26 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4329 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German
| Message 25 of 26 14 August 2014 at 11:49am | IP Logged |
montmorency wrote:
There are at least two regular posters here who have reported excellent results with
extensive reading like that.
But I still wonder whether extensive reading in that mode is so effective if the ratio of
unknown words to known ones is too high. I could not define what "too high" would mean
exactly, but when the act of looking up words became so frequent that it became an
irritant.
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I guess what "irritant" and "too high" means is subjective and would vary from person to person.
For what it's worth I used Anki to get enough words that I could start reading after about six months of German study (I continued to use Anki for another six months before giving it up).
The first books I read took ages to work through - 10 pages per day max - and were more translation than reading. However, I quickly learnt a lot of words and after a few thousand pages was basically reading not translating.
I would have had an easier time if I had picked even simpler children's books to begin with, but Harry Potter was about as "low" as I wanted to start with.
Even after a year and a half of reading (+16000 pages) there is still plenty of fiction that I find too difficult to read comfortably, so I still need to find books that fit my level and I can read without too many unknown words. It's not clear why some authors seem so much harder than others - for me Murakami is easy, Ian M Banks difficult - presumably a lot of it has to do with pockets of vocabulary that I do or don't possess.
What I find great about ebooks is that they allow you to comfortably tackle books that would be too irritating to read in paper form - so your choice of reading is greatly expand in ebook format.
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| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6471 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English
| Message 26 of 26 14 August 2014 at 12:27pm | IP Logged |
montmorency wrote:
Well yes, if you really want or need to read something enough, you will tackle it and
probably finish it with a good pop-up dictionary.
There are at least two regular posters here who have reported excellent results with
extensive reading like that.
But I still wonder whether extensive reading in that mode is so effective if the ratio of
unknown words to known ones is too high. I could not define what "too high" would mean
exactly, but when the act of looking up words became so frequent that it became an
irritant.
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If you have a basic knowledge of the language (one hundred most frequent words), you can start reading with a good pop-up dictionary.It depends on the language and how much related is your L2 to your L1. Extensive reading works for me.
If you are English and you are learning Mandarin, I don't know.
1 person has voted this message useful
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