10x your vocabulary growth with this language challenge

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. Today I want to talk about perhaps one of the most powerful things you can do to dramatically improve your level in a language, and that is read a book from cover to cover on paper, and I'm going to talk a bit about my own experience and the things you can do to make that happen. Now, reading a book is not expensive, like I happen to have here, a book in Turkish, Turkish history book.

Unfortunately, it's too difficult for me. There's too many words there that I don't know. I kind of get a sense and I can listen to the audio book, but I can't really understand the book.

And so in order to enjoy the experience of reading a book, you have to have, you know, 90, 95 percent of the words that you can at least take a decent guess at. And so that requires a certain level in the language. Okay.

But by the same token, when you do that, that's proof of where you are in the language. I still remember when I was studying Mandarin Chinese and after six months, I read Loto Xiangzi, which is a very famous book. The Rickshaw Boy takes place in Beijing.

It was very much part of my whole, you know, connecting to this Chinese world. I enjoyed it. I missed a lot of words.

There were no audio books at that time. I didn't have a digital version of that book. I struggled through it, but I felt very proud of myself.

I got confidence from having done that up until that point. I had simply read either articles or chapters in readers, which had a lot of, uh, vocabulary lists in behind them. But here I was on my own, just me in the book, great sense of achievement.

You know, in German, I remember I read a book, uh, on environmentalism written by a German author. And again, having fought my way through the book gave me a great sense of satisfaction. Now, the thing about a book is books are not expensive.

You can even borrow them from the library. What's required is your motivation and a certain level in the language. And when I look at the amount of money that is spent on language learning and the amount of hand wringing that goes on in some countries, For example, someone showed me a website saying that, you know, English level in Japan is declining and, and, you know, the numbers of people who speak English in Japan, depending on what you read on the internet is anywhere from 3 percent to 30%, even saw one suggestion that the average English level in Tokyo is a B2, which of course is.

Absolute nonsense, B2 is a very high level in order to have B2. You've got to be able to read a novel away from any, you know, online dictionaries. So that is not true.

I often have people tell me, you know, I read well, but I just don't speak well. I don't really believe. I think if a person is reading novels, they are acquiring.

Or have a level of vocabulary and familiarity with the language, which means that given the opportunity to speak, they will speak and you hear all these things, well, you know, the Japanese are not good at languages because they're not risk takers and stuff. You don't need to be a risk taker. If you have enough of the language in you, if the brain has gotten used to the language, Through massive input, it's not that big a risk to start using what you have.

But by the same token, you know, I saw this video where this American asked some Japanese kids if they speak English and they sort of answer in monosyllables and they sort of implies, well, I guess you want to go to America. And they said, well, no, actually I'd rather go to Singapore. Do you ever want to live outside of Japan?

Do you ever want to live in America or Europe or? I'm, uh, I want to go to. Um, Singapore.

Like why is the assumption that people are learning English because they want to go and speak to Americans or English people, not necessarily English is a major means of international communication. And so the motivation can be many. However, the fact that the Japanese don't do so well in English is not so surprising because they live in Japan, 125 million Japanese people.

They don't have any immediate neighbors who speak other languages. If you look at Canada with all the money that the Canadian federal government spends on language learning, you know, they have a five year plan, like straight out of the Soviet union action plan for languages, 4. 2 billion to increase the bilingual.

So it's a very high level rate amongst English Canadians, and yet it's continuing to drop every year, despite all of those expenditures, as you can see from this, this graph here. Amongst the English speaking population in Canada, fewer people speak French than Japanese people who speak English. So it all comes back to motivation and what you do to improve your language skills, and that's where I think reading a book comes in.

Reading a book is powerful, but you have to prepare for it. If I take the case of, of Chinese or German. Or other languages, I have gone through a period of building up my vocabulary.

Now that I use LingQ, I bring books in and I work up my vocabulary knowledge and I combine it with listening until I get to a level where I can actually listen to the book on its own. So it's something that I think is very important to do. Anyone that, that has read one novel can read a second novel and it doesn't have to be a novel.

It can be a book on history, it can be a book on gardening, but there's a great sense of satisfaction in doing that. And so therefore at LingQ we started this read a book challenge where members at LingQ are bringing books in or finding books in our library and they've sort of announced that to the challenge that this is what their goal is. And it's, it's kind of a motivator.

It's a way for people to motivate each other at LingQ. And it's also a way to encourage people to do this relatively inexpensive thing, which is so powerful when it comes to language learning. One thing I would caution you, as you'll see when I go through this, obviously not all digital books that you buy are available to import into LingQ.

So we have some in our library. Some websites allow you to download the, uh, you know, the electronic file, which can then be imported into LingQ. But some websites, these, uh, digital files are DRM protected.

You're going to have to find your way around those. In the case of Turkish, the Storytel app only let me read on the app. So it's, it takes a little bit of work to find places where you can get books, particularly modern books, classical books is easier, uh, that you can then, uh, download the, uh, the digital file and import it into LingQ.

I wish more people would read books. It's an inexpensive thing to do. It gives you a great sense of achievement.

It's a very clear objective. And of course, if you bring the books, a digital version of the book that you are also going to read on paper, but if you bring that in, it has a number of advantages, not only that you can look words up and you have all of the functionality at LingQ that help you learn words and get used to the language and you can even listen to it, but you now start getting statistics. So if an average book has 80, 000 words in it.

You bring in a book with 80, 000 words, your statistics, once you finish the book, if you read it on LingQ, as well as reading it on paper, will reflect that you have now read those number of words. If you are looking words up as you go, it'll indicate which words you know, which words you have learned. So there's a lot of advantage to, you know, in addition to reading the book on paper, bring the digital version into LingQ, do it as part of the LingQ book challenge.

And I think it'll be a big boost. To your language progress in whatever language you're learning. Thanks for listening.