Absolutely! I've done this in French for a long time, and now in Italian. Trying to use accurate phrasing helps me with comprehension because it forces me to recognize the grammatical structure of what I'm reading -- that is, how the sentences are put together. It is not important that I know every conjugation of every tense as long as I can recognize the endings enough to get the meaning. Also, trying to read out loud with accurate pronunciation really helps my pronunciation in conversation because, when I am reading, I can easily go back and re-read a sentence if I realize I pronounced it badly the first time. This has been especially helpful in French, where what you see on the page and the way it is spoken are not always the same. (Not such a problem in Italian.) If I am reading in a coffee shop, I will just "sub-vocalize". All this is quite the opposite of speed-reading in English when I am only going after content and don't care how the language sounds. Sometimes I also listen to an audible while reading along and trying to sub-vocalize at the same time. This helps me find words that I would otherwise mis-pronounce as well as helping me with phrasing and other speaking skills.
Reading is what took my Spanish to a new level. I am now attempting it in French. The best for me is Harry Potter. I have read the books several times. I have seen the movies more than a dozen times. I know the stories completely. When you are just getting started get the books in both English and your target language. Read a section/page/chapter whatever in English so you know exactly what is happening then read it in your target language. Rinse and repeat until you have finished the series. I would bet by the middle of the series you will probably stop reading the English version first because you simply won't need to.
My library has a selection of toddler and youth books in my TL so I've been relying on that. It was tough at first because I needed to brute force my way through with a dictionary for several books but now I've got a solid foothold in the 4-6 year old age range and I'm using that to keep climbing onwards without having to be as militantly intensive about it. I ask my tutor to record herself reading passages of books I've finished reading and I use them to practice speaking by reading the book aloud alongside her audio. I had a solid background in basic grammar before starting so most of my time is spent on vocab. I'm happy with my progress and excited to keep going. It used to take me a week to get through a new picture book and now I can read 3-4 in one afternoon. A lot of people are turned off by this approach because the kid books are boring. Yes they are, but there's two secret weapons to combating this problem: 1) the language learning aspect makes it more interesting and 2) discipline.
Thanks for the very clear advice. I am learning French and Japanese - the difficulty in even getting a basic beginners ability in reading Japanese is a huge handicap. But French is much easier, especially with all the shared words, gaining a general understanding of a text is quite easy, even as a beginner. With Japanese I think there is little choice if you are to focus on input but to start on listening only, then focus on reading subtitles for videos. I feel you have to be already well on the way to B2 to be able to cope with dense Japanese text.
After a summer HS exchange in Tokyo in ‘75 where I learned kana and sight kanji, I came home with a Japanese middle schooler 漢和 kanji dictionary, and started reading a collection of short story fables. At first I spent more time going in circles in the dictionary, which sped up my lookups even if I had to assembled clues to find the meaning. Later my exchange student girlfriend would give me her Asahi Weekly magazines. Decades forward… Since COVID I’ve done the million words challenge, reading about 15 novels a year. And tripled my reading speed. Now after countless detective novels written with more commas than kanji, I’m able to read great literature. It’s all about what you find interesting to do, and your tolerance for ambiguity vs drudgery. I hate drills, but love to read and don’t mind puzzles.
The languages I actually feel comfortable in (like English, where I've become fully proficient, but I can also understand and read several others) I learned through massive amounts of reading (where the actual purpose was to read.. not to learn, that was just a side effect). Reading is by far the most efficient way to acquire a language, in my opinion (if, like me, you really enjoy reading). But that doesn't work with Japanese. I've been at it for years. It's the other way around, essentially. In order to read, you first have to know the language, and painstakingly learn how to read what you know. You can't really use reading as a way to acquire more of the language until you're already at a high level. Quite frustrating, but there's no way around it. In other words, I do not agree with the "ANY Language" in the video's title. If it were that simple I would simply have used that approach to learn Japanese and get vocabulary and more, like I did for other languages. Instead it's listening which matters. After a while it's possible to listen and read transcripts simultaneously, but that's part of the process of learning to read what you can already understand, not about acquiring the language through reading. Not at all. (If someone is compering with reading Chinese here.. it's not the same. In Chinese, as I understand it, characters essentially have a single sound, in other words, if you know the characters you can actually learn a word from reading, whether it's a new one or not, but in Japanese you can't know the actual sound until you have heard it _and_ seen it written - at least not until you're at a very high level and kind of get the pattern. There are several "readings" of any Japanese kanji character, at least two, sometimes many more.) If you stick to "readable" languages, then yes, I agree with everything in the video - particularly the part about avoiding translations. I never used dictionaries of any kind, and I'm certain that's why I got the nuances and everything to the extent I did. The negative, if you can call it that, is that I almost can't translate.. there's no connection between my native vocabulary and, for example, English.
@@matt_brooks-green do you want to learn Spanish more easily, play game vr chat, The method is to speak in each target language, I speak to you in English, which is the language I want to learn and you in Spanish, I correct your Spanish and you my English.
I need help with this. My vocab level is at about 400 words(Beginner). Toddler-level books are boring or have very little number of sentences. So I tried about a 10 year old-level book (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), and I was TOTALLY lost on the grammar not to mention Looking up practically every word. Can y'all think of books, that's not boring for an adult, and that are in-between toddler and 10 year old leveled books?
Buen video!! Buenos tips. Personalmente me incomoda mucho parar y traducir el significado de cada palabra que no entiendo a mi idioma nativo. Por tanto lo que hago es simplemente tratar de sacar el significado por contexto y si no entiendo vuelvo a re-leer toda la pagina o la frase una y otra vez. Y eso mantiene mi interes en la lectura.
Like you flashcards don’t work for me but I will use the books I’ve read kind of like flashcards. I look through my already read book and skim through the words I highlighted to see if I remember the meaning. Having it already in context of its sentence/paragraph is helpful as I retain the meaning more than I would with flashcards. I only do this with books I really enjoyed as the boring ones lack a connection with the story and the words. I find that just as you said, reading levels up your understanding and listening. I made sure a huge jump this summer in my listening comprehension from the books I read it felt like magic. Great video. Fantastic advice.
Thanks for this. I do a combination of extensive and intensive reading. I more or less do what you suggest and translate words I do not know and then I choose a few words and write sentences using them. I hate flashcards as the words are not in context. I find reading a text two or three times useful but what is a gamechanger is talking with a Tandem partner about what I ve just read. I think it is because I am tuning passive language (written language) into active language (spoken). It seems to help the words stick for me.
Sorry, Matt, I got lost in the video. It wasn't clear the system for me. Please can you correct me if I pick it up right? 1. Select the right material 2. Presentation of the text and translation? 3. Re-read
The only thing I would caution against is learning a language exclusively through reading as a beginner. It really hurts people's ability to develop a natural accent and hear the language clearly if they spend too much time reading as a beginner and not enough time listening. I think 3/4 listening and 1/4 reading is a good balance between the two as listening is more difficult and needs more time dedicated to it for most people. It's much easier to go back and learn to read better than go back and relearn an entire accent, especially in languages where accent matters with pitch accent like Swedish or Japanese and tones as in Mandarin or Vietnamese. Most people subvocalize when they read so any accent they have in mind for the language is reenforced by reading a lot. So, it's important to take the time to develop a decent understanding of the proper pronunciation of the language before lots of extensive reading. It's the same way kids learn their native language. They learn to listen to it years before they can read it.
I've heard various people speak about the subvocalising thing. I think that if it's important to you then you can always wait. Certainly there are plenty of people who've reached a very high level without worrying too much about those small details. I've heard (from BVP I think) that there is evidence some pronunciation adjustments are effective later on but don't necessarily have long term effects if they are done earlier in a learner's journey. TBH, there are so many people arguing for both sides of this that I'd rather continue enjoying what I'm doing that sweat the small stuff
Its something I’ve definitely noticed in high level English as a second language speakers - you can immediately notice if they are ‘read’ oriented learners by their pronunciation - or put another way, they pronounce many words as they are spelled, not pronounced. It’s one reason why I think the ‘silent’ period is still very worthwhile for starting out in a language. I mostly learn French by reading, and I’ve found it frustrating how often I find I’ve engrained horrible pronunciations in my head (I only recently discovered the ‘x’ in ‘Aix’ is not silent, much to my embarrassment).
Back when I started learning Japanese, there wasn't a lot of resources available, and most of them were text only. I read multiple times that "Japanese is flat", "it has no stress", and so I did not pay any attention to intonation for a really long time. Only to find out later in my studies the existence of pitch accent. My spoken Japanese is doomed. It's a hell lot of trouble to fix it now. I also had that issue with English. Too many years pronouncing some words incorrectly. It took me quite some time to pinpoint every mispronounced word and fix them. That was almost 20 years ago, however every once in a while I still find a word or another that still needs to be fixed. Every other language I'm learning, I focus on learning the correct pronunciation first and foremost. I only use audio made by native speakers. I completely stopped using TTS after it taught me wrong pronunciation both in Russian and Norwegian. All that said, I don't let that stop me from reading, but I'm extra careful about learning the proper pronunciation of every new word I come across. As a bonus, I get to absorb the word more easily, so it's a win-win.
@@FrancescoCarpi My experience of some English L2 learners here backs up what you say. I have several Chinese friends who learned formal structured English in China. Despite years here completely immersed in English they still struggle with many aspects of the language. Others I know who started later, but using more native media (sometimes just obsessively watching favourite TV shows) developed a far more natural and higher quality English.
You can search here on youtube Spanish/ English bilingual stories and practice listening to the language... extensive listening in a relaxed way helped me lots 😊... you. An do this for any language u learning not just spanish
You mentioned at 6:32 that you just kept reading without looking up words. What do I do when I don't understand (or I'm not sure I understand) what is going on, even though I know every word in the sentence (even in the paragraph)? Yes, I usually have a professional translation in my native language. So, I can look it up. But I don't always have that luxury.
Do you have a source link for the 95% figure you mentioned? I binge watched a bunch of Paul Nation lectures and interviews as well as those from other academics and the figure I've always seen is 98% ie. you should know 98% of the words in the text to get the best results with extensive reading. The brackets are usually broken down like this: 98%+ = Extensive Reading 90 - 98% = Intensive Reading - this would include the 'grammar translation' between an L1 & L2 version like you mentioned Less than 90% = Reading pain - something the experts suggest never to do as comprehension will be difficult and it will quickly sap your motivation and enjoyment
Fair play. I did Spanish Uncovered and I thought it was a decent intro before going on to focus on lots of input. They've got a money back guarantee so hopefully you didn't lose out
I'm a very slow learner and I want to learn Turkish. I'm more of a reality escapist, so it's hard for me to have interest in things. what's the best way for someone like me who is way below average level ?. Also would appreciate if you could let me know the prompt that i can use to learn the language through chatgpt.
I've tried to read a book, the story is familiar to me, as you said at 7:29. It doesn't work, precisely because of that. If the plot is familiar, it's not interesting. It is like the ultimate spoiler. I'm not forced to figure out what is going on, because I know it beforehand.
Graded material. And/or very strong interest in the material. I started reading (subscribing to) a computer magazine when I was a teenager, I barely knew any English but I was extremely interested in the material and there were a lot of common technological terms which I could get. Which made it possible for me to read it. Slowly at first, after a year I was up to normal (native) reading speed. The I started to read short books about science.. again, common terms, and stuff I knew and was interested in. There's no way I could have read novels or anything at that point. But at one point I did start reading books.. I had run out of books to read during my travels, so I picked up an English book in a railway station, in a genre I liked to read. And just.. read through it. I got enough of what it as about to let my brain see images, and from then on it exploded. When I finished the first book I read it again (I liked the book), and found that this time I understood much more. In short - you need to, somehow, get to a base level so that you have a minimal starting point. This may be through traditional methods (i.e. studying, learning essential words and basic grammar), and from then on it's about finding material (what's called "graded" material in this video), otherwise called Comprehensive Compelling Input.
@@GeorgeDeCarlo I believe you.. when that's said, there wasn't any graded readers for English back in my day either. It's just that it was possible to find something I could (barely) read. Obviously it's easier to find something useful and of interest in a language as large as English. It's not impossible in other languages, just more difficult.
Im learning chinese now and I kinda use this method but not with real text. I usually just ask chatgpt to give me a 1-2 page text with the specified topic, vocab, context, and it works :) Same way I learned high level japanese, I have a book case full of japanese books :D Chinese is a bit harder because Im still a beginner, but I am aiming for chinese books too (if I ever get to that level)
🥳Get the StoryLearning courses in the BLACK FRIDAY sale here: geni.us/SLBlackfriday2025 🎉
I have found it very useful to read a book out loud. It’s really helped my speaking skills too.
bingo!
nice advice
Absolutely! I've done this in French for a long time, and now in Italian. Trying to use accurate phrasing helps me with comprehension because it forces me to recognize the grammatical structure of what I'm reading -- that is, how the sentences are put together. It is not important that I know every conjugation of every tense as long as I can recognize the endings enough to get the meaning. Also, trying to read out loud with accurate pronunciation really helps my pronunciation in conversation because, when I am reading, I can easily go back and re-read a sentence if I realize I pronounced it badly the first time. This has been especially helpful in French, where what you see on the page and the way it is spoken are not always the same. (Not such a problem in Italian.) If I am reading in a coffee shop, I will just "sub-vocalize". All this is quite the opposite of speed-reading in English when I am only going after content and don't care how the language sounds. Sometimes I also listen to an audible while reading along and trying to sub-vocalize at the same time. This helps me find words that I would otherwise mis-pronounce as well as helping me with phrasing and other speaking skills.
Reading is what took my Spanish to a new level. I am now attempting it in French. The best for me is Harry Potter. I have read the books several times. I have seen the movies more than a dozen times. I know the stories completely. When you are just getting started get the books in both English and your target language. Read a section/page/chapter whatever in English so you know exactly what is happening then read it in your target language. Rinse and repeat until you have finished the series. I would bet by the middle of the series you will probably stop reading the English version first because you simply won't need to.
I re-read books I already know.
My library has a selection of toddler and youth books in my TL so I've been relying on that. It was tough at first because I needed to brute force my way through with a dictionary for several books but now I've got a solid foothold in the 4-6 year old age range and I'm using that to keep climbing onwards without having to be as militantly intensive about it. I ask my tutor to record herself reading passages of books I've finished reading and I use them to practice speaking by reading the book aloud alongside her audio. I had a solid background in basic grammar before starting so most of my time is spent on vocab. I'm happy with my progress and excited to keep going. It used to take me a week to get through a new picture book and now I can read 3-4 in one afternoon.
A lot of people are turned off by this approach because the kid books are boring. Yes they are, but there's two secret weapons to combating this problem: 1) the language learning aspect makes it more interesting and 2) discipline.
Thanks for the very clear advice. I am learning French and Japanese - the difficulty in even getting a basic beginners ability in reading Japanese is a huge handicap. But French is much easier, especially with all the shared words, gaining a general understanding of a text is quite easy, even as a beginner. With Japanese I think there is little choice if you are to focus on input but to start on listening only, then focus on reading subtitles for videos. I feel you have to be already well on the way to B2 to be able to cope with dense Japanese text.
After a summer HS exchange in Tokyo in ‘75 where I learned kana and sight kanji, I came home with a Japanese middle schooler 漢和 kanji dictionary, and started reading a collection of short story fables. At first I spent more time going in circles in the dictionary, which sped up my lookups even if I had to assembled clues to find the meaning. Later my exchange student girlfriend would give me her Asahi Weekly magazines.
Decades forward… Since COVID I’ve done the million words challenge, reading about 15 novels a year. And tripled my reading speed. Now after countless detective novels written with more commas than kanji, I’m able to read great literature.
It’s all about what you find interesting to do, and your tolerance for ambiguity vs drudgery. I hate drills, but love to read and don’t mind puzzles.
Can you summarise just so we know that his explanation is really clear to you. 😊
The languages I actually feel comfortable in (like English, where I've become fully proficient, but I can also understand and read several others) I learned through massive amounts of reading (where the actual purpose was to read.. not to learn, that was just a side effect). Reading is by far the most efficient way to acquire a language, in my opinion (if, like me, you really enjoy reading).
But that doesn't work with Japanese. I've been at it for years. It's the other way around, essentially. In order to read, you first have to know the language, and painstakingly learn how to read what you know. You can't really use reading as a way to acquire more of the language until you're already at a high level. Quite frustrating, but there's no way around it. In other words, I do not agree with the "ANY Language" in the video's title. If it were that simple I would simply have used that approach to learn Japanese and get vocabulary and more, like I did for other languages.
Instead it's listening which matters. After a while it's possible to listen and read transcripts simultaneously, but that's part of the process of learning to read what you can already understand, not about acquiring the language through reading. Not at all.
(If someone is compering with reading Chinese here.. it's not the same. In Chinese, as I understand it, characters essentially have a single sound, in other words, if you know the characters you can actually learn a word from reading, whether it's a new one or not, but in Japanese you can't know the actual sound until you have heard it _and_ seen it written - at least not until you're at a very high level and kind of get the pattern. There are several "readings" of any Japanese kanji character, at least two, sometimes many more.)
If you stick to "readable" languages, then yes, I agree with everything in the video - particularly the part about avoiding translations. I never used dictionaries of any kind, and I'm certain that's why I got the nuances and everything to the extent I did. The negative, if you can call it that, is that I almost can't translate.. there's no connection between my native vocabulary and, for example, English.
Congrats on 25k, Matt!
Thank you so much!
@@matt_brooks-green do you want to learn Spanish more easily, play game vr chat, The method is to speak in each target language, I speak to you in English, which is the language I want to learn and you in Spanish, I correct your Spanish and you my English.
@@matt_brooks-greenI have a method that It can you remember more words
I need help with this. My vocab level is at about 400 words(Beginner). Toddler-level books are boring or have very little number of sentences. So I tried about a 10 year old-level book (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), and I was TOTALLY lost on the grammar not to mention Looking up practically every word. Can y'all think of books, that's not boring for an adult, and that are in-between toddler and 10 year old leveled books?
Buen video!! Buenos tips.
Personalmente me incomoda mucho parar y traducir el significado de cada palabra que no entiendo a mi idioma nativo. Por tanto lo que hago es simplemente tratar de sacar el significado por contexto y si no entiendo vuelvo a re-leer toda la pagina o la frase una y otra vez. Y eso mantiene mi interes en la lectura.
Like you flashcards don’t work for me but I will use the books I’ve read kind of like flashcards. I look through my already read book and skim through the words I highlighted to see if I remember the meaning. Having it already in context of its sentence/paragraph is helpful as I retain the meaning more than I would with flashcards. I only do this with books I really enjoyed as the boring ones lack a connection with the story and the words.
I find that just as you said, reading levels up your understanding and listening. I made sure a huge jump this summer in my listening comprehension from the books I read it felt like magic.
Great video. Fantastic advice.
ánimo Matt! Loved it. Solid tips as always!👍
Hello Matt. Thank you for all the videos. They have really helped as I begin this journey
Thanks for this. I do a combination of extensive and intensive reading. I more or less do what you suggest and translate words I do not know and then I choose a few words and write sentences using them. I hate flashcards as the words are not in context. I find reading a text two or three times useful but what is a gamechanger is talking with a Tandem partner about what I ve just read. I think it is because I am tuning passive language (written language) into active language (spoken). It seems to help the words stick for me.
That’s a great idea. I’m not at a stage where I could do that just yet so I hope I remember by the time I am.
@@raysouth1952 takes a while but even if you did it with an easy text it would work.
I start with children’s books.
Sound advice as always. Thanks Matt. I was delighted to see Ábel in your last video. He’s my crosstalk partner.
Sorry, Matt, I got lost in the video. It wasn't clear the system for me. Please can you correct me if I pick it up right?
1. Select the right material
2. Presentation of the text and translation?
3. Re-read
I am learning french, do you have recommendations what books should I read for intermediate level?
thank you!
How to find graded readers?! This is something that I struggle with
Thank you Matt.
The only thing I would caution against is learning a language exclusively through reading as a beginner. It really hurts people's ability to develop a natural accent and hear the language clearly if they spend too much time reading as a beginner and not enough time listening. I think 3/4 listening and 1/4 reading is a good balance between the two as listening is more difficult and needs more time dedicated to it for most people. It's much easier to go back and learn to read better than go back and relearn an entire accent, especially in languages where accent matters with pitch accent like Swedish or Japanese and tones as in Mandarin or Vietnamese.
Most people subvocalize when they read so any accent they have in mind for the language is reenforced by reading a lot. So, it's important to take the time to develop a decent understanding of the proper pronunciation of the language before lots of extensive reading. It's the same way kids learn their native language. They learn to listen to it years before they can read it.
I've heard various people speak about the subvocalising thing. I think that if it's important to you then you can always wait. Certainly there are plenty of people who've reached a very high level without worrying too much about those small details. I've heard (from BVP I think) that there is evidence some pronunciation adjustments are effective later on but don't necessarily have long term effects if they are done earlier in a learner's journey. TBH, there are so many people arguing for both sides of this that I'd rather continue enjoying what I'm doing that sweat the small stuff
Its something I’ve definitely noticed in high level English as a second language speakers - you can immediately notice if they are ‘read’ oriented learners by their pronunciation - or put another way, they pronounce many words as they are spelled, not pronounced. It’s one reason why I think the ‘silent’ period is still very worthwhile for starting out in a language. I mostly learn French by reading, and I’ve found it frustrating how often I find I’ve engrained horrible pronunciations in my head (I only recently discovered the ‘x’ in ‘Aix’ is not silent, much to my embarrassment).
Back when I started learning Japanese, there wasn't a lot of resources available, and most of them were text only. I read multiple times that "Japanese is flat", "it has no stress", and so I did not pay any attention to intonation for a really long time. Only to find out later in my studies the existence of pitch accent. My spoken Japanese is doomed. It's a hell lot of trouble to fix it now.
I also had that issue with English. Too many years pronouncing some words incorrectly. It took me quite some time to pinpoint every mispronounced word and fix them. That was almost 20 years ago, however every once in a while I still find a word or another that still needs to be fixed.
Every other language I'm learning, I focus on learning the correct pronunciation first and foremost. I only use audio made by native speakers. I completely stopped using TTS after it taught me wrong pronunciation both in Russian and Norwegian.
All that said, I don't let that stop me from reading, but I'm extra careful about learning the proper pronunciation of every new word I come across. As a bonus, I get to absorb the word more easily, so it's a win-win.
@@FrancescoCarpi My experience of some English L2 learners here backs up what you say. I have several Chinese friends who learned formal structured English in China. Despite years here completely immersed in English they still struggle with many aspects of the language. Others I know who started later, but using more native media (sometimes just obsessively watching favourite TV shows) developed a far more natural and higher quality English.
You can search here on youtube Spanish/ English bilingual stories and practice listening to the language... extensive listening in a relaxed way helped me lots 😊... you. An do this for any language u learning not just spanish
You mentioned at 6:32 that you just kept reading without looking up words. What do I do when I don't understand (or I'm not sure I understand) what is going on, even though I know every word in the sentence (even in the paragraph)? Yes, I usually have a professional translation in my native language. So, I can look it up. But I don't always have that luxury.
Do you have a source link for the 95% figure you mentioned? I binge watched a bunch of Paul Nation lectures and interviews as well as those from other academics and the figure I've always seen is 98% ie. you should know 98% of the words in the text to get the best results with extensive reading.
The brackets are usually broken down like this:
98%+ = Extensive Reading
90 - 98% = Intensive Reading - this would include the 'grammar translation' between an L1 & L2 version like you mentioned
Less than 90% = Reading pain - something the experts suggest never to do as comprehension will be difficult and it will quickly sap your motivation and enjoyment
Each to their own, but I found the Turkish Uncovered course tedious in the extreme.
Perhaps the other languages are better.
Fair play. I did Spanish Uncovered and I thought it was a decent intro before going on to focus on lots of input. They've got a money back guarantee so hopefully you didn't lose out
Why did you think it was tedious?
Book or something extensive right?
I'm a very slow learner and I want to learn Turkish. I'm more of a reality escapist, so it's hard for me to have interest in things. what's the best way for someone like me who is way below average level ?.
Also would appreciate if you could let me know the prompt that i can use to learn the language through chatgpt.
I've tried to read a book, the story is familiar to me, as you said at 7:29. It doesn't work, precisely because of that. If the plot is familiar, it's not interesting. It is like the ultimate spoiler. I'm not forced to figure out what is going on, because I know it beforehand.
How do I read another language when I do not know the words?
Graded material. And/or very strong interest in the material. I started reading (subscribing to) a computer magazine when I was a teenager, I barely knew any English but I was extremely interested in the material and there were a lot of common technological terms which I could get. Which made it possible for me to read it. Slowly at first, after a year I was up to normal (native) reading speed.
The I started to read short books about science.. again, common terms, and stuff I knew and was interested in. There's no way I could have read novels or anything at that point. But at one point I did start reading books.. I had run out of books to read during my travels, so I picked up an English book in a railway station, in a genre I liked to read. And just.. read through it. I got enough of what it as about to let my brain see images, and from then on it exploded. When I finished the first book I read it again (I liked the book), and found that this time I understood much more.
In short - you need to, somehow, get to a base level so that you have a minimal starting point. This may be through traditional methods (i.e. studying, learning essential words and basic grammar), and from then on it's about finding material (what's called "graded" material in this video), otherwise called Comprehensive Compelling Input.
@tohaason there are no graded readers for Tagalog.
@@GeorgeDeCarlo I believe you.. when that's said, there wasn't any graded readers for English back in my day either. It's just that it was possible to find something I could (barely) read. Obviously it's easier to find something useful and of interest in a language as large as English. It's not impossible in other languages, just more difficult.
very niche comment but I've been watching several of these videos in a row and you caught me off guard by saying Russian (my target language)🤣
No wonder I'm shit at languages. I fuking hate reading and I absolutely despise doing things more than once.
Im learning chinese now and I kinda use this method but not with real text. I usually just ask chatgpt to give me a 1-2 page text with the specified topic, vocab, context, and it works :) Same way I learned high level japanese, I have a book case full of japanese books :D Chinese is a bit harder because Im still a beginner, but I am aiming for chinese books too (if I ever get to that level)
I’m Chinese , and I like to offer some help if you need 😊
Teacher
You have really cool, isn't?
What a spindly web of explanations -- very UN-simple!
Right, russian language as an example - you couldn't have chosen a "better" one to use
two and a half minutes in, 90% just skipping forward through stuff I really dont want to hear. gotta go. please just get to the point.
Skim the pdf then
wants to learn a language but doesn't have the patience to sit through a youtube video. lol. lmao even.