The Greatest Books I haven't Read Yet (In Russian)
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The Greatest Books I haven't Read Yet (In Russian)

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This year I wanted to get back into learning a language that I never quite reached a good level in. That language, is Russian. I had all these grandiose plans to read all the great books in Russian, including their rich and expansive literature, and huge contribution to sci-fi that isn't quite as well known here in the west.

But then, reality would backhand me across the face and knock me to the ground. Because, as luck would have it...

Russian is a very different and difficult language

Learning words in Russian is a bit different, because you're not using the same Latin roots for words that you can usually use in say, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, etc.

For example ,

EN - Different , PT - Diferente , RU - Разный

Not quite the same.

So approaching a book, even a short one, can pose you to learn hundreds (if not thousands it feels like) of new words, even in a single chapter. I do like challenges, but that is one challenge that is going to melt my brain if I'm not smart in how I approach the problem.

So I gave up on reading books for a while, until I found the site litres.ru

It is one of the largest ebook and audiobook sites in all of Russia, with a pretty cheap selection if you're buying the books in a harder currency like the US dollar or the Euro.

Best of all, they allow you to read up to 20% of a book as a "fragment" for free!

Given this awesome feature, I thought, "hell, I can read a few pages of a book!"

It was marginally easier, but it was still a lot of new words, even in translated works, teenage fiction, and children's fiction. Worse yet, I tried to read the summaries of the books provided on a book's page, and I realized I couldn't even read the summaries. That was a major blow to my confidence and motivation.

But then, I realized.

Summaries are really short teasers of books.

And given they're short, sweet, and leave you wanting more, then you can read them, review them, and practice reading them out loud, without a completely overwhelming force on your part!

So, for the next few weeks, maybe few months, I plan to read and expand my vocabulary with book summaries from Litres!

In the subsequent section, I'll give a brief overview of the method I plan to use for using these book summaries.

For Illustrative purposes, I chose this book here. Evgeniy Glagloev appears to be a children's author for children circa 10-12 years old.

So I went to the book description below, and I copied and pasted the text into my "Learning with Texts" software.

From here, it's a matter of going through the text, and changing the words in blue (unknown), into learning (red), or to mark them well-known (white).

For anyone wondering, yes, this is like Lingq. Yes, it is free. No, it doesn't have the vast content library of text and audio that Lingq does. Yes, it is a pain in the butt to get set up and working. But yes, I would say it is worth it to use for reading texts in your foreign language. :))

I do have some other posts where I tried to explain getting LWT set up on your own device, but I think I will update them, as we can now post posts with pictures to aid in explanation.

So after I went through the entire text, this is what my text looked like.

So of 61 unique terms, I had 19 that I didn't know, and had to look up to make sense of the text. That's about 31% of all words in the text.

This text took me about 15-20 minutes to go through give or take. Now imagine if I had to go through a full chapter, or the entire book, not knowing about 30% of the words....

Needless to say, it wouldn't be a very fun time.

But with this, this is easily condensed, easily sorted through, and can be easily practiced for repetition. I hope this gives ideas for study for anyone struggling to read full length texts in their target languages. :))

For life, and for learning,

Tom :))

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