32000 words of intensive reading - an accidental experiment

[Axon]

I know lots of us like stories and experiments that end up with actual progress, so I thought I'd share this one.

My girlfriend has been studying English for a long time. Her native language is Chinese, and she's never been to any English-speaking country besides a short internship in India. She and I have been living together for several months now, and we speak English most of the time. Her spoken English is definitely fluent. Since she wants to get a good score on the IELTS, she's been working on improving her reading skills for a while now.

In September she started intensively reading New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic articles - copying the text into Word and going through it word by word and sentence by sentence until she understood. I usually explained words or grammar in English, and she'd often check a Chinese-English dictionary to back up what I said. Each article was about 1000 words on average. The topics were usually on American/world politics, though some were general interest or lifestyle oriented.

She didn't keep to a regular schedule with this study, because as you can imagine it's hard work to read NYT editorials intensively. For a while it seemed like each article was more challenging than the last. But after about article 20, I noticed that she was getting a lot better at understanding the general structure and flow of these texts. At about article 30, just a few days ago, she seemed to hit a sort of critical mass. Today was article 32, hence the title.

Starting a few days ago she's been reading English almost all day. Today she told me that now it's much easier for her to read the articles, and when we go through them she's able to quickly untangle long sentences with tricky clauses all over the place. She can hold more of the sentences in her short-term memory while she uses context for additional information: that is, she's well past reading word-by-word. Her pronunciation and reading aloud have improved as well, since she always discusses the tough sentences with me verbally.

This sustained intensive reading has also had a small but noticeable effect on her spoken vocabulary. Without any prompting she's been slipping more literary words into everyday conversation, and of course it's a major confidence booster for her to be able to do that. And it's a wonderful thing for me to see as well!

So there's a little case study for you. Reading 10000 words intensively might not seem to make much difference, but push past it and eventually you'll start to make leaps and bounds in reading ability - even in completely unrelated languages with very different writing styles.

[Xenops]

In September she started intensively reading New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic articles - copying the text into Word and going through it word by word and sentence by sentence until she understood. I usually explained words or grammar in English, and she'd often check a Chinese-English dictionary to back up what I said. Each article was about 1000 words on average. The topics were usually on American/world politics, though some were general interest or lifestyle oriented.

I find this really encouraging: when I think of "studying languages", I don't think of Anki or Pimsleur: I think of piles of books and notebooks stacked on a dusty desk, pouring myself over a text with a dictionary at hand. Even though I might accomplish a lot with Anki, the feeling of pride and accomplishment and wonder at the marvel of studying a language seems most present when I intensively study a text.

[Steve]

My experience with ancient Greek is similar. I read the Septuagint (about 1000 pages with about 500 words per page) a few times over the course of a couple of years. (Wow! I had never counted numbers of words until I picked it up to do a rough count just now.) This partially explains the progress I've been making.

I'll refer to various topics (verb forms, conjunctions, noun cases) and vocabulary as "things".

I found that intensive reading helps me to learn new things. I found that extensive reading helps me to internalize and automate those things. A combination of intensive and extensive reading yielded good results for me. Using a parallel text was helpful in that it could often save me the time and effort of looking things up. The challenge is trying to balance the amount of intensive versus extensive. Too much extensive and I do not learn new things and improve. Too much intensive and I do not internalize or automate the new things.

What seems to work for me is to adapt the ratio of intensive to extensive based on my mood. If I am enjoying reading, I'll stay in extensive mode. If I start getting frustrated that not knowing certain things is slowing me down, I'll go into intensive mode and work on those things. This combination of quantity and quality seems to work. In some genres, I'm running at 10% intensive and 90% extensive. In other genres, it might be 50% and 50%. Going to older Greek among the philosophers, it feels more like 90% and 10%.

[zenmonkey]

Congrats to her!!

What you describe makes sense, it seems like a lot of work and requires a lot of consistency but it also sounds like she was doing this exercise at the right time!

[s_allard]

Congrats to the young woman who got through 32000 words of intensive reading. That will certainly provide great results. But what I found quite intriguing was the role of what I would call an in-house tutor. Someone who can give explanations and to experiment with, plus of course just the sheer fact of speaking the language with a native every day. I doubt that I would achieve similar good results if I read 32000 words in my target language just with myself and a dictionary.

[smallwhite]

Congrats to your girlfriend. I see both on this forum and in my own studies, that doing something not previously done (and probably should have been done) yields great results.

I'm curious what in those articles she is finding difficult when she is already fluent, since most of us find reading easier than speaking. Can you show us a couple of examples of sentences that she is finding relatively hard?

[Axon]

Thanks everybody! I've passed along your congratulations.

I'm curious what in those articles she is finding difficult when she is already fluent, since most of us find reading easier than speaking. Can you show us a couple of examples of sentences that she is finding relatively hard?

Sure, stuff like this:

The group that ate the most carbs had an 80 percent higher chance of developing mild cognitive impairment—a pit stop on the way to dementia—than those who ate the smallest amount of carbs.

One thing that definitely used to trip her up was parenthetical references or embedded clauses. I took this sentence from a random article but it's pretty representative. Back in September, I don't think she would have known the vocab carbs, cognitive impairment, pit stop, dementia. Structurally, she had a hard time figuring out what "a pit stop on the way to dementia" was referring to or modifying.

In political articles there are monsters of sentences like this one:

In a speech at Georgetown University, she laid out the U.S. military maneuvers over the past several months—including a nuclear-powered submarine heading to South Korea, the movement of three aircraft carriers to the Western Pacific, and the Army testing out “mobilization centers” for deploying troops and training soldiers to fight in tunnels like those beneath North Korea—that inform this worry.

Look how long that middle part is! And less obvious but equally confusing: what are the mobilization centers for? Deploying troops and training soldiers. To do what? Fight in tunnels. Tunnels like what? Like the tunnels beneath North Korea. What does "inform a worry" really mean, and how can it be used? I'm a native speaker with a degree in a writing-heavy subject and I'm positive I've never used that phrase before.

Remember, she's able to fluently speak English for everyday purposes, but she's never taken a class taught in English and this is the first time she's really attacked high-level writing. Plus, I think people learning languages with different scripts - especially Chinese - tend to be more comfortable with speaking than reading newspapers. I know my Russian reading is still in the "chore" stage, let alone my Chinese. Hers is a pretty unusual situation on this forum for sure, but I think the lesson of hard work and its rewards is sound.

[smallwhite]

Sure, stuff like this:

Thank you, Axon. You explained it very well. And your gf's doing really well to be reading stuff like that!

[Cainntear]

I think there's a lot to be said for consciously parsing complex sentences and underlining and/or highlighting individual phrasal units.
Even just marking "higher" and "than" makes the sentence structure much more comprehensible. Anything between "higher" and "than" is likely to be one single noun phrase, and if you can "collapse" that in your head and just replace it with a sort of "thing" concept, the sentence is simpler and clearer.
Also, because it occurs between "higher" and "than", the little clarifying note must be clarifying that noun phrase, so you can isolate the phrase and look at it ignoring everything up to and including "higher" as well as everything starting from "than" when trying to understand it.

[s_allard]

...
In political articles there are monsters of sentences like this one:

In a speech at Georgetown University, she laid out the U.S. military maneuvers over the past several months—including a nuclear-powered submarine heading to South Korea, the movement of three aircraft carriers to the Western Pacific, and the Army testing out “mobilization centers” for deploying troops and training soldiers to fight in tunnels like those beneath North Korea—that inform this worry.

Look how long that middle part is! And less obvious but equally confusing: what are the mobilization centers for? Deploying troops and training soldiers. To do what? Fight in tunnels. Tunnels like what? Like the tunnels beneath North Korea. What does "inform a worry" really mean, and how can it be used? I'm a native speaker with a degree in a writing-heavy subject and I'm positive I've never used that phrase before.

Remember, she's able to fluently speak English for everyday purposes, but she's never taken a class taught in English and this is the first time she's really attacked high-level writing. Plus, I think people learning languages with different scripts - especially Chinese - tend to be more comfortable with speaking than reading newspapers. I know my Russian reading is still in the "chore" stage, let alone my Chinese. Hers is a pretty unusual situation on this forum for sure, but I think the lesson of hard work and its rewards is sound.

That quote is some pretty heavy-duty English. I'd be curious to see what the intearctive process was to arrive at a complete understanding of that sentence. This is where the role of the tutor/boyfriend is so important. How does one explain to a learner what "laid out" and that "inform this worry".

The takeaway for us language learners is something that I've always highly recommended: work diligently and systematically with a good tutor. Imagine a schedule of meeting twice a week to read aloud and comment a page or two of an article. Progress would be guaranteed.