When I decided last year to stop reading novels in German and reading them in English instead, it felt like a hard decision; like turning a relaxing activity into work. But I was very motivated and enthusiastic about extensive reading because I thought that my German is as good as it is due to the fact that I had read a lot of books as a child.
After doing this for more than a half year, it's time for a résumé.
1. It hadn't turned out as a panacea that shovels tons of vocabulary in my brain without any further effort than reading fascinating stories. Usually, I'm able to guess unknown words just enough to understand what's going on, but not exactly the meaning of the word. For example: A "xyz" sits on a tree, warbles a song and flies away. It's easy to guess that "xyz" is a kind of bird, but if I want to know the species I have to look it up. And there are sooo many new words in books... As learners, we are often told that knowing a few thousand words is enough... For example they might tell you that a six-year-old child is fluent with a vocabulary of only 5000 words. They don't tell you that this child can understand already 20,000 words and still isn't able to understand a presentation about most of the issues you, as an adult, are interested in. Or to understand the books an adult might want to read. And the kids don't stop at this point. At the age of 20 they reach an active vocabulary of 27,000 to 52,000 words, then the pace, that is about 30 words a week from 4 to 20 years, slows down. By the way: From one to four years, where we intuitively assume the learning of the native language to be exploding, the pace of learning new words is only about 13 a week. (The website I took the numbers from was in German. It might be a little different for other languages.) I hope the information reconciles you a little bit with the "intermediate plateau"... The feeling of progress is always subjective and relative to something, and this relation is always most impressive as long as you compare the progress to zero.
2. Despite that, of course reading in a foreign language improves the skills in that language! Including vocabulary. But in my opinion mainly in the manner that you come across words you've already learned and get used to the way they're used. To learn more vocabulary from the books I started to type in sentences from some of the books into the "examples" box in my vocabulary trainer and then copy the unknown words one after another in the vocabulary field. I read those quotations aloud whenever they appear. I think what I learned especially through those quotations is much more than some new words.
3. The habit to read novels in a target language had dramatically changed my approach to reading, my preferences and my relationship with the books I'm reading. In the past, the goal of reading novels was mainly to relax. And so most of the books I read don't challenge my brain. It was "junk reading". When I started to read in English, I made the decision to focus on good and realistic literature. Not too many dwarfs, astronauts and sorcerers, because they might use a lot of words that aren't very useful for me. Crime literature would have been okay, but because reading in a foreign language takes much more time and effort, I didn't really fancy wasting my time with stuff I can as well forget after turning the last page. Yes, I still want books to be entertaining! But not only entertaining. I think I'm somehow getting back to my reading as a child, when everything was new and a book was able to permeate my mind. Reading novels in English hadn't felt any longer like sacrificing an amusement for my language goals since I had started. Instead, it feels like an enrichment of life.
I think much of this enrichment is linked to reading the real words of the author. And I found this assumption confirmed when I just recently read a book I already had read in German: "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak. I remembered it as "a good book", so when I found it on a book exchange shelf, I picked it up. Because it's a story from German history, set in the Nazi period, I thought that the German book was the original. It took me a third or a half of the book to come to the conclusion that this is impossible. There's so much in the English version that I didn't see in the German one, including things that can't be translated from a German original into an English translation. And yes, the author is an Australian! And... The original is not only good, but heartbreaking! So I'm not sure if I can recommend it. But well, recovering from a book is much easier than from traumatic experiences in real life.
Despite The Book Thief, my top three (out of near about ten):
"The Girl With All The Gifts" by M. R. Carey. My first English book in this learning period. Although it's a gripping dystopian thriller that leads the reader by their questions through the text, it's also about growing up, relationships and a lot about ethics. Take a pot luck!
"I Married A Communist" by Philip Roth. I just wanted to know what a nobel prize winning author has to say about beeing married to a communist. Now I know! It's not about that at all. It's mainly a historical novel about the persecution of communists during the McCarthy era in the USA, and there are nearly all human matters involved, including a marriage. Power and emotion in every word!
"Playing The Jack" by Mary Brown. This historical novel is mostly entertaining, but I won't forget it any time soon. It's poetic, colourful and enthralling. It's set in England in the eighteenth century. A runaway orphan was picked up by a group of fairground people... Again a novel I would need to recite from to explain what's so great in it. It's the book version of a folk song.
So - my Spanish isn't yet good enough, otherwise I would join the book club... Happy reading to everybody!
Such interesting post! As you've pointed out, we are often taught that knowing 2000 words in our target language is enough. Perhaps we can handle a basic conversation with 2000 words. But it's clearly insufficient when it comes to read a novel or any content that is intented for native speaker.
Hi Maiva, great text! Especially the paragraph on language aquisition was very interesting to read. I've started reading English novels more than 10 years ago and by now, they make up the greater part of what I read. So I can tell you from experience that it's going to get easier - even to the point, where it doesn't make a difference if you read them in German or in English. Have you read "A History of Bees" by Maia Lunde? It's not only a great story but also linguistically very interesting as it mimics the different manners of writing from the differet periods it's set in.
The Book Thief is one of my favorite books of all time. It's really interesting to hear you say that you found the German translation to be much less powerful. I totally understand this, and I agree that reading a translation is never the same. Ironically, I'm a professional translator. In the past, I've worked mostly with legal and governmental documents, but my ambition is to break into literary translation. As I read in foreign languages with translation in mind, I realize what an impossible task literary translation is. And that is definitely true regarding La Sombra del Viento, so I don't blame you for wanting to wait until you can read it in Spanish. I'm planning to keep a list of some of the "untranslatable" phrases I come across while reading it. Then I will post them here and maybe others in the book club can compare how the phrases were rendered in their translations. Your English writing skills are excellent, by the way. I wonder how much they have been improved by all the reading you've been doing?
Thank you for your help and the comments! @ Caro: I will make a note of it and look for the book. It's also interesting to hear that language acquisition through novels works so fine over a longer period of time. I think it was very forceful for my Spanish passive understanding abilities, although I preferred some series on YouTube for beginners and copying masses of example sentences as riddles in My Dictionary (vocabulary trainer), since even graded readers for A1 level were too much for me by now - but I'll start a second trial with it soon. @ Wendy: There are surely a lot of novels that are easier to translate than The Book Thief... And I wouldn't recommend to dispense with reading literature from other countries as long as you can't read them in the original! It's difficult to say how much my English had improved through reading because I did various things. I'm even not ready with my Duolingo English course, but that's because I got stuck on it because translating sentences without context leads to many problems when it comes to different time tenses. And it's annoying when even the discussions about the sentence are about possible meanings of the German sentence. The only thing I can say without a doubt is that reading alone isn't the most effective way for intermediate learners to learn new vocabulary and make it active. But when it comes to expression, even how to make sentences with more than basic structures out of words, I've no idea how to learn that without reading.
@Maiva_Ka You're totally right, it's certainly worth reading literature in translation if you're not able to read the original. But I have so many languages I want to learn/improve that I tend to put off reading those books in the hopes that I will be able to read the original one day :-) I hadn't heard of My Dictionary. Is it the one called "My Dictionary - Free: polyglot" in the Google Play store? And would you recommend it over Anki?
It's the one from Kataykin. I haven't tried Anki, because I'm contented with it. I think both have in common that you make your own flashcards. My Dictionary helps by loading the voiced vocab, translations and examples from a server, but I recommend to use own examples and check the translations. It's simple and fast and has different types of query. In my opinion the most important is making fill-in-the-gaps test from example sentences and even shuffle them. And you can create your own spaced repetition system by using the tags. That takes a little time (not more than administrating paper cards), but you can fix problems when there are more and more cards to repeat and perhaps days you've done other things... What, in my opinion, is the main problem of spaced repetition in general. At the moment I think about repeating everything I subjectively really know in half a year because I spend too much time on it. If a program had been administrating the cards, the system would have been collapsed long ago. I think Anki has more multimedia functions and much more users to share libraries with, so both are similar and have their strengths.
@Maiva_Ka Great, thank you! I might give it a try.