jorge Bucay - Cuentos para pensar (first book meant for adult native speakers!, 184 pages, parallel text = I bought two books, one in Spanish, one in German and the audio CD) Luis Sepúlveda - Diario de un killer sentimental (short story, meant for native speakers, used a version with German vocab help and audio, 144 pages) I will now switch to the parallel texts from Penguin (New, 1, 2) and once I don't need to cheat all the time I will just buy novels in Spanish and keep reading. This kind of progression in mere 8 weeks is in my opinion hard to achieve without readers or at least extremely frustrating. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6942 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 15 of 25 25 September 2012 at 6:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I've always had the impression that the golden age of readers is in the past, which is why I usually buy them in used bookstores.
Some of the characteristics I've encountered in the old readers are (a) a complete glossary at the end of the reader, with the listed word meanings reflecting the texts in it, (b) often based on or containing literary works, (c) annotations and/or footnotes on each page, (d) not too short, sometimes quite long, so you get decent to good value for the money, (e) notes, exercises, and sometimes lists of idioms or other important vocabulary for each chapter, (f) obvious care put into producing them - many of these readers were used in college courses. Not every old reader will have all of these features, but it's not infrequent to meet several of them in one place. What you don't get, of course, is recordings. Edited by frenkeld on 25 September 2012 at 6:33pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4491 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 25 25 September 2012 at 6:52am | IP Logged | ||
Maybe it is because the golden age of reading, as in a book, is past. As you note the publishers of old took a great care in production as they had to in order to produce graded readers. But virtually all the learning methods were via books and teachers pushed reading ability, probably at the expense of speaking. Now the opposite is the case for self-learning programs. And just the extensive availability of native reading material on the internet likely reduces greatly the demand for readers, no matter the learners may more often fail when tackling native material too early. A series of graded readers would be the natural extension to best current audio courses like Assimil/FSI/Linguaphone/etc. And if they too had audio all the better and would lend themselves to the methods preferred by many here like shadowing and L-R. I guess in a way Using Spanish by Assimil is a type of such reader (the only of the Using series I have seen). While as Iversen notes you can use machine translations for just about anything, it lacks the semi-frequency based progression of a series of readers and of course the glossary, notes, etc. frenkeld mentions, i.e. what makes it comprehensible input. And the same would apply to jumping into an L2 version of Harry Potter or whatever after Assimil/FSI/Linguaphone/etc. IMO, the same also applies to non-graded type of old Latin Gallic War type of "readers" with huge vocabulary dumps in the footnotes on every page. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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