I always question this decision - should I be re-reading a text until I hit 100% comprehension, or should I move on as soon as I finish? I am curious what other people in the community have tried and what has worked.
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A similar question:
https://forum.readlang.com/t/what-of-words-do-you-save
I think it is better to choose which words/grammar structures you want to learn and also choose part of the unknown material as “unnecessarily advanced for me, I’m leaving it for later”.
I am myself a perfectionist who tends to want to master everything 100% before moving on. However, I try to keep in mind that most learning takes place while exposing myself to uncomfortable challenges:
- reading texts with slightly higher percentage of unknown words and actually looking them up,
- tackling math problems that require hard thinking rather than those I can solve more-or-less casually,
- sight-reading piano music that requires lots of concentration rather than first-grade pieces,
- lifting somewhat heavier weight just once rather than very light weight forty times, …
Just as there is a sweet spot for forgetting while using spaced repetition, and it’s not revising things so often that you remember 100% of the answers (the ideal forgetting index is said to be 6-14%), there seems to be a sweet spot between rigour and speed in all other areas of learning.
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When I first started using Readlang a couple years back, I would read much more slowly, and look up anything I was even slightly unsure about. Over time, I stopped reading so deeply, and now I favor reading as much as I can, as quickly as I can. I find that this helps me to reinforce grammar and sentence patterns more naturally than picking apart the sentences. In the past couple of months, I’ve finished several books this way, and I’ve felt a greater sense of accomplishment than I did when reading more slowly and in depth.
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I read mostly deeply and listen widely. I can cover so much more ground more quickly listening to podcasts (often audio captured from YouTube) than any other method. And podcasts are language “dense.”
I benefit from reading anything, but I have to work with the personality I have, which does not lend itself to long reads. I can try in vain or go with what I’ve got.
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I’m the same as you, Vern. Listening is the place to gain wide exposure. I’ve tried reading widely and quickly but it doesn’t stick and it just makes me associate reading with feeling lost. And now I know that preserving your motivation and natural curiousity and passion is the most important thing. But if I read a book I’m intrinsically interested in deeply and really understand a paragraph before moving on, and really understand a book before moving on to the next, it gives me a feeling of accomplishment, that my time is paying off, and then I feel fine listening to a podcast just for the music of the language and catching a word here and there. The two modes balance each other out nicely but the reading deeply is the foundation for it.
It seems to depend so much on your mental and emotional constitution. It’s good to have as many different vectors of engagement as possible, but you need to build a strong foundation around the node that is most natural to you. It comes down to reflecting on what’s working and what preserves and strengthens your curiosity and engagement.
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People like Steve Kaufman often talk of Extensive reading, reading for the simple pleasure of it, and Intensive reading, working on a text to understand as much as possible. I think most experts would say that both have their place, and rather than one being better than another, they are complementary. My own preference, however, is for extensive reading. And I should say that I read almost exclusively fiction.
For me, language learning is a hobby, and I’d rather acquire vocabulary, by coming across words repeatedly in different texts, than actively trying to learn them. And I have rarher an aversion to repeating materials.
A long time ago, I took the strange decision, that as I already knew how to read in English, from then on I would only read books in French, starting with Maigret, as I knew the character from an excellent BBC series. After a while I quickly got used to the idea of reading without understanding everything. If I was reading a page-turner like The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo, I really didn’t want to be stopping every time I didn’t understand a word. For me it would completely spoil the pleasure of reading.
And when I knew enough Spanish, I did the same, devouring the novels of Isabel Allende, one after the other.
Of course, it depends on the author - Dumas and Allende are relatively easy to read. With some authors, I have to work a bit harder.
Occasionally I do something a bit more intensive, for example comparing the French and Spanish versions of The Little Prince. Or of course when I’m at a lower stage with a language.
What I find I really like reading in foreign languages are detective stories, and occasionally thrillers. I get so engrossed in the story, that I forget I’m trying to learn a language. My current favourite are the Montalbano books by Andrea Camilleri, not so much in Italian, as there’s quite a lot of Sicilian dialect, but in translations to other Romance languages. And I’ve definitely read many more detective books in foreign languages than in my native English.
For languages I’m less familiar with, I read a lot of stories for learners from YouTube, no doubt mainly AI produced. They may not be the greatest literature, but I have found that after doing this in Italian for three months, my passive vocabulary increased considerably. Now I’m finding the same with Dutch and German.
A final word, I know that language learning is a long process, and I’m in no particular hurry.
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I don’t have nearly the amount of time I would like to read/listen/study/whatever as I would like, so I am a bit forced to get it where I can. I follow the Nachrichtenleicht.de Instagram account, and it posts news stories mostly every day. Some stories are tougher than others, so I get some good exposure to new words. I think they are a good blend of challenge and also just reading for enjoyment/keeping up with current events.
I think you just have to find what works best for your schedule/workload and what you actually enjoy. It is a journey, not a destination, so “optimizing” everything might end up doing more harm than good.
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Widely for me. There’s no end of books to read, might as well get through them!
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