Extensive reading and listening. Does it really work?

[rdearman]

I'd have to disagree with the advice to read baby books, or books which only have 5 unknowns per page. If you've more than 5 unknowns per paragragh, then you're going to go really, really slowly but you shouldn't give up on the book. You'll have to look up more words at the start, but the more you read the less you'll know. I personally didn't like reading "See spot run. Spot runs fast. See Spot walk. Spot walks slow." when I was 5 and I don't like those books when I'm 50. I think you should find a book either fiction or non-fiction which interests you. I'd even go so far as to say pick up a novel when you don't know a single word of your TL and start reading it. Try to figure out the words in the first sentence, then look up them up. Repeat.

You'll be able to read a book suprisingly quickly. And don't look up every word, just the ones that help you understand the gist of the subject. In my experiance these tend to be nouns because you'll swiftly learn the verbs. EMK did some research on this with French (you can see fully here) but shows in the table below.

fr.word.coverage.png

You can see to get 95% coverage of the average book & film you need to know only ~2,000 verbs as oposed to ~13,000 nouns. So you'll spend a fair amount of time looking up nouns. Although, you'll get better at figuring them out as you go along.

I think the major criteria has to be interest. If you aren't interested in the book, then just don't do it. Unless you're struggling to find material like in some of the more obscure languages.

[Woodsei]

In my experience, extensive reading, as well as extensive listening, works!! I think extensive reading can be done from the very beginning, too. Graded readers and picture books come to mind. I know that a lot of people disagree with reading baby books, or children's books, and there are two sides to this argument. Sure, there are a lot of baby words, and adults will not necessarily talk like babies (personally I think they're useful, hearing friends speak to their children and understanding what they were saying was an epiphany for me early on). However, for every baby word, there are a bunch that adults use, because they're written in a way that sounds as if the parent is reading to the child. There are also a range of stories that could be equally fun for adults and children alike.

The example you have mentioned above, rdearman, sounds a lot like "decodable books" or "readers" for elementary-age school kids here in the US, meant to teach them how to read phonetic and sight words. Yes, these are graded readers too, but the good thing about graded readers is that they have a wide range. Some are for pronunciation/reading fluency purposes, and some are for comprehension and story. I do agree that children's books are not everyone's cup of tea, and in reality, I don't think any language learner will absolutely limit themselves to 100% graded readers or baby books. It's just one other tool in a language learner's arsenal.

Pictures in picture books and graded readers can do the function of a dictionary much better than the dictionary itself, because it helps you train yourself to bypass translation and glean the meaning from context. A picture can leave all sorts of impressions on you, and these to me are deeper than just a dry dictionary translation (which is definitely very, very useful, but not all the time). I have a set of Japanese graded readers that were meant for language learners, but they were fashioned in picture book-style format (aka extensive reading/Tadoku) and they were created by Tadoku proponents in Japan. These were a breakthrough in my Japanese learning. They also were accompanied by audio files of professional native speakers reading out the story. No dictionary, word lists, translations, nothing. Just Japanese, natural repetition which doesn't sound fake and promotes the flow in the story, picture to supplement comprehension, and wonderful audio. To me this combo is the ideal "graded reader," but unfortunately, there may not be a lot, or any of them, depending on the language learned.

Picture books are similar in this way, but because they're meant for natives, they can be deceptively difficult. I read a lot of picture books online a while back, and for many, the language was not useless, or easy. These were real phrases that you would use conversing, and you learn a LOT of very useful vocabulary. I once read a book about the changing seasons. One doesn't only get vocabulary for weather, which you can find anywhere, but how the seasons morph into each other, which serves as a great descriptive exercise that you can use to go around a specific word you want to use in conversation but don't know or can't remember. That's why I think picture books are wonderful, and they do bridge the gap for more difficult material. Manga or comic books are great alternatives, and there are a variety of age ranges for those, too. Other examples of descriptive pictures to aid in reading can be magazine articles, etc, for adults. You can get really creative with the sources once you give materials that you may otherwise think unhelpful a chance.

Bottom line: I feel picture books and graded readers help you train yourself to pay attention to details, read for flow and context, and be able to handle more advanced works. They make the transition to extensive reading of adult material a lot easier, but you don't need to do them in a linear fashion, and it's always good and useful to keep an interesting mix of both. I do read and listen widely across various subjects ranging from children's to adult material.

Like many mentioned here on the thread, I do extensive listening too, maybe even more so that extensive reading, because it's logistically easier in terms of time/location. Children's shows are amazing. You don't have to watch shows that are about babies saying peco-peco, but shows like Pythagora Switchi (a science experiments-show for Japanese children) will teach you all sorts of useful vocabulary and phrases, and employ the show-and-tell strategy as do picture books, and I think that's very helpful. Cooking shows, travel shows, science shows, and documentaries for adults do the same, and are also probably more interesting to the average adult.

I know this thread is about extensive reading, but I do think extensive reading and listening go hand in hand, and reinforce each other. And you do really need to hear the sounds of the language in order to develop your "inner native voice" in the language as you read silently, without risking messing up your pronunciation. I have been listening from the very start, even before I consciously started learning Japanese.

Regarding the word limit in order to understand a page, early on, I found that very useful, but as my comprehension and my ability to understand from context improved, I found that I don't necessarily have to follow that rule, because I could still get the general idea of what was being discussed or spoken. I think it's good to adapt guidelines as your language level and ability change, and not be too rigid about anything. Low unknowns are great if you're a zero- beginner, but as an intermediate, you may find yourself going too slow or limited for content. That's one of the reasons why I go between children's and adult materials. But then again, I think it mostly depends on the author's language, style, the book's difficulty level, and my own personal level as a language learner.

Concerning the character dilemma for Chinese (and similarly Japanese), I found somewhat of a workaround involving a couple of strategies. First, learn the meanings of the characters early on (similar to Heisig). Second, for readings, either go for something that has furigana, or read a lot of children's literature (not necessarily baby books) as they employ extensive hiragana/katakana and furigana for every kanji. There are actually books for children organized by grade level that introduce the kanji gradually as it's introduced in schools. I don't know if there is something similar to Chinese in terms of school-grade levels, or readings of hanzi, but audiobooks, and mp3 audio for news articles or shows, can bridge the gap left by readings, and you can also use adult material in that way without being necessarily limited to children's books. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I have to yet tackle Chinese.

I love this thread, and especially rdearman's (thank you! ) 1 in 50/1 in 20 intensive and extensive exercise, and that reddit link.

[kujichagulia]

Ditto about rdearman's exercise and the reddit link.

I cannot believe that I'm just now finding this thread. I'm in the same boat as the OP, and I'm sure iguanamon, Serpent, Expugnator, and others will now bash my head in, because they've spent years trying to get me to see everything that was written here.

I keep getting into a rut of looking up everything when reading something, studying the language like a microscope. (And what's worse, I feed a lot of those words into Anki.) I'm in that kind of rut right now, and that's bad because it kills the flow I need to improve my languages. Nothing slows down my progress more, and demotivates me more, than looking up every single word in a text, and then doing Anki input on top of that. But the reason I keep getting into a rut is because of that fear of "leaving words behind," of forgetting words I just learned, or of just not having a clear understanding of what I read.

And then I see this thread and read it, and it has really made me think. Words like "trust," "patience," "let it go," and "move on" seem to prevail here, as does the idea of "everything will work out, and gaps will be filled." This is just what I need at this particular moment, and I thank all of you for your advice and insight. I really need to start every morning with a thorough read of this thread.

[Serpent]

Aww kuji, that's fine You've been seeing it since the summer I think, just struggling to find the balance.

I would like to ask those more experienced extensive readers whether they choose to read passages/paragraphs/chapters/books more than once... or if they did so at one point then stopped?

I'm often tempted to go back to the beginning and reread it now that I understand more, sometimes in order to enjoy the story more now that I know how it ends. I've done this with Agatha Christie once, noting all the clues that I had in the beginning. Also, unless a book is bad I find it comforting to think of how I'll reread it one day, though I've come to accept that I honestly find it more fun to read with a less than 100% comprehension Nowadays, if I genuinely want to understand everything, I just read intensively. I suppose I should learn to be more honest with myself early in a book and note the things that I'll want to reread later

Also, these are almost all paper books I currently have in progress


I read a page or more from each within 24h last Thursday/Friday.

As for children's books, I don't like them either (and they're expensive grrr), but some are very special, like the Moomins, the Letters from Father Christmas written by Tolkien to his kids, and of course many authors are inventive with language so that it's not necessarily beginner material anymore, though eventually it may be too boring for an advanced learner. I'm also liking Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid series, especially the style of the illustrations (I think often the ones in children's books are made to be suitable for discussions with the parent or teacher, the ones here are more to the point and don't really feel like they were added to aid comprehension, though they do help).

I post about most things I read in this thread (and everyone else is free to, if they sign up for an external challenge )

[reineke]

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[PeterMollenburg]

Ditto about rdearman's exercise and the reddit link.

I cannot believe that I'm just now finding this thread. I'm in the same boat as the OP, and I'm sure iguanamon, Serpent, Expugnator, and others will now bash my head in, because they've spent years trying to get me to see everything that was written here.

I keep getting into a rut of looking up everything when reading something, studying the language like a microscope. (And what's worse, I feed a lot of those words into Anki.) I'm in that kind of rut right now, and that's bad because it kills the flow I need to improve my languages. Nothing slows down my progress more, and demotivates me more, than looking up every single word in a text, and then doing Anki input on top of that. But the reason I keep getting into a rut is because of that fear of "leaving words behind," of forgetting words I just learned, or of just not having a clear understanding of what I read.

And then I see this thread and read it, and it has really made me think. Words like "trust," "patience," "let it go," and "move on" seem to prevail here, as does the idea of "everything will work out, and gaps will be filled." This is just what I need at this particular moment, and I thank all of you for your advice and insight. I really need to start every morning with a thorough read of this thread.

I have suffered from the same issue, and have gotten past it with a combination (rotation) of activities. The best advice I can give is to give yourself time in which you can look up everything intensively (an intensive half hour/hour/day/whatever works), and time in which you must do extensive work. If you feel insecure about the extensive reading then have no fear as you will rotate back to intensive work in your next 30min/hour/whatever your chosen block of time is. This way you have time to 'test-run' extensive reading (in which you will probably feel uncomfortable initially) and time in which you can hang on to your perfectionism and don't let go of anything during your intensive reading.

[sfuqua]

I've been doing a lot of extensive reading lately, and I have a constant battle with myself about using the popup dictionary. It can be a complete lifesaver when looking up one word unlocks a paragraph, but it is a waste of time when I use it on a word I can guess from context.
I try to keep in mind something a Morman missionary, who was way ahead of me in learning Samoan said about it. He said it was better to just make a wild guess at a word than to look it up. "She adjusted her X and then entered the ring" Do you really need to know what an X is? If it bugs you, it's probably better to think of a funny or satisfying guess for the word and then get into the next thing happening in the story than to stop everything and look up X. If the next sentence is, "X is the key to the match. She always worried about her X. ", maybe you want to look it up, but you still might do better guessing.

I constantly have to fight the temptation to slow down to a grind and look every single thing up and reread everything 10 times.

Oh yeah, it's working great for me.

[Serpent]

I keep getting into a rut of looking up everything when reading something, studying the language like a microscope. (And what's worse, I feed a lot of those words into Anki.)

This caught my eye as I reread the post. I think you used to add literally all "useful" words to Anki? (ie everything apart from the rare/obscure ones or those you can't find the meaning of) If you've begun distinguishing between "extremely useful" and "kinda useful but not crucial at my level", you're already making great progress

[Iversen]

It seems that the majority of those who have written in this thread support extensive reading and listening from the start. I prefer learning some hard grammatical facts and some basic vocabulary first, and I do mostly that by studying short texts intensively - and studying here includes copying short passages by hand, reading and summarizing grammars and sometimes also making translations. If I feel that the sentences in my study texts still are resistant after one copy then I just copy them them again, and the second time I understand them without looking words up or checking the translation (if there is one, which there ought to be). I'm as fond of extensive reading (and listening) as anyone, but for me it is only worth doing when I can get at least the gist of a text just by running through it without spending the time on things like dictionary lookups.

Earlier today I listened to a number of short Youtube clips in Romance dialects and languages I haven't studied. Many of these had translations, but I didn't read the translation the first time I listened because that would have interfered with my listening. The second time I might check the translation, but only to clear up murky points. In several cases I felt that just 2-3 hours with such material would be enough to make me understand a dialect/language - but only because I already was at a stage where I could recognize many words and sometimes understand a whole passage of maybe 5-6 words. Without that background I wouldn't expect to get anything much even from a couple of hours' of listening.

For me intensive study gives the hard facts and the background knowledge I need. Extensive activities give me the feeling of 'flow', and they serve to consolidate the things I already have learned. OK, later I may also learn expressions and style and facts about the topics in the texts - but that's after the time we are speaking about here.

[kujichagulia]

If you've begun distinguishing between "extremely useful" and "kinda useful but not crucial at my level", you're already making great progress

Yeah, I don't put everything into Anki like I used to. I only put words in that I think I could use right away. It's certainly not as bad as it used to be. But I still think I need to further reduce my Anki time to get a good balance.

Anki input still takes too much time for my liking, especially when I have things I want to read, but that is not as big of a problem as looking up every word and taking notes. If I could skip some words and just look up words occasionally, that would help my flow a lot. I would have done that a long time ago, but the fear of losing opportunities to learn a word or forgetting what I just learned is a strong force to overcome for me. However, this thread shows that extensive reading and rarely looking up words does work.