Reading around the World
How do you read in a language you are learning? Slowly, word-by-word, with a dictionary in hand?
How do you read in your first language? Probably none of those ways.
If reading is an integral part of language learning, then reading naturally becomes an activity, or sometimes even a drill, to complete in order to learn the language. The goal becomes learning every word in the reading. And the meaning of a text is the sum of all the words, right?
For a long time my belief, or theory, about reading in a target language was:
- it should be slow
- I should look up every word I don’t know
- I should keep pronunciation in mind
- I should try to learn the language while reading.
But this is not at all how I read in English. When I read in English I see words that I haven’t mastered, but when I do I just keep forging ahead provided I still feel I’m getting the gist. Now and then I might reread a paragraph if I get distracted and lose focus, but my reading strategy for as long as I can remember has been “just keep going” and I’ll probably be able to make sense of it. So for years I prioritized fluency, flow, and the big picture while reading English, but prioritized word definitions and pronunciation while reading in a target language — whether it was Spanish or any other languages I’ve worked on.
To put it another way, when I read in English, I read to make sense. But whenever I was reading in my target language, I was reading in order to learn the language. Reading extensively in English has certainly given me all sorts of insights into my native language, but I don’t pick up books in English with the thought, “If I read this book, I bet I will get better at English”. I pick up books in English because I’m interested and want to make sense of them. I mainly read non-fiction, but for folks who read lots of fiction they may also read for the experience of reading. They may not look at a novel as something to be made sense of, as much as something to experience. And what is that experience? It’s certainly not looking up every other word in a dictionary.
A decade after I’d started studying Spanish, my ideas about reading in a target language were finally challenged. I was living in Peru, serving in the US Peace Corps and had found a manual from the Peruvian Ministry of Education related to their alternative education program — this was my career field and where my work was focused in Peru, so I began reading it to better understand how this type of education was organized in Peru (and also I’m a huge nerd who can’t say no to a boring non-fiction book). Before I knew it I was reading the manual with the fluency normally reserved for English. Something had clicked for me and instead of stopping myself for every uncertain word I was powering through provided I was getting the gist. I was focused on making sense. Instead of translating, I was just reading.
But what I’ve finally learned while studying Russian recently is that I can read fluently in my target language long before I hit the decade mark. In Peru I was reading a text created by Spanish speakers for Spanish speakers, which I can barely scratch the surface of as a beginner in a language. But I can find simplified texts that tell a story or describe a thing or an idea without making it a laborious process of dictionary diving. I just needed to find texts with the right vocabulary size and linguistic complexity for my language experience. After a year of Duolingo and YouTube grammar videos I realized that the correct “level” for me was still the absolute simplest texts I could find. I had purchased Rosetta Stone a while back and despite barely doing any lessons in it I found they had a lengthy list of readings, beginning from very simple ones that were only a few sentences. I searched the internet and websites with short texts in Russian designed for beginners and found even more. Unsurprisingly I still had a range of experiences with these texts. Sometimes I could read the text once and understand it. Other times it took multiple readings. And of course sometimes I could barely understand or I couldn’t understand at all. But instead of trying to turn each of these experiences into the maximum learning opportunity by looking up all the words to try to understand it, I chose not to look up more than a word or two and simply accept that some texts I didn’t understand. Then I’d go looking for texts that I could understand.
But even though I wasn’t trying to “study” every text, I noticed that the more I read texts I understood, the better I understood more challenging texts too. Not only did I see a natural progression in my abilities to read more challenging texts I also saw that I was able to improve my comprehension if I returned to difficult texts after a few weeks or months.
So what I’m realizing is that reading in my target language doesn’t have to be all that different from reading in my first language. It is about making sense of the text. My updated theory of reading in a target language goes more like this:
- Focus on making sense
- Read about topics I’m interested in and already know something about
- Only stop to look up words if I’m completely lost
- If I’m completely lost, consider setting aside the text and finding something easier
Thinking in this way is still a work in progress. As a beginner, I had to read what I could find. I didn’t have the luxury of reading what I was most interested in, because there simply weren’t enough texts or readings out there which were made for beginners and focused on my unique interests. But I’ll leave off with one example of how I found a way to read in my interests as a somewhat beginner in Russian.
One long term goal I have for learning Russian is to read news in Russian. News articles, though, are way beyond my beginner abilities. But I’m also a hockey fan, so I searched for Russian sports websites. And while most sports websites were still too complex (even if they weren’t as challenging as politics news coverage) I eventually found a site that worked. The advantage of this website is that it is not in-depth journalism. They do have longer articles, but more importantly for me they also have a steady stream of short, formulaic articles covering the North American hockey league I follow (the NHL). The articles are three-paragraph news blurbs that follow a simple pattern: a paragraph listing the teams who played in a game, the city, arena and the final score; a paragraph listing who scored and often highlighting the contributions of any Russian players in the game; and a final paragraph mentioning who the teams will play next. While this formulaic approach could be quickly boring and repetitive in my native language it offers me lots of support for making sense of the article in my target language. I know what to expect from each section, so I can work through challenging vocabulary or sentence structure. The articles also use repetitive vocabulary so over time I’ve been able to identify important hockey vocabulary and look up those key terms. But also very importantly I’m reading about things I want to know. I want to know who won games and who scored, so in the end my primary focus is on making sense, not language learning. I guess one of the few things that can distract me from trying to learn a language is finding out whether or not my team won. But for now this is the paradox I’m hanging on to: when I focus less on trying to learn a language while reading, I actually learn the most.
