The time when a person has mastered his native language is both significant and sad. It's sad just because the person has stuck to this language's rules and logic. Hence, it becomes too difficult to learn any other language, even common one. That's the permanent problem traditional methods of language learning can't solve. Why? Just because they are not oriented to poke a new logic into recipient's mind.
No one would deny, the most useful thing for any language learner is to appear in so called "language environment". Study tours are the thing that implements this perfectly. But what if a person can't go abroad to study language there? Here a perfect place comes on the stage. It's called extensive reading.
What is extensive reading?
The method is based on the assumption that reading is a good way to imitate the process of communication. The reader is common to listener he listens to author's thoughts and reflects them in his mind. In addition, reading of an interesting novel is much better study time than reading of boring sentences without any sense, or trying to memorize long lists of words.
How should I read?
Surely, extensive reading is a good way for language learning only for those who at least can read foreign words and knows essentials of the language structure. Let's assume that you can read and can differentiate a verb from noun. So you can start your extensive reading.
- Pick a book.
Choose a book that would be interesting for you. If the book is not interesting, you won't enjoy your reading, so you won't wish to read at all.
- Start reading.
Then you just start reading. Don't get discourage if you understand just 20% or less. The more you read, the better you understand everything, the more words you know. Your reading comprehension will son rise to $40%, then to 60%, then to 80% and finally, you'll understand everything.
- Use dictionary rarely.
Don't use a dictionary for every word you don't know. Believe me, it would be the best if you see this word throughout the text for 5 time and suddenly you realize its meaning because of context. That's the way the word will be memorized for ages. Besides, the more you refer dictionary, the less you are involved into the story's flow. And your goal is to read, not to understand every single word.
- Don't like the book? Take another one.
If the book is not interesting, do not force yourself. There are lots of other stories that are just waiting for you to read them.
- Use parallel texts.
Sometimes it's useful to have parallel texts if you can find them. That means that you read the passage in the foreign language. And then you read the same passage translated into your own language. This method is extremely good for complicated texts. But do not read sentence by sentence. Read large blocks of information.
- Use optimized texts.
It's also useful for beginners to read optimized text. I mean the texts where translation into native language follows each sentence (or its part), so you don't need to study dictionary. Here on the web site dedicated to learning of Russian language you can see examples of such optimized texts http://learnrussian.hut1.ru
As you can see, language learning can be enjoyable and pleasant process. Moreover, it can be successful with less efforts that you usually thought about. Just start reading foreign books, and sooner or later you'll realize that you understand the language and even can speak it easily. That's the way children learn the language. That's the way we might use too.
About Autor
Al Polonski is an administrator and chief-editor of a free online Russian language tutor, Learn Russian Easily, based on the method of extensive reading. He can be reached through the website http://learnrussian.hut1.ru
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