Cavesa wrote:-a part of that attitude is a good learning curve, created by the appropriate reading choices. The author basically gives us a very clear overview on how to progress from the easiest step to the hardest one. I love that. Something similar is actually what I recommend to other people interested in extensive reading all the time (actually, I'd love to know what the author of the video thinks about the Latin Harry Potter and the Hobbit, whether he'd recommend them, and to which phase would he add them. I guess the easy non bilingual reads. Unless he is against translated modern works, that is possible).
Alongside Harry Potter and the Hobbit, don't forget about Winnie Ille Pu!
I read an article a few years back about a study on reading and the effect on vocabulary acquisition, in which the author emphasized that students who were allowed to read books of their own choice made much more progress than students who were given set readings. The choices of successful students in the study were most often what would often be called "trashy", such as teen novels and romance novels, but the difference came because the students were motivated to read more. In the author's own reflections he said that reading is "the best" way to learn a language, that simple translated books in series were effective, and that for himself when he was learning a new language he had read loads of Star Trek novels translated into that language. I want to say that the article was by Stephen Krashen, but I can't remember for sure.
For my part, a great tool would be a book series that is easy enough to read but interesting enough to both read many books in the series and to re-read some or all of them several times. Personally, I still prefer if it is a native original and not a translation, because cultural understanding is a large part of my motivation for language learning. This series is the Holy Grail of language learning if it also has audiobooks of many of the books. For learning French, Le petit Nicolas has met all of my criteria and filled this function for me admirably. Sadly I have yet to find such a series for German or for Hindi, although Tintin in Hindi might fill that role.
