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Extensive vs intensive reading | ||
Tags: Reading | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5258 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes  Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 1 of 11 05 July 2012 at 12:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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For one who can't understand more than 7% - 8% percent of the text, which method would you recommend?
When reading extensivly, I find that I'm more often thinking about other things, rather than being concentrated in the text, which is for most of the part a meaningless string of characters and words to me anyway. Eventually I just lose interest pretending I understand something. On the other hand, when reading intensively, I spend no less than 10 minutes per sentence and ultimately lose interest faster. So which method would you recommend me? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4680 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 2 of 11 05 July 2012 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Either you forgot a 0 twice in your percentages, or I'd suggest you go back to textbooks and learn more vocabulary before you continue reading.
With 7-8% (I suppose you'll correct saying 70-80% because I don't know how you'd measure otherwise...), you can of course not read extensively (you understand nothing), and reading intensively proves to be so frustrating that you'll quit in a few days. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5132 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 11 05 July 2012 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | ||
If your percentages are correct, that's WAY too low a number. It wouldn't make any difference what you did. Have you tried looking for easier reading material? Graded readers, maybe? children's books? R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5258 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 4 of 11 05 July 2012 at 12:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sadly, the percentages are correct. ._.
It's just that I got enough of learning grammar and now I want to read some real language. I don't know if what I'm reading is a graded reader(and dont know whats grader reader either), but Ill look into it Why am I reading so early is because wordlists and various vocab learning sites dont seem to work for me in the long run, so now Im betting on immersion(if this can be called so) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5132 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 5 of 11 05 July 2012 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | ||
When you say you "got enough of learning grammar", do you mean that you feel you've learned most of the major grammar points you think is necessary, or that you're tired of studying only grammar? I'm going to guess that you've not gone through enough grammar, if you're only getting 7-8 percent of what you're reading, but I could be wrong. What type of courses are you using or have you used? Most courses out there will gradually introduce more difficult grammar concepts as you progress, as well as introduce more difficult reading in graded steps (unless we're talking about a Pimsleur of Michel Thomas audio-only course). R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 6 of 11 05 July 2012 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | ||
With 7% - 8% percent extensive reading would be out of the question, and it would even be a bad text for intensive study. Find another text. At 7o% - 8o% percent extensive reading would be difficult and probably also irritating, but intensive study would be both possible and fruitful, maybe even pleasureable depending on the content. Actually you could go even lower, but if you have to look up more than half the words you should find something easier to study. Using a bilingual edition - which you could make yourself using a machine translation - extensive reading could also be feasible at 7o% - 8o% percent, but I would still prefer doing an intensive study first and return to the small part of the text I had studied to test whether I now could understand it without help. For a text to be truly comprehensible without the use of a dictionary you need even higher percentages. Unless of course the text itself explained all the problematic words in comprehensible terms. By the way: all those percentages are purely subjective assessments. You could in principle understand all words in a text and still not have the faintest idea about the intended meaning. Edited by Iversen on 05 July 2012 at 2:15pm 5 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 11 05 July 2012 at 6:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is it about your Finnish? Continue just a little more, and soon you'll be able to work out the compounds' meaning from the individual components. Also, make sure you understand the morphological changes such as consonant gradation and the plural. When you're a beginner in Finnish, half the time you think you don't know the word you just can't recognize the form.
If it's your Norwegian or German, find a list of cognates with English (or one another). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5258 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 8 of 11 05 July 2012 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's about Finnish. Give any random word, be it adjective, verb or noun, declined or conjugated in any random form and in most of the cases I'll be able to tell the dictionary form. The problem is, that I dont know the meaning of the word itself.
And I dont want to stop reading because I know little vocab - I'm reading in an attempt to expand my vocab, hardly anything else helps. I guess I'll have to go back to ymmärrä suomea. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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