Lianne wrote:Day 306:
24 minutes Duolingo
45 minutes intensive reading, Miss Peregrine et les enfants particuliers, 1 page
Every time I do intensive reading, I'm reminded why I don't do intensive reading. ... I spent 45 minutes looking up words and phrases from a single page and writing them down. And I got a headache. ... this process does not feel worth it. In 45 minutes, how many pages could I have read extensively? How many words could I have been exposed to, even if I didn't completely understand them at the time?
Or am I just doing intensive reading wrong? Am I too intensive?
Hmmm, 45 minutes on
one page! Are you sure you are ready to be reading this book yet? Perhaps it may be better to read it in parallel with the English version at this stage. You may get more out of it this way. At this stage, intensive reading will be painful... but words repeat and phrases repeat within a book and the more you read, the easier it gets. The pain lessens- if that's any consolation.
It's hard to say because, well, learning a language is not always "with ease". I suffered with my first book in Haitian Creole "Woben Lakwa/Robinson Crusoe". There was so much nautical vocabulary I'd never seen before. The first third was a slog. I questioned myself repeatedly on why I decided to read it. It got better in the middle third. The final third, I was cooking with gas! I like to read with a pdf version of a book because I hate marking up a real book. Marking up a pdf is so much easier and neater, plus I can easily review the words I've marked with definitions after I've finished reading in a pdf. "Woben Lakwa" was a physical book, so I made notes on my tablet. There are ready made parallel texts available of several public domain books in French at
Farkas translations.
Reading with a parallel text allows the reader to more easily and rapidly verify guesses and/or meaning. You can
make your own relatively quickly once you've done a few and get used to the process. I find it makes reading in the beginning less frustrating and more fulfilling. You can enlarge the text on a tablet and swipe right to see L1. I used it sparingly in the beginning of reading but when I needed it, I was glad I'd made it. Emk calls this process "cheating". There's no shame in it at all. It's an aid, like a dictionary is an aid, to learning. As you read more you need the parallel text less and less. Like riding a bike, you get to the point where you don't need the training wheels anymore. Then you get to the point where you may only have to look up just a few words per page!
Still, even without looking everything up or verifying, you will learn. It just takes a little longer. This is the "not so fun" stage of language-learning but it gets easier the more you read. Just have faith and trust that it will get better
. Keep up the good work, Lianne. You are, indeed, progressing.