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What is Your Reading Process? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 24 29 August 2009 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was given the following advice at high school and I've generally found it to be effective and rewarding.
First up, you've made a good choice by starting with a novel. There's a lot of repetition of words in a novel, and usually the majority of the vocabulary you need will be covered fairly well in the first 100-150 pages. This means that as you start the book you'll be going fairly slow, because you'll need to look up lots of words as you go. However, you'll be reading fairly fast when it comes to the end of the book, as you'll know most of the words by then. When you're reading shorter texts, you don't have this advantage. (Short stories might seem like a good place to start, but you'll find that by the end of the story you're still looking up lots of words, and because you're still concentrating on language rather than plot, you kind of miss the ending.) Here's the general guidelines: 1) When you come across a new word, you don't always need to stop immediately to look it up. If you read on -- perhaps to the end of the sentence, perhaps to the end of the paragraph, perhaps further -- you might get a feeling for what it means, you might realise it's not important, or you might even find out that your not supposed to know what it means. Maybe they're just about to explain the word to you, or maybe it was even invented for the book. 2) As you read, you'll start to get a feel for what's just background description, and what's useful to the plot. It probably doesn't matter whether he found the gun under the bed, the sofa or the chest of drawers, so things like that don't need looked up. 3) Even unimportant words should be looked up sometimes. There comes a point where you've seen the same word 3, 4, 5 times and it starts to irritate you that you don't know it. Once you get that feeling, look it up. It's bound to come up again -- either the author just likes the word, or it's particularly suited to the topic or setting of the book -- and so you'll probably learn it properly through the course of reading. Now I've not read that many novels in that many languages, but the few times I've done this, I started out ignoring this advice, and would immediately look up every word I didn't know. I would realise by about the end of the first chapter how long and slow the process was, and how bored I was getting. When this happens, I remind myself of the above advice and adjust. 14 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 10 of 24 29 August 2009 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find the easiest reading in L2 is the news because it is relatively familiar material, you may already have read it in L1, there are lots of familiar situations, events, people and places, and for me, it is always interesting. I read it online with a pop-up L2 > L1 dictionary.
The next easiest is history, for many of the same reasons as for news. Third is geography, and information about countries, cities, peoples, etc. Fourth is science because many of the words in related languages are very similar, and again, it is often familiar material and concepts. However, in all of the above, I try to read in L2 what I would normally be reading in L1. For example, if I need to find out about country X or some specific science topic, etc., I try to do it in L2 if it is available. And for most popular L2s, it is available, often on Wikipedia or similar sites. Fifth are books, and specifically novels. I am not a big reader of novels in L1 but I find that a very interesting "page-turner" novel is easier to stick with in L2 than history, science etc. Ideally you should read novels by native L2 writers. But that is usually more difficult than novels translated into L2. The language tends to be a bit less flowery and simpler. By far the easiest novel I have read so far is "Levkas Man" by Hammond Innes ("De Man van Levkas" in Dutch). I don't really know why it is so much easier than similar novels from other authors, but it is. I am now looking for further Dutch translations of Hammond Innes novels and hope they are just as easy, but so far I have not gotten any. So you might consider his English books or translations for your L2 readings. Wikipedia has complete list at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_Innes Edited by tommus on 29 August 2009 at 7:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lancemanion Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5573 days ago 150 posts - 166 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 11 of 24 29 August 2009 at 8:29pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree. Especially if the culture is quite different, the L1 material won't translate well, or be as useful as original L2 material. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6719 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 12 of 24 30 August 2009 at 4:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks everyone, for the tips! Everyone has offered very good advice!
Based on what I've read from your input, I'll ditch the translator except for circumstances where I have looked up any necessary words and I still have absolutely no idea what is going on. Fingers crossed it all continues to go well! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 13 of 24 30 August 2009 at 9:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes. For me, it sometimes is a bit difficult to stop the urge to look up words (mostly because I believe I have to know them all at once), but after five or ten pages I can suppress it. If I can't it's a good sign that it is too far above my current level and I should find an easier one for now.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 14 of 24 30 August 2009 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think you should read everything in the same way. It is useful to be able to thunder through a text, leaving unknown words and mysterious constructions aside because you only want to get the gist of the text, and it is equally useful sometimes to take your time to understand something properly.
But of course you can do a combination of these two: when you want to get to the bottom of a text you can of course look through a paragraph at a time and look up the problematic words and expressions, and then read it once again in normal tempo. It is a blessing to be able to feel how it is to understand such a text, even if it only happens at the second pass. One trick more: when I look up words I mostly just note down the offending word without the translation. It takes less time, and normally I can remember it (otherwise I haven't been attentive enough), and I don't fear that I will lose it again because my informal notes will normally be used as the basis of a word list. Just underlining or colouring the word wouldn't be as effective, because writing it down by hand is part of the memorization process. Edited by Iversen on 30 August 2009 at 5:45pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| snig Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5891 days ago 71 posts - 79 votes Studies: Italian | Message 15 of 24 30 August 2009 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with Bao,if you need to look up every other word then you have the wrong book,when you come to a word you don't understand then I would think it would be clear if looking up that word would help your study of the language.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 24 30 August 2009 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like Cainntear's three guidelines, and Iversen provides good info as usual.
Both the level of the text and one's language affect the ability to "guess" the meaning. My Spanish has been dormant for very long, and after listening-reading two of Dan Brown's works I've had a lot of "Hey, that's that word again"-experiences. Extremely good advice from both of you. Professor Arguelles once wrote: I generally try to look up only "known unknowns," i.e., words that I have seen often enough to recognize them ("there's that damn word again--what the hell does it mean?") or even better actually remember them and say to myself, not necessarily while reading, but simply while ruminating, "I know that I don't know what X means--it seems like it means such and such, but I wonder..." When I finally look it up, I never forget it, whereas if I use a dictionary too early, I find myself looking up the same word repeatedly. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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