german2k01 wrote:My question is, how long should we aim for the consumption of media through listening and also through speaking before actually picking up a book and start to read it?
At some point, I would also like to enjoy reading books/novels fluently in my target language.
I'll touch on the last sentence above. I can enjoy books in my target languages, but I am not 100%. I think if some say they are, then they are few and that most people just improve over a fairly long period while being essentially functional. They can read better because they can use the language better in all its capacities.
What I'm essentially getting at is that even though we have to read and do all the other direct textual things, because it's L2 learning rather than first language learning, the acquisition of the language as 'use' language is a knack thing rather than a content thing past some point. This is why you get those people who are functioning after only 3-4 months when they can't possibly have learned the mass of necessary vocabulary required to meet native speakers on their level - and that some who might have, somehow still can't put it to use. What they have acquired however, is the knack. That thing when the penny drops and your inhibitions fall and you're actually running rather than endlessly planning how to approach the starting blocks. This is not a 'revelation' borne of doing the right amount of reading or listening, it's a getting into the water act. Most often people prepare forever and a beautiful blueprint of a house, no matter how carefully planned, is not a house; it's just an idea. It's only when you start work on it in reality that the real obstacles manifest themselves.
As far as I'm concerned there are no time measures and plans and page counting worth the name. All this 6000, 10,000, 102 pages-a-day thing is nonsense. If I say anything at all I say that I read maybe 2-3 dozen books in my first three years of learning Dutch (about the same for German, many more in French because I started young), more about that isn't necessary. I didn't count the damn pages or the words, some of them I didn't even finish. This is not like algebra. Planned bursts of study is fine and necessary, but this minute graph plotting thing reaching visible ideal points in time to do things is just so much rubbish. It's something transplanted over from exam preparation mindsets. Quite a few people are doing exam prep work and understandably look for measures (as the exam itself is).
When I took the Dutch exams I didn't even care about the marking system, or the names given to the results or anything. You either fail it or don't. Of course I wanted to pass it, so I just did all the exercises, read a lot (often with text books of selected 'reading material'). I read the short articles in the paper, and most importantly I talked to everyone about anything and everything, since how else is one to prepare for a speaking exam which involves free-form expression? Even then, some of those who failed it still went out to the pub and talked to people in the target language because they'd done all the experience work.
I know you are in the country of your TL and that you want to speak the language. So I urge you to do things like going into the post office and initiating an awkward discussion about how much it will cost to send a package somewhere. Or going to the bakery and asking for something specific. Or to the supermarket and asking where a certain item is. To a man in the street about where a certain street is (even if you know exactly where it is). All of these things persistently every day until the way people respond and the things they say become obvious patterns and you absorb them. Reading books is never going to give you that, not ever even if you read 100,000,000 pages. After understanding the raw basics or finishing a regular course, you can either speak the language or you can't and it's a doing/necessity thing.
