How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

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einzelne
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby einzelne » Sun Jul 17, 2022 5:05 pm

rdearman wrote:I think reading, is brilliant, and I'm not advocating that you don't read, but I would say switch from fiction to non-fiction since the amount of uncommon words will be higher in non-fiction than fiction.


Actually, my experience (and statistical analysis) shows exactly the opposite. It is always fiction books originally written in L2 that bring me the largest amount of new words. This June, I went through 30-40 Assimil lessons, 101 Conversations in Simple Spanish and immediately dived intro reading Hawking in Spanish. The same month, I managed to read two of his books and end up reading a short book on AI originally written in Spanish (Chamanes y robots). No way I would be able to perform the same trick with fiction books.

This is where the comparision between native speakers and L2 doesn't work. When friends ask me for advice, I always tell them not to start with fiction because vocabulary wise it is the most challenging type of reading. (Well, may be books on botany or nature which have lots of detailed descriptions can be compared to fiction in terms of vocabulary density, but other than that, I doubt it)

Btw, generally I don't read that many fiction books and prefer non-fiction.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby einzelne » Sun Jul 17, 2022 5:14 pm

rdearman wrote:[But spend some time with a dictionary in the other languages, or word of the day or whatever.


Yes, this is what happened when I had two languages under my belt. You can comfortably combine expensive activities with some intensive one, like deliberate work on you vocabulary. But, like an average user on this forum, I can only have a couple of hours of free time in a day. So, you already read 1h in English, 30 min in German and have another 30 minutes to spare. What should you do? Read in French or Italian? Or may be trying to review the new words you encountered today and yesterday while reading in English and German? It's not an easy decision, well, at least for me.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby Sprachprofi » Sun Jul 17, 2022 10:08 pm

lichtrausch wrote:
Sprachprofi wrote:Also keep in mind the interesting-things-per-10-pages ratio (my term). Some authors have a really high interesting-things-per-10-pages ratio, e.g. Dan Brown, so much action, so many twists in the story... Whereas you can read even 30 pages of Sartre and still nothing much has happened.

In my view you need X interesting things to happen during your reading session in order to gladly keep reading. If your typical reading session is 30 minutes long and your reading speed in your target language is 3 minutes per page, i.e. you manage to read 10 pages in one go, the interesting-things-per-10-pages ratio tells you that you'll come across at least one and probably more interesting new developments during that time in Dan Brown, whereas reading Sartre you can spend several sessions just dragging yourself through the book until something finally happens. Now, if your reading speed is 1 minute per page, i.e. you manage to read 30 pages in one go, Sartre may start to become more accessible - you stand a chance of having something happen most of the times you pick up the book. For the densest, most boring authors, a high reading speed is essential. Or a love of the way they pick their words - if you find that interesting, and your language level is high enough to appreciate it, that vastly increases the "interesting things per 10 pages" of some classic authors.

Maybe plot twists is the word you're looking for?


Definitely not. Interesting things is just interesting things. Could be a plot twist, but could also be the characters getting involved in a battle everyone knew was coming, or learning some background information, or in nonfiction it could be insights that you don't have yet... or like I said above, in some cases "the way a good author picks their words" also counts as "interesting things". Things that keep up people's interest in the book.

My point is: some authors have these more often than others. Subjectively but also objectively (I don't know anyone who complains that Dan Brown is too boring, while on Sartre opinions are split). So if you know your reading speed and you know the author's style, you can find an appropriate point in your learning when that author will be fun to read. And you can ask for book recommendations that will keep you glued to the target-language book despite having a slow reading speed at first.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby Querneus » Mon Jul 18, 2022 7:42 am

rdearman wrote:This makes me sound like a book bulimic, just gorging and purging. :(

That was quite the image... :D
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby anitarrc » Mon Aug 01, 2022 8:39 am

A different point of view:
At work I have to proofread, improve or correct translations.

So I read mostly:
English
German
Spanish
Dutch
Russian (this is the toughest one, I am not so good at Russian, so ru.wikipedia.org and яндекс переводник are my best friends)
Portuguese
and French

since I also translate into English and Spanish these 2 don't stress me at all.

Swapping 5 Languages a day happens quite often. It takes more to read a whole book.

To keep up with French and Dutch I have decided to read at least one book in either language or some news per month.
Unfortunately for Portuguese my only option here is talk to the cleaning lady or use a whatsapp group. We don't have any Portuguese TV channels here. But that is my next personal challenge.

My grain of salt.. read something totally different from the fields you cover at work. Then it doesn't become stressful and there is a good chance you keep it up.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby Erisnimi » Sun Sep 04, 2022 8:58 am

I'm not good at organising things. I just try to keep languages active, using whatever method. When it comes to books, I try to stick to one book on paper and one book on audio each at a time. My three languages that call for the kind of activation I speak of, and that I can comfortably read books in, would be German, Swedish and French. Of these, I am most comfortable listening to audiobooks in German, so I try to listen to one now and then. That's for me more than enough to keep the language going. I try to read a book in French every now and then, and I mostly neglect Swedish. It comes down to interest.

Most of the time I don't pick individual books because they are in a language I want to concentrate on. It's more that I have more choice because I know a few different languages. But in the back of my mind I'm trying to keep a balance.

When I read articles or follow the news online, I sometimes push myself towards a language I have been neglecting.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby lingua » Sun Sep 04, 2022 4:35 pm

anitarrc wrote:Unfortunately for Portuguese my only option here is talk to the cleaning lady or use a whatsapp group. We don't have any Portuguese TV channels here. But that is my next personal challenge.

Try rtp.pt

I'm currently only reading in two languages (Portugal and Italian) though I'm planning to start up German again. I usually have three books going at the same time. One on the kindle for nighttime reading, one on the iPad for treadmill reading and one on the Mac for reading/recording. I have a habit of taking my time at the beginning of the book but when I get to around the 70% mark I tend to want to finish it so I'll sit down with whatever device and complete it in one go.

I read virtually every day with the Kindle, most days with the iPad (sometimes I prefer to walk outside rather than on the treadmill) and more sporadically on the Mac since my recording habit isn't super ingrained.

Edit: I wanted to add that on the iPad and Mac I use both the Kindle app and the Kobo app. I've been able to get several books from Kobo that weren't available on Amazon.
Last edited by lingua on Mon Sep 05, 2022 1:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby lusan » Sun Sep 04, 2022 9:50 pm

After struggle with this problem, I set up as:

For fiction only:
French/Italian: Alternate as 1 book or 300-400 pages.
English: 40 min/day. A non-fiction book at the time: The history of the Greek by Duran.
Spanish: None but eventually I will begin reading in Spanish too. I think I will read again Latin-American Literature. Another round of Llosa and Marquez coming.

Of course, I read the news in F/I/E

I don't like non-fiction books. Too easy or I have no much taste for them at this time.

I love very long books: Currently I am reading Guerra et Pace in Italian. How the heck!? Well, I divided it in 400 pages parts. I am alternating these parts with Le Proces of Franz Kafka. There I go! Not so hard to do. I have done already Noir et Rouge in French. Since there are so many books, I prefer to read curated books. I have no time to waste. Life is darn short. I am done with Agatha Christi's type of books. I read for pleasure and personal enrichment not for language learning anymore! C'est la vie!
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby einzelne » Mon Sep 05, 2022 1:13 am

lusan wrote:Since there are so many books, I prefer to read curated books. I have no time to waste. Life is darn short. I am done with Agatha Christi's type of books. I read for pleasure and personal enrichment not for language learning anymore! C'est la vie!


Same, I happy that thanks to pop-dictionaries in e-readers I can reduce reading pulp fiction to a bare minimum. Still, I don't have enough time to read all the essential books I want to read! Life is hard. May be I should simply log out and unplug so I could have more time for concentrated reading...
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby anitarrc » Mon Sep 05, 2022 7:10 am

lingua wrote:Try rtp.pt

I'm currently only reading in two languages (Portugal and Italian) though I'm planning to start up German again. I usually have three books going at the same time. One on the kindle for nighttime reading, one on the iPad for treadmill reading ...


thank you. Is treadmill reading something like this
treadmill reading.jpg


to be honest I wouldn't do it if it would pay my salary.

At the moment, apart from my daily Folha de SP and Aljazeera I only read "la Mano de Fatima" by Ildefonso Falcones. Well maybe a short story in between.
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