32000 words of intensive reading - an accidental experiment

[tommus]

Now I am going to look more closely at just what these 55 per day are.

I had a look at what new words showed up on the last day of the 1,000 days. There were 42 new ones on that particular day. Immediately, a reason appears why, after 1,000 days of news, there are a lot of new words showing up. Like the Germans, the Dutch like to join smaller words together to make bigger, compound words. So there are about 18 of those whose components probably showed up in the previous 999 days. The remaining 24 are mostly legitimate new words. I guess it is somewhat surprising that some of these words had not appeared in the news in almost three years. I suppose it just means that new words are going to be popping up forever in your L2 reading, and even in your L1.

Here are the Dutch words:

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aanzwengelde
carnavalskrakers
carnavalsliedje
concierge
cursusjaar
eicelontwikkeling
eierstok
eierstokweefsel
eileider
eregasten
geschiedenisboekjes
gij
hedde
herschrijven
ijshockeysters
immigrantendiscours
islamdiscours
keigezellig
lijstrekker
meezitten
migrantenpartijen
olleke
onderwijsassistent
onderwijsvernieuwing
onpraktisch
oudgedienden
platter
poes
pony
porseleinen
prachtnummer
remi
schunnigheid
solleke
stemvee
stofwolken
strijdperk
terugplaatst
vaseline
vruchtbaarheidsonderzoek
witwast
zwaaiende

And the English translations using DeepL Translator:

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swollen
carnival crackers
carnival song
concierge
course year
egg development
ovary
ovarian tissue
oviduct
honored guests
history books
thou
hedge
rewrite
hockey players
immigrant discourse
Islam discourse
cozy
slicer
last
migrant groups
oil spill
assistant teacher
educational innovation
impractical
veterans
flatter
cat
fringe
porcelains
wonderful number
remi
obscenity
solo
voting cattle
dust clouds
arena
refitted
vaseline
fertility study
whitewash
waving

[tarvos]

The translation of "gij" is only partially accurate and that of "hedde" is wrong. "Hedde gij" is Brabantian dialect and means "Heb jij".

Gij is thou in biblical texts, but is in common vernacular use in Belgium and in the south and is used both for jij AND u. U is actually the oblique form and also uw is the possessive.

Hedde is a local variation of "Hebt gij" and has been watered down to "hedde".

"Hedde gij 'n nieuwe waoge gekocht?" sounds like good old Brabantian vernacular.

[Tristano]

Waoge is car?

[tarvos]

Waoge = wagen = car. You could say auto (pronounced oto) as well.

Or you could say "bak" even.

Brabant slang is fun.

[mcthulhu]

"I personally find that the small amount of time I did explicit parsing of English taught me enough about the process that I can now do it in my head, and can "see" divisions in text without marking them, both in English and in languages that I'm studying." - Cainntear, congratulations, but the suggestion was not intended for you. There's a reason why students do not continue to do sentence diagramming for the rest of their lives. Crutches are meant to be temporary.

There are several automated sentence diagramming tools available for English; possibly they might be of some use for the situation described by the OP. See http://sendraw.ucf.edu/, and http://www.nactem.ac.uk/enju/demo.html, among others. Enju is pretty good, and easy to use, though I was taught the traditional Reed-Kellogg diagrams in school. The Stanford parser at http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/ is better known and also easy to use; English is one of several languages supported. There are many different approaches to parsing, and many other tools out there for generating parse trees. See http://www.nltk.org/book/ch08.html for some information on approaching this with NLTK.

No automated solution is going to be 100 percent accurate, of course, but in general a parse tree or sentence diagram could certainly help intermediate language learners to visualize syntactical structures.

[Axon]

It worked!

From February onward she continued to read English articles daily in preparation for the IELTS exam. Many were intensive, but as it became easier for her to read, she just read the articles and discussed them with me. She guesses she read about eighty in total. Almost all ended up being from The Atlantic because of its mix of politics, culture, and history stories. She actively tried to find articles that were on unfamiliar topics to improve her general knowledge and preparedness for whatever the examiners might throw at her.

In addition, she bought some IELTS test prep books and worked through them extremely diligently. There's a lot of people on this forum who study hard, but I've gotta say her study endurance is something else. Each book has four sample tests (each test has three reading sections) and she did four books. These sample articles were also about 1000 words each.

For those keeping track at home, that's at least 80,000 words of Atlantic/Economist/New York Times plus 48,000 words of test prep articles. And, of course, there were many more hours of reading university admissions websites, speaking English with me, and preparing for the listening, writing, and speaking sections. Synergy was in full effect here.

She took the IELTS exam on April 14. IELTS scores range from 0 (did not attempt the test) to 9 (educated and articulate user of English, strong C2 equivalent).

Her overall score was 7.5 (C1 equivalent). Her reading score? 8.5.

In a space of roughly three and a half months, she went from a good reader of English to an outstanding reader of English. It took consistent and dedicated effort. And it paid off.