HOW TO CLASSIFY  BOOKS FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING
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HOW TO CLASSIFY BOOKS FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING

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literature
language learning
culture

Many self-taught polyglots highlight the importance of reading books in your target language as a strategy to develop our vocabulary and writing skills. Currently we have access to graded readers that are materials designed to readers at differents levels of language mastery and they already have a clasiffication according to the number of words needed to understand the text.

My problem with graded readers is that they spoil my further reading of the original book, turning it into a less satisfaying experience. That said, I did a search looking if it already existed book recommendations based on difficulty level. Luckily I found this website called Goodreads, it's a social website made for readers and full of book recommendations, there you can find lists of books that organize books according to reading difficulty.

So what makes a book easier or more difficult to read than another book besides of the reading skill of the reader? One obvious factor is the amount of vocabulary used, another could be the complexity of sentence structure, also is important the structure of the story, a non linear story like in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Pedro Páramo" makes it harder to understand if you're not a hundred percent focus.

After reading some books in English an in Portuguese I would classify them as follows:

Beginner: The Diary of a Young Girl, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Color Purple, the two first books of Throne of Glass

Intermediate: His Dark Materials trilogy, the first two books of Game of Thrones, She's never coming back, Frankestein, The Old Man and the Sea

Advanced: Blindness by the portuguese author José Saramago, this book was difficult although I already had read it in my native language.

What books do you consider to be in an intermediate level?

Lastly I want to share a list of difficult novels, the day I would be able to read these books in another language, I will consider myself to be in an advanced level.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/827.Most_Difficult_Novels

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