Reading books in the original
English

Reading books in the original

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reading
literature
language learning
culture
habits

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!

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