How many books in your target language do you read on average per year?

[einzelne]

Do comic books/ graphic novels count?

I would rather not include them. Not because I'm against them (far from it) but they cannot be compared with regular books in terms of word density per page.

[kanewai]

I looked back over the past six years, and get an average of four each for Spanish and Italian, five for French, and four for English. I marked down "11 to 20." It varies immensely, though. This year I'll read over twenty books, other years under ten.

[Lemus]

This poll made me feel much better about myself. Maybe I'm just looking at too many logs but sometimes it feels like I'm the only one not finishing a book a week.

[smallwhite]

I have fairly clear goals when I learn a language so I only read (or do) the minimum to reach that goal. The goal is usually roughly "B2", which is achieved fastest by reading+SRS, so I read as little as is enough to extract 4000-8000 words into SRS. Which means I read very little and finish few books, equivalent to 1-10 books/year.

[dedalus66]

Never enough!

But seriously, I tend to find sourcing material one of the most difficult things as I really do not enjoy reading on a computer screen.

[Le Baron]

Never enough!

But seriously, I tend to find sourcing material one of the most difficult things as I really do not enjoy reading on a computer screen.

Yes, I'm not a great fan of reading from a screen. The e-ink screens are better, but I actually like paper books. Finding books in FIGS languages in the shops (lots of second-hand examples) is not difficult here. Finding stuff in e.g. Swahili is not so easy, so it has to be the screen stuff and that hinders me a little.

I don't use an e-reader extensively, so I wonder what people think about the ease of looking up words with built-in dictionaries. I tend to feel that it makes things too easy at times. The necessity of building tolerance to skip over a few unknown things for the sake of reading momentum seems to me better than looking up every word and also forces you to work things out. Of course I'm not daft enough to think it can all be divined from context, but there has to be a little bit of puzzling whilst reading, rather than having the dictionary quickly solve the problem. Which to me is like like looking things up on Google when your memory fails, rather than giving your memory a workout.

[DaveAgain]

I don't use an e-reader extensively, so I wonder what people think about the ease of looking up words with built-in dictionaries. I tend to feel that it makes things too easy at times. The necessity of building tolerance to skip over a few unknown things for the sake of reading momentum seems to me better than looking up every word and also forces you to work things out. Of course I'm not daft enough to think it can all be divined from context, but there has to be a little bit of puzzling whilst reading, rather than having the dictionary quickly solve the problem. Which to me is like like looking things up on Google when your memory fails, rather than giving your memory a workout.

That's a good point.

At the moment I'm reading an eBook, and then listening to the same chapter as an audiobook. I sometimes understand things better with the audiobook than I did with the dictionary-supported eBook.

[Le Baron]

At the moment I'm reading an eBook, and then listening to the same chapter as an audiobook. I sometimes understand things better with the audiobook than I did with the dictionary-supported eBook.

Yes, it no doubt confirms the practise of reading the transcripts of audio material. I was listening to some audio about half a year ago (fairly repeatedly in cycles) and kept coming across a sentence someone said which just sounded garbled and I missed it every time. That obstacle wrecked the entire dialogue for me. Then I read the transcript, just once, and saw that it was 'deberia haber hecho eso'. The problem disappeared.

[iguanamon]

Yes, I'm not a great fan of reading from a screen. The e-ink screens are better, but I actually like paper books. Finding books in FIGS languages in the shops (lots of second-hand examples) is not difficult here. Finding stuff in e.g. Swahili is not so easy, so it has to be the screen stuff and that hinders me a little.

There is an easy way to turn web content into e-books that can be read on an e-ink reader. I know because I have learned some minority languages and less commonly studied languages: Catalan; Ladino'Djudeo-espanyol; Haitian Creole and Lesser Antilles French Creole. So, how can you do it?
1) Find content- web articles; pdf's; etc on a laptop or desktop computer
2) Copy and paste to a word processor or highlight and save a selection in html by right clicking and choosing save to html.
3) print a selection to pdf by highlighting it and clicking "print". Hopefully you have a pdf printer installed.
4) download the free, open source,and easy to use Calibre e-reader software to create epub or mobi content.
5) import pdf; html files to calibre.
6) click convert to epub or mobi format- whichever is appropriate
7) connect ereader to computer
8) have calibre send the epub or mobi file to your e-reader.
9) Read.

It sounds complicated and there's a lot of steps, but it only takes me a couple of minutes to create my own ebooks from any language I can print or copy and paste. There is a rub, unless you have mad programming skills, you aren't going to be able to get a dictionary to work with your files. I have no idea how to make an e-reader recognize a converted dictionary and have it link to it in an ebook I've created for a minority language. Still, you can highlight words and add notes to them on kindle's e-ink reader.

I don't use an e-reader extensively, so I wonder what people think about the ease of looking up words with built-in dictionaries. I tend to feel that it makes things too easy at times. The necessity of building tolerance to skip over a few unknown things for the sake of reading momentum seems to me better than looking up every word and also forces you to work things out. Of course I'm not daft enough to think it can all be divined from context, but there has to be a little bit of puzzling whilst reading, rather than having the dictionary quickly solve the problem. Which to me is like like looking things up on Google when your memory fails, rather than giving your memory a workout.

Yes, figuring things out on my own helps me to really learn the language. I only look up a word to confirm a guess or when I can't figure it out through context. I also make my own parallel texts from human-translated novels or web content when starting out learning and use the L1 to confirm my guesses or get an answer. I might also look it up to further enlighten myself and to see other usage. In e-ink, for Spanish and Portuguese, I use monolingual pre-installed dictionaries. When I make ebooks of Catalan; Ladino or Haitian Creole content, I don't have that easy option.

Obviously, the fewer words to look up, the better. So, I wouldn't start out reading "The Hobbit" in Swahili. But I would make a parallel text of Deutsche Welle's "Learning By Ear" Swahilli radio plays. I'd download the audio. I'd read (making every effort to figure things out on my own), then listen, then listen and read, then read again and switch it up however I want- over 50 hours of content in not too complicated language. Scroll down the page for the links to the translated content in French, Swahili, Hausa, Amharic and Portuguese. After doing this for several plays, you can probably start to read more complex language... gradually.

Personally, I'd read these pages on a tablet in pdf for better note-taking and ease of use for parallel text (fill screen with L2 and scroll over for L1 when needed; ability to use a bilingual dictionary also in pdf format- physically scrolling for a word's definition). You can eliminate blue light from the tablet's display to lower eye-strain. Adobe pdf has an option for "night mode" which I use to read.

I understand people's reluctance to read on a screen... but there are ways to make reading on screens less stressful and enjoyable without spending a bunch of money. I'm going to have to write a post on it. What I can say is that I no longer own a printer. I don't buy physical books very often. Reading on e-ink is almost the same as paper as to eye strain- the brighter the ambient light the better.

[Le Baron]

Yes I have Calibre, though I don't use it so much now. I don't have a Kindle (I won't support anything to do with Jeff Bezos, REDACTED BY ADMIN). with many e-book readers they recognise simple txt files as ebooks. FB Reader and EbookReader recognise them and display them as they would epub files, and they're very small and simple to compile. So I have made them from various material.

This is not so easy with current literature, recently released books I mean. I don't want to pirate those and diddle the author. Books from 30-40 years ago, well... Enough has been extracted from those cash-cows.

With paper books I get the ability to slow it down and focus on one thing. I used to take a tablet with me on the plane/train 'because it can hold a lot of books'. But really who is going to need 'a lot of books' for a holiday? Not me at any rate. Better to savour the one or two books I'm reading where I can lie down and just hold that little pile of bound paper. If I really finish it too quickly, it's an excuse to walk into town, find a bookshop and buy a book. I'm a bit done with perma-ultra-efficiency.