How to start reading in a foreign language (even as a beginner)

reading is a major reason why I learn languages at this point I think I've read over 100 books in English which is not my mother ton as you can tell by my accent 30-something books in Spanish a couple of books in Italian though I will admit those were mostly books written for children and a couple in Korean and in the meantime I have developed a system that I think works really well for me and that I wanted to share with all of you today so basically in this video I will talk about different approaches that

people use when it comes to reading in foreign languages I will also talk about the approach that I myself prefer as well as devices and apps that I use to make reading in my target languages easier and then I will also discuss the advice that you often hear and I will tell you whether it has worked for me or not so let's begin if you're not new to the topic of reading in different languages you have probably heard about intensive and extensive reading let me briefly explain what these two approaches mean intensive reading involves reading

slowly and carefully and looking up everything that you do not know whether it's grammar or vocabulary also possibly taking notes and then reviewing those notes later and it's usually recommended for beginners or for reading shorter texts because looking up every single thing you do not know can be and in fact is exhausting it can also be used if you are not a beginner but you are not really knowledgeable about a certain topic right let's say you're reading an article on how to take care of a houseplant and even though you are somewhere at a good

level with your language you might not know words that are related to this topic specifically and this is where you might find that it's actually useful for you to write things down and then try to review them later extensive reading on the other hand means reading widely and mostly for pleasure without looking up every single thing that you do not know and it's usually recommended for reading texts that are slightly above your level so that you are able to learn new things but at the same time you are also able to grasp the meaning without

necessarily understanding every single sentence that you read now people have all kinds of rules about that some people say you shouldn't look up more than three words per page or five words per page other people say that you should only look things up when you can no longer understand what is going on and to be completely honest with you I look up as many things per page as I want and I could never understand why people come up with all these rules and then I realize the people that talk about all those restrictions are people

that read printed books of course it will get annoying disruptive time consuming regardless of whether you are using your phone or paper dictionary to look up things trust me I love of physical books too I love buying books I love looking at my books sniffing them whatever weird things people do with their books I do it too but if you watched my bookshelf tour you might have noticed that I barely have any language books that are not textbooks and now you know why if anything I think I also talk in that video about how I

have four books in Korean and those probably are the only fiction books I have in any of my languages and those four books are still unread exactly because it is so much harder to read above your level when you read things on paper so what is my Approach then as you might have guessed it is almost always extensive at least when it comes to loan form content like books and to be completely honest with you I feel like I practice this extensive approach for pretty much all of my language learning I rarely review stuff I

almost never listen to the same podcast or watch the same video twice unless I'm actually doing it for the content and not for the purpose of language learning I also don't really take notes because I never go back to review them that's just kind of the person I am so my Approach is just to always read more watch more listen to more stuff and hope that by doing that I will get the repetition that I need but when it comes to Shorter content like song lyrics social media posts articles or graded readers yeah I do

practice intensive reading too but only in the sense that I look up everything that I do not know but I never go back to review it again I I would rather prefer for example to read five different graded readers then read one and learn every single word that I didn't know in that one book so we have established that I'm not really a fan of physical books when it comes to reading in my target languages what do I use then let's break it down by devices and applications that I use so when it comes to

devices I personally prefer reading things on either a tablet which I have an iPad or on e-readers like the Kindle tablets are cool because you can install apps that make creating easier and I'll talk about apps in a second however it's not always necessary to download a bunch of stuff for example back when I was just starting to read in Spanish I didn't even download anything I just used the default books app and some of the built-in iPads features so here's a book I have and if there's a word I don't know I click on

it choose look up and my tablet shows me the definition if your tablet has a stylus support you can also highlight things and write your own notes on the margins I use this mostly when I work with short articles or stories so basically when I do intensive reading and by the way the app that I'm using here is called good notes it's an iPad only app but I'm sure there are alternatives for Android tablets and again to translate words I just use the define feature that is inbuilt I do not need to download anything else

besides my good notes app so the method that I have just described to you works really well until you decide you want to also review the words from a book you just finished reading what I would do before is I would manually add all of the words to either Anki or Quizlet and that itself will take so much time that after creating those vocabulary sets I would just never go back to them that was until I learned about link which is this app co-founded by the famous polyglot Steve Kaufman or to be even more precise

until I learned to use Link for my needs so what link who's sponsoring today's video by the way allows you to do is to look up words or phrases while you're reading watching or listening to content there's a website version as well as apps for Androids and iOS I as I've already said prefer reading things on my iPad and you can literally find thousands of hours of content here but I think my biggest misconception when it comes to link was thinking that you could only use the content that already exists on the website in reality

you can import pretty much anything you want to link articles podcast episodes books videos and even Netflix shows and once I realized that was an option link became one of my favorite apps for language learning I am now mostly using it to learn Italian and my favorite thing to do is to find articles that I like and that are relevant to me elsewhere and then import them to link okay so let me show you how this works after installing the browser extension I find an article I'm interested in imported to link and then I can

either open it right away or go and Link later and find it under imported lessons here I see the number and percentage of unknown words and also the number of words I have already studied from other content I have read on link so let's open the article and you will see that all of the words I do not know yet are marked in blue if I click on them to see their meaning they will become yellow these words are now called links and you can later practice them with different types of questions so one thing

to remember though is that if you're just starting to use Link you might actually know some of those blue words you just haven't come across them on link yet so what do you do in that case when you turn the page just tell link that you already know the words and they will be added to your known words also if you are still a beginner in your language you can choose to see the sentences one by one instead of seeing the whole text I do that with Greek a lot because otherwise it just gets too

overwhelming another thing that I really really like is that you can also track your statistics on link how many words you know how many links you have created how much time you spent reading or listening so it's not just about streaks but also about measuring your actual progress if you would like to try link there's going to be a link in the description that will give you a 35 discount I definitely definitely recommend it if you want to read in your target language but going back to tablets one thing about them is that they're not

really great for your eyes and I feel like when I just got an iPad and I started reading in Spanish in the beginning when I didn't really read for more than 30 to 40 minutes a day it was fine but as I was getting better at Spanish and I started reading sometimes for three to four hours a day that's when it got really bad my eyes were dry they would get itchy like my head would hurt sometimes so I definitely do not recommend using your tablet or any other device that has a screen that is

similar to your tablet for such a long period of time especially because we already spent so much time working or studying in front of those screens that I guess add in even more time on top of that would not be the best decision which is why I personally decided to get a Kindle back in 2020. Kindle or any other e-reader is great because it doesn't hurt your eyes like normal screens do features Wise It's really similar to what I just showed on my iPad you can press on a word and either see a translation or

a definition you can also look things up on Wikipedia or you can use the translation option but Kindle uses Bing which I feel like is not the best another cool feature it has is the vocabulary builder basically what it does is it shows you all the words that you looked up in a book so you can test yourself and see whether you remember the Minion or not a step up from the Kindle would be an Android e-reader which has the same screen technology so it doesn't hurt your eyes but since it's powered by Android you

can install apps on it just like you would on your Android phone or tablet the one that I have is by this Chinese I think brand called Onyx books so here you can install such apps as link for example that I just talked about Libby which is an app that lets you read ebooks through your library membership apps like pocket or read wise that allow you to save articles and read them later apps for reading webtoons and even the Kindle app so you can have the Kindle experience without having the Kindle itself okay now that

your tools are all set up we need to determine what exactly you will be reading and here are some options for you from easy to hard but of course it always depends on the particular piece of content that you're reading this is however how I would normally rate different types of text you can read so the first one is short text like the ones you can find in a textbook if you have one um the second one my favorite is graded readers then articles or social media posts usually written for native speakers than something like

graphic novels just because they tend to have less text children's books I feel like are not as easy as people make them out to be so I would put them as the next step and when I say children's books I don't just make books for like children who are five years old I also mean chapter books middle grade literature and so on the next level I would say is non-fiction especially books like popular psychology or self-help those tend to be relatively easy if you can read those with no problems you can start reading contemporary fiction

and only after that I would personally start trying to tackle the classics but of course I don't follow the structure for every language that I learn there's a lot of different factors that you have to take into consideration for example what materials are available for that language how similar is that language to a language that you already speak or your native language and also your personal interests of course if you have no interest in self-help why would you read that right so this is just a general guideline feel free to adjust it to your needs

and wants now let's talk about some advice that you can hear pretty often when it comes to reading in foreign languages and I will just tell you whether it has worked for me or not the first one is reading children's books I personally haven't had the best experience with this maybe that's because I'm not a child anymore so things that are relevant or interesting for children are not really things that are relevant and interesting for me but I also feel like a lot of the times those books have vocabulary that is not really relevant to

us adults who are trying to learn languages I also feel like they're not really as easy and so if I have to make an effort to read something I would rather read something that I enjoy a bit more than books for an audience that I'm not a part of and whenever I do read books for kids which I've just told you in the beginning of this video that the books that I've read in Italian so far have all been written for children I am extremely extremely picky with what I choose right first of all it's

books for children who are at least eight if not 10 years old and older second of all I try to make sure that the topic or the vocabulary that the book uses are relevant to me for example one book that I have read in Italian again that was written for kids is this book about cyber bullying and just kind of navigate in social media I had a ton of useful vocabulary and wasn't the most interesting book but I wasn't really dying inside reading it so yeah if I were to give you advice I would say

be extremely pick it with those and then my next advice would be try graded readers instead created readers are books that are written specifically for people who are trying to learn a language and for this you will typically have two options either books that have been written for native speakers but then adapted to sue people who are learning the language and then the other category is books that were written specifically for people who are learning the language choose which whichever you prefer or if you're learning language that doesn't have a lot of resources whichever you

can find I guess a great thing about these readers is that they're often categorized by levels depending on how many words you're expected to know so you can kind of have an idea of what level of difficulty to expect also these stories tend to be quite short which I find gives me a sense of accomplishment and a boost of motivation and then the more books I can Mark is read in the beginning when the process is painfully slow the more motivation I get to read more and the more motivation I have the better at reading

I become and the better at reading they become the more skill I have to start tackling actual native content because this is the ultimate goal right one big downside of graded readers though is that a lot of the times the stories are just bad I find that in the beginning stages when I'm still riding that high from being able to read something in my target language and understand what's actually going on in the story it kind of compensates for the bad storytelling but obviously as you progress you will have to start looking for something else

another strategy that many people recommend is just reading something that you have already read in another language and I know a lot of people who love this strategy and they read Harry Potter in like every single language that they learn but to be honest for me it doesn't really work that well because I really like reading Mysteries crime novels things that have a plot twist and once I know what happens who killed who who's the bad guy I don't really care to read the story again but I guess that depends on the kind of literature

you read and also on what kind of person you are because I know people who watch the same movies or read the same books I'm not someone who does that so I guess that strategy doesn't really work that well for me okay so this one might be a little controversial but I swear if I got a penny every time a person that is learning Spanish asks a native speaker what book they should read and the native speaker says something like that I would have a lot of pennies of course Tiana news de Soledad and so

many other Classics that were written in Spanish are great but this should probably not be the first or even the second or the third book that you read in Spanish also if you're someone who doesn't really enjoy the classics in your native language I think it might be a little naive to think that you will enjoy those in a language that you do not speak as well as you speak your mother a ton but of course I'm not trying to tell you that you shouldn't read the classics at all and if anything I know some

people who start learning languages precisely because there are certain works of literature that they want to be able to read so yeah feel free to adjust this advice to your case but I feel like a lot of the times language Learners get those super difficult books just because they don't really know better foreign and then finally I think what has worked for me the most is just being flexible and not really trying to follow somebody else's advice to a t yes you can get certain ideas you can kind of see what things work for different

people but at the end of the day see what works for you and don't be afraid to do that even if that goes against whatever advice you heard on the internet also if you tried a book and it seemed too hard do not just give up on reading try reading something else on Amazon for example if you pick the Kindle version you can go through a preview of the book and kind of try to gauge the level and see whether it's the right one for you or not if you find that the format is not

good for you yet for example you're trying to read a novel and you think it's just way too hard try graphic novels or maybe short stories or maybe try non-fiction or fan fiction you know if you have only been trying to read printed books try an ebook with the tips that I gave and see if that works better for you different genres different formats different media do not let one bad experience discourage you from reading in your target language and that I guess is everything I wanted to talk to you about today I will be

happy to see your advice and your experience with reading in different languages in the comments below and as always thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in my next video bye bye