I started learning english at a private school when I was seven years old. There was a library in that school and since I’ve always been a bookworm I started reading kids books in english. At first, reading in english was very difficult, because I didn’t know a lot of vocabulary yet. Therefore, at all the pages I had to look into the dictionary to see the meaning of the words I’ve never seen before and because of it my reading was very slow.

Although I enjoyed reading books in english I stopped doing it when I moved to a different english school that only had books in english for teenagers and adults. Anyway, at the total I’ve been to 5 different english schools and all of them helped me to increase my knowledge of this language. I got more acquainted to the english grammar, expanded my vocabulary and improved my listening skills.

Coming more to the present, in 2019 I was in the latest years of my english course and I decided to go back reading books in english, since my background of english had increased so much after the first time I read a foreign book. Thus, I did a challenge to myself that would only read books in english during August 2019 till the end of February 2020. The first one that I read was Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. At the beginning, I thought that I was going to have some difficulties by reading this book, because the language of classic books are usually old-fashioned and maybe that would make the interpretation of the text get harder.

But in the end it wasn’t so hard to read this book, because I knew a good amount of vocabulary in this language and to read a book in a foreign language you have to understand the main point of the story and not focus in every single word that you don’t know. In conclusion, I read this book and the others very slow comparing with the speed that I read in portuguese. Nevertheless, it was very enjoyable seeing that I was able to read foreign books without always taking a look at the dictionary and the results of all the effort that I put on my study english over the years.

During that period I read Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Persuasion by Jane Austen, Hard times by Charles Dickens, The adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, The turn of the screw by Henry James, The great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald and The catcher in the rye by J. D. Salinger.

Little tips about reading in a foreign language:

1- Don’t translate every phrase of the book to your native language, this only going to make you slow the speed of your reading. Instead of doing it I prefer to mentally read the book in the language that it was written.

2- You don’t have to understand all the words of the text while you’re reading it you just have to understand the context. However, if you like me enjoy understanding the meaning of words you don’t know I advice you to make a little mark on the words you don’t know, end 1 or 2 pages, and then look back to see the marks and search the meaning of the words on a dictionary.

3- I like to make a deadline to finish the reading of a book and also make a goal to read an specific number of pages per days, because that helps me to read books faster, since I have the incentive of achieving a target.