brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5444 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 49 of 61 01 April 2010 at 12:23am | IP Logged |
Iversen wrote:
Try to look up some of the unknown key words before you actually try to read a paragraph,
- that's better than looking up words in while you are in the middle of the text. And if you have had to interrupt
your reading in the middle of somewhere to consult your dictionary then read the passage again without using it.
Getting through a text in this way takes slightly longer, but you will experience the all-important 'flow' in your
reading.
The purpose of extensive reading should not primarily be to learn new words, but to learn to understand the
meaning on the fly, based on the words you already know, and to get a feeling for the proper way to use those
words. |
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That makes sense. I'll try that with my copy of Die Zeit tomorrow.
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datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5585 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French
| Message 50 of 61 01 April 2010 at 12:46am | IP Logged |
brian91 wrote:
Iversen wrote:
Try to look up some of the unknown key words before you actually try to read a paragraph,
- that's better than looking up words in while you are in the middle of the text. And if you have had to interrupt
your reading in the middle of somewhere to consult your dictionary then read the passage again without using it.
Getting through a text in this way takes slightly longer, but you will experience the all-important 'flow' in your
reading.
The purpose of extensive reading should not primarily be to learn new words, but to learn to understand the
meaning on the fly, based on the words you already know, and to get a feeling for the proper way to use those
words. |
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That makes sense. I'll try that with my copy of Die Zeit tomorrow. |
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I have a couple "Die Zeit" papers too :D They are excellent, and I read with a dictionary too.
I read it aloud, as fast as I can with good pronounciation, and then go back and try to understand it. Don't look up very word, some of them you can understand the meaning without even looking for it. :D
Reading aloud has really helped me with audio comprehension. :)
-Jordan
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brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5444 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 51 of 61 01 April 2010 at 12:55am | IP Logged |
Die Zeit is great as it's so huge for only around €6. My favourite section is Reisen, of course. :D
I should really be reading aloud too. Will try this tomorrow also.
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noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5340 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean
| Message 52 of 61 14 April 2010 at 2:10pm | IP Logged |
Honestly, even though I passed the C2 level of the French DALF and German ZOP exams, I don't think I can ever read French or German novels as well/fluently as I do in my native language(s), nor understand all the nuances associated with the languages and their cultures. On the other hand, I don't think I understand every single word that's written in English nor Chinese too...
Edited by noriyuki_nomura on 14 April 2010 at 2:11pm
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Zeitgeist21 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5645 days ago 156 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French
| Message 53 of 61 15 April 2010 at 10:57am | IP Logged |
Slightly off topic but an awesome idea for working on reading; read at a bus/tram stop! I was reading the other day at a tram stop in Zürich. I found a couple of words difficult per article, and asked the person next to me what they meant. As I was in a city tram stop, the person next to me changed every 3-4 mins so I could continue asking whoever was there without getting on their nerves ^^ This is also meant I had to practice chatting as well, and I found it so useful that I didn't get on my tram and just stayed there for an hour and a half :D
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JS-1 Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5983 days ago 144 posts - 166 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), German, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic (Written)
| Message 54 of 61 18 April 2010 at 7:25pm | IP Logged |
WillH wrote:
Slightly off topic but an awesome idea for working on reading; read at a
bus/tram stop! I was reading the other day at a tram stop in Zürich. I found a couple of
words difficult per article, and asked the person next to me what they meant. As I was in
a city tram stop, the person next to me changed every 3-4 mins so I could continue asking
whoever was there without getting on their nerves ^^ This is also meant I had to practice
chatting as well, and I found it so useful that I didn't get on my tram and just stayed
there for an hour and a half :D |
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That's brilliant!
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Kounotori Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5344 days ago 136 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin
| Message 55 of 61 18 April 2010 at 8:17pm | IP Logged |
So far I can only read English with the same kind of fluency as my native Finnish. I've read a lot in Japanese, though, and it's gotten much more pleasant ever since I tackled all the 教育漢字 (i.e. the 1006 Chinese characters Japanese schoolchildren learn in primary school) and 300 or so of the other more frequently used characters. There's still a long way to go (you have to know a little over 3000 characters to be able to read literature without a problem), but I've reached a point where I can read Japanese characters relatively fast (and Cyrillic, too).
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Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian
| Message 56 of 61 19 April 2010 at 11:50pm | IP Logged |
I can read English and Spanish without reflecting on which language I am reading in, and that is as far as I need to come.
Reading through this post, I had a flash back to my days as a student. I was starting on my thesis about the American author William Dean Howells, and suddenly got the bright idea, that the topic would be "The influence of Italian literature on the work of Howells". Now, what I had not though about, before deciding on the theme, was that this entailed reading as much of the Italian literature that he had mentioned somewhere in his novels/literary critic as possible , and see whether I could trace any influence. That literature was written in the 18th and first part of the 19th century, practically none of it was translated , and my background in Italian was 4000 pages of crime novels + a two weeks holiday in Cattolica. To say that I had a grasp of classical Italian would be a lie, and to add to the picture some of that literature was in Venetian dialect, and I only had a pocket dictionary.
I started out with Goldoni's "La putta onorata", and realized after about two pages that my pocket dictionary was of absolutely no use.I therefore threw myself into it, and just read. After a while I discovered that the title which sounded dearing, and something of an oxymoron, was neither, because "putta" in Venetian dialect of the time just means young girl, and not what everyone thought it meant...
The moral: You can learn anything if you just take the book and go on reading even without a dictionary, as long as you have a basic understanding of the language.
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