The best way to read in another language

0:00Today I want to give you my tips on powering up your reading capability. Don't try too hard to understand. In other words, accept the fact that as you are progressing in the language, there are a lot of times when you are not going to understand. And I was talking to my brother who my gave an iPad to and was working on link. And he says, I always forget. I studied a sentence and I keep on forgetting. And I thought to myself, yeah, you're not supposed to try to totally understand and remember that sentence. You're supposed to just allow the language to kind of enter your brain and let the brain get used to it. And so my brother said, it's a bit like mowing a lawn. If the grass is high, then you have to set the lawn more at a higher level in order to have an easier first pass through mowing the lawn. The second time through, you can set the blades a little lower. If you try to force yourself to push that lawn more into very high grass,

1:03you're not going to get there. It's got a very hard work and you won't you won't be able to get the job done, depending on how long the grass is. It's the same with the content that I learned from, listen to, read. First time I go through, I don't fully understand that I may listen the second time. I may move on to other lessons. Then I come back and even on something as basic as the many stories, I always pick up something the second, third, fourth time through. You also want to sort of come across these vocabulary items, words, expressions, phrases in different contexts. It's also been proven that more than the sort of frequency, the sort of repetition of the same items, which is sometimes the case of people who study lists, blocks, flashcards, whatever, what's more important is to encounter the same words in a variety of different contexts. And that way it turns out the brain is able to better retain them.

2:04So several passes over the same content, be prepared not to understand, just keep consuming the language. It used to be that reading meant reading a print book. But nowadays we have e-books, we have digital texts where we can access online dictionaries and text to speech. These are tools that I use at an early stage in learning a language in order to make it easier to access material of interest to me. I've always preferred to read things that are a little difficult, but that I'm interested in with the help of these other benefits of reading online, as opposed to reading easy readers simplified fiction, which I'm not very interested in. I mentioned that I had trouble reading the books in my library because there were too many unknown words. How do you acquire words? We need words in order to access meaningful content, even in terms of studying grammar books, where there are examples of different grammar patterns. If you don't know the words, you can't make much sense of the grammar examples that they're showing you.

3:06So link is extremely efficient at helping you acquire words. Every time you see a word, you don't know you look it up. It goes into your personal database. The next time that word shows up, it's changed color because you'll have forgotten that you ever saw the word. And so you're able to follow the progression of your words and phrases as they gradually become better and better known. So the database that you create is kind of like an external hard drive where you park all of the words as you come across them. And gradually they are brought back to your initially passable vocabulary when you're reading and eventually some of them into your active vocabulary as you start to use them. Also, this issue of intensive reading versus extensive reading. Intensive reading, you're looking up every word, you're going over the sentence a few times, extensive reading, you're just reading. And the same applies to listening. Now, I have found that at the beginning stage for me, it's not possible to just, you know, go straight into extensive reading, not looking anything up, just listening.

4:07I can't do it. I have to have a certain level of vocabulary, a certain level of familiarity to be able to move to more extensive reading and listening no longer in sense mode. Perhaps certainly not repeating when I'm reading or listening. I may be I don't even have to read what I listen to. I can read over here and listen over here and all the while I'm building up my capability in the language. So the further we are along in the language, the more we have a tendency to not repeat, to not go back and it's better for us not to repeat. In terms of the percentage that I can deal with, 15% 15 to 20% is an acceptable level of unknown worries for me. And so I develop a strategy, which says at an early stage, I want material as five minutes long. I want maybe 15 to 20% on the words. I want that to be about 20 words that I'm trying to learn, 20, 25 words that I've never seen before. And that is kind of my strategy and it's an optimum position.

5:07It's a sweet spot in terms of increasing my vocabulary so that I can eventually reach the stage where I can read a paper book, because I will have enough vocabulary so that I won't be guessing at every second or third word, but at the same time, it won't be only three four words per page that are unknown to me, because then I'm not increasing my vocabulary. In simple terms, I would divide my strategy or approach to listening reading and the ordering which I do them into three stages. So the absolute beginner stage, call it A1 to A2 stage, then the intermediate stage, which is B1 really, because once you're at B2, you're kind of launched. And then once I'm at B2 or beyond, what is my strategy? At the very beginning, I look at a sentence of finish, as you will see, I see words. If these words are written in the Latin alphabet or an alphabet that I'm familiar with, I can kind of pronounce it. So therefore, as a beginner, I would first of all go at this text in sentence view,

6:09so one sentence at a time. And then I would listen to that sentence, and then I would try to read that sentence. Make a now say, so the order would be listen first, then read. But very soon, again, dealing with one sentence at a time, I would try to force myself to read first and then listen, because we can get lazy if I listen to it, then I'm not trying hard enough to vocalize those sounds. So I would typically say, if I'm doing the many stories, maybe after many story two or three, I would try to make an attempt at pronouncing the sentence in finish, because I can read the Latin alphabet, then I would listen to it, and then I would say it again. The next stage, and by the way, this idea of having a reading and listening strategy that depends on the stage you are in the language, I think is a good thing to try to do. If we look now at the intermediate stage, obviously it's easier to listen first.

7:11I get up in the morning, the easiest thing for me to do is to listen to something. So I'll go grab a podcast, let's say, in Farsi. While I'm listening to that, there is quite a bit there that I didn't understand, or that I'm kind of familiar with the words, but I'm not entirely sure what they mean. So that then triggers my curiosity to go and read that transcript. So in that situation where I'm B one and a half in Persian, I tend to listen, and then later on I'll go in and read. It is useful to try to narrow the range of subject matter that you're dealing with. And I tend to do this if I follow a podcast on politics, in say Arabic or on economics, or if I can narrow the range of subject matter that I'm dealing with, even if I'm dealing with different, like I'm interleaving in the sense that I'm dealing with different podcast episodes, or different sources of content. But it's in a somewhat narrower range of subject matter. I'll have a higher probability of meeting the same vocabulary over and over again.

8:14I have then some familiarity with the subject. I have that prior knowledge. If I move away, for example, from a political podcast to say literature or something on an unrelated subject having to do with dating or something, then it's going to be much more difficult. So stay within the same sort of general range of content, and that way you're going to achieve that goal of more familiar vocabulary and some sense of prior knowledge. Reading on paper versus reading on a digital device. Part of getting to where you can read a book on paper, which I said at the outset was my goal in language learning. Part of that is to be able to quickly access the meaning of words. And in some cases where the writing system is not familiar to us or not, it's called transparent one to one, then also the ability to hear the word. So we can use digital reading to access text that would otherwise be too difficult for us.

9:15We can look up words. We can hear the word. We can isolate a sentence as we do at link. We can listen to the sentence. We can look up words and then review those words. So there's many different ways that we can use digital devices as a sort of a gateway towards eventually being able to read on paper, which to me is kind of the holy grail. However, then the subject comes up. Should we continue reading on our iPhone's iPads, computer screens, or should we read a book on paper? Also Kindle, for example, which is digital reading. And apparently there's a lot of research that shows reading on a digital device tends to create a more superficial or shallow approach to reading. We're not as focused. We're attracted or distracted by other things. And we start reading in a more shallow manner. And this tends to influence how we read on paper. So there are some negatives to the sort of digital reading,

10:18even though it is a very good way to get to the point where you can read a paper book. But regardless of how you do it, regardless of why you're interested in it, the key thing is to concentrate, to give yourself a chance, whether it be reading a book from cover to cover, or committing yourself to spending an hour reading in a foreign language online, without distractions. It's that willingness to commit to the process, and that will create the habit that will ensure that you continue doing that. And if you continue with massive concentrated reading, hopefully also combined with listening, you will notice a significant improvement in your language ability, because it drives that core capability in your brain, that ability to anticipate the ability to project the next word, which we need in order to be able to communicate in the language. It doesn't take away from the fact that you still need to speak in order to become good at speaking, but you first have to have that base of the language within you.

11:20And that's where massive concentrated reading can be so important. Thank you for listening. Bye.