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Can you read with the same fluency...? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5447 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 9 of 61 24 March 2010 at 6:30am | IP Logged |
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I dug into French because I wanted to read <i>Les Misérables</i> in the original. Eventually, I wound up ABD in French literature. I don't recommend this for everybody. That said, when I picked up an anthology of French poetry in the bookstore tonight, it was like stumbling across old friends as I skimmed the sections for Lamartine (the most high strung of the Romantics) and Hugo. Vigny left me cold, however, which is unusual.
While my French is fairly good for reading 19th century French literature, of which I've read entirely too much, it's very different for science fiction. Be it Asimov translations or homegrown French sci-fi, the language is growing and shifting too fast and I don't always tune into the made-up words for imagined future technologies or social phenomena. To get good enough in a language to follow a novel is impressive. But you haven't really made it until you can pick up the local equivalent of Calvin and Hobbes and get the jokes. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 10 of 61 24 March 2010 at 8:22am | IP Logged |
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I can read German at a good enough level to just enjoy the story. I don't know every word on the page, but I also don't need to look them up to know what's happening. The best thing I ever did was to follow the idea of some Japanese students who were studying English by trying to read 1000000 words of English. The idea was that they never used a dictionary while they were reading....they just kept on going. This frees you up from the drudgery of dictionary work, and allows you to get more absorbed in the story (or at least as much of it as you can understand so far).
What I tended to do was to read with a highlighter beside me and highlight 1 or 2 sentences per page (sometimes less on average), and go back later to look them up all at once and make flashcards out of some of them. This let me gain a lot of good vocab without interrupting my reading period. I did word-counts to estimate the number of words per page, and then multiplied that by the number of pages in the book to get an overall estimate of the total word count. By the time you reach 1 million words I guarantee that you will be good at reading that language. For an "easier" language (ie closer to your own) it will happen sooner. In short, it can be said like this: You get good at reading by reading. You get good at dictionary lookups by doing dictionary lookups. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6783 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 61 24 March 2010 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
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I'm getting there. It's my sixth book in Italian and it's up to me if I want to read for enjoyment and go at a pretty good pace or if I want to pay attention to linguistic curiosities I haven't understood yet. I can do both.
At the moment I'm reading a book very closely, with a dictionary in hand and looking up almost everything I don't know. I end up using it 2-3 times per page at most, but on many pages not at all. But I'm making a special effort with this book, typically I just read on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5435 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 12 of 61 24 March 2010 at 11:24am | IP Logged |
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Reading through a text without looking up unknown words is the best method at an intermediate level. You already need a good vocabulary to do this with a 19th century short story or novel, otherwise the author will quickly knock you unconscious. You can learn a lot with this method, but it's not the end of all things. Once you've reached a level where you encounter not more than 3 unknown words per page on average, you won't make much progress anymore. The method still remains useful if you want to get through a lot of material, though.
You can increase the benefits of reading at this level of proficiency if you switch to learning each and every unknown word that crosses your way. Since you don't find that many, it's not as time-consuming as it sounds, and you still increase your vocabulary, which otherwise you wouldn't. There is a misconception that you can always ignore unkown words, because if they are important enough they will appear often. The truth is that the method of ignoring unknown words is quite efficient, to the point that you don't even notice when an unknown word reoccurs. Every language learner knows the strange experience that a word you just learned suddenly seems to appear everywhere. Well, it has always been there but since you ignore unknown words you didn't notice it! Whether a word is useful or not can be judged only after it has been learned. As for fluency with reading, this is not the end of all things either. Once you can read a foreign language at native speed you still might need more energy, i.e. you cannot keep going for several hours without getting exhausted, even though you're comfortable with your reading pace. I can read English and French at the same pace as in my native language and without getting exhausted prematurely. After roughly 20 years of acquaintance everything else would be disappointing. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 14 of 61 24 March 2010 at 3:23pm | IP Logged |
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I probably read more fluently, and in more languages, than I speak. I read Russian newspapers with ease, and literature a little less easily. My spoken Russian is only semi-fluent.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 61 24 March 2010 at 3:27pm | IP Logged |
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I can do extreme speedreading (or skimming) in Danish and English, - such as when I search a specific sentence or construction or information. Then I take right even and uneven pages separately and turn pages at the rate of 1-3 seconds per page, depending on the readability. Even with wellknown languages German, Swedish or French that would take at least twice the time, and more with other languages. But afterwards I don't remember much of the content.
I don't try to calculate my normal average reading speed in different languages, - reading speed is far too dependent on factors like my interest in the content, the time I want to spend, the graphical quality AND my reason for reading a certain text. With my weaker languages I may read slowly simply because I want not only to understand the content, but also to study sentence constructions, idioms and things like that - even in a situation where I skip unknown words. So the relevant test would be to take a text in a number of languages and read a couple of pages in each of them without any intention of learning anything, i.e. just reading for fun. And my hunch is that this would eliminate much of the speed difference. For instance I know that I can read Low German almost as fast as High German, even though it is pretty clear that I am much better at High German. I also have read some pages in an old book with partly prose, partly poetry in Old Occitan some time ago, and at least the prose sections went almost as smoothly as Old French, which in its turn doesn't take much longer to read than Modern French. I just have to skip more words. The things that really can slow you down is when you have to 'solve riddles' in order to understand a text. From the moment you can choose just to ignore a word here and there without loosing the 'red thread' the average reading speed seems to be almost the same (maybe a factor two, give and take, between Greek and English in my case). Edited by Iversen on 24 March 2010 at 3:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5585 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 16 of 61 24 March 2010 at 4:13pm | IP Logged |
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Should I be looking up every word in the story or just read to enjoy it. I can read enough to enjoy the plot and understand characters... but should I look up every word? I want to know all aspects of the language, I just want to be able to pick up a newspaper and read along and stay up to date :) (I can do this pretty well actually, it's little words that trip me up. I need immersion!) :D
Pyx- That's pretty impressive, I hope my German skills will be like that someday, same with Russian. Surprisingly, I can read Italian and Portuguese pretty well, I guess it's the romance relation thing. My speaking is subpar but it's still a lot of fun!! :D 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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