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How to Improve Your Reading Skills in a Foreign Language
Advice from a language tutor
One of the best ways to improve your language learning and widen your vocabulary is to read. But not reading just any way.
If you’re the super-diligent type, you might well be tempted to stop at every word you don’t understand and look it up. I applaud your enthusiasm, but I’d advise you not to do that. Firstly, because it will take a long time, and you will quickly become discouraged when reading one article or a couple of pages of a book takes the best part of an hour. Secondly, because it’s often unnecessary.
When you read in your own language, there are often words you don’t understand, but you generally work them out from context. That’s part of how you widened your vocabulary and learned spelling as you grew up. As you were reading, you absorbed new words along with their spellings.
But you probably weren’t in learning mode, pencil in hand, and so you did this without noticing. I’ve found it impossible to recreate that particular state of mind when I’m reading in another language, so instead I keep the pencil in my hand and underline the words I don’t know as I come across them.
After a few pages of a book or at the end of the article I cast my eye back over them — there are some that I will…
