Languages are tough or that’s how they used to be when I first moved to Germany about 15 years ago for an IT job. On arriving here I was shocked to see that no one spoke English. I was staying in Munich, one of the richest cities in Germany and one which has a large amount of tourism and a few multinational companies. For every 20 people I met, I would come across one person who spoke in broken English. Learning a language was not a hill that I had to climb, it was more of a steep cliff covered in moss.
Now the world has changed. There are hundreds of language learning apps and thousands of free websites providing every piece of information possible on any foreign language. There are numerous academies across the Globe, both online and offline, meet-up groups, books, magazines, and whatnot, focused only on language learners.
The language learners of today do not have the same problem that I had, which was the lack of good quality material. It is that they have too much to choose from.
In all of these choices, people forget how they learned their second language (probably English) in the first place: by reading a lot. Reading is the most important aspect of learning any new language. By reading, the reader builds up critical vocabulary and also subconsciously memorizes the grammar structure of the foreign language. Six months of daily reading will make a huge difference in the reader’s vocabulary as well as grammar.
HOW DOES ONE START?
I would suggest that you start off slowly. No one starts with a 300-page novel unless they have already read a few hundred short stories, 80-page novels, comics, and magazines.
Try reading simple one-page short stories daily. There are so many collections such as Aesop Fables, Arabian Nights, Akbar and Birbal, Tenali Raman, Sherlock Holmes, etc. Most popular English stories are available in every language and that too for free.
A better tip will be to lock yourself in a room and read the story loudly and slowly. Speed is not of the essence since your objective is to learn a new language, not to complete the story. Consistency and vocabulary should be your focus area. In fact, speed reading is detrimental to your learning and you will not have time to process the new words.
WHY SHOULD I START WITH ONE-PAGE STORIES?
You will get confidence. When I started learning German, I started with a 160-page novel and a simple newspaper. I gave up after 3 days and stopped learning for 3 months. Do you know why? The reason is that I was a beginner and had a very limited vocabulary. Building a large vocabulary enough to read a novel takes time and patience.
I had to spend hours going through a German English dictionary for understanding any sentence. What was worse was that these novels cater to seasoned readers. Thus each sentence was over 2 words long with many structures. In a nutshell, I quit and lost three months before I restarted. I realized that starting slow was the way to go. I started with one-page short stories and here I am, easily putting entire novels away.
To explain the example above in numbers, in any sentence a novice might understand about 30 – 50% of the words. This means that the reader has to use a dictionary to look up the remaining words. For a single page, the reader might take about 20 minutes after cross-referencing the dictionary. Now that is not much. However, if you count the same for 300 pages, it’s about 100 hours of reading time which is a lot. This will result in the reader losing motivation.
SHOULD I BE TRANSLATING THE ENTIRE STORY?
When you search for stories in German, you might find “Grimm’s Fables” or “Aesop’s Fables” German. The story might just span one page and you might not have much to read. You would still need to cross-reference with a dictionary to look up the new words.
Alternatively, there is a popular concept of reading called Dual Language reading. In dual language books, you will find the short story in two languages side by side. Usually, the base language is on the left side page while the same story in the Target language is on the right side page. The base language is usually English as the market is broader. The target language could be German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.
This makes life much easier for the student. The reason is that if you don’t know a word, you can just look at the right side of the page and you will know the meaning of the word and the sentence. If you do not wish to see the meaning as you read, you only need to close the right side of the book.
Similarly, such dual language short stories are also available on a few language-learning websites and apps. In these, you will find the same story in two languages side by side thus enabling easier studying.
WHERE DO I FIND SUCH DUAL LANGUAGE STORIES?
DUAL LANGUAGE BOOKS: For most European languages, hard copies of Dual Language Books are available on Amazon and eBay. You can just search for dual language books and you might find a few. You can see an example below which is a dual language book having German and English side by side. These books are also popularly known as Bilingual books.
These books are relatively not purchased by many as you have few websites online which offer the same service for free.
Some of these books might be quite expensive since it is quite a niche topic. The hard copy book gives you complete control and you can choose to read whenever you are free and without any distraction.
DUAL LANGUAGE SHORT STORY WEBSITES: There are a few websites that offer free dual language short stories. In these websites, the format usually followed is that the English paragraph is displayed while the translated paragraph of the target language is hidden with an expand button.
The most popular website for dual language short stories is a website called Childhood Stories. It has 100s of short stories in multiple languages with English as a Base language. You can access the German page from www.childhood-stories.com/german and their collection is absolutely brilliant! The website is free and has short stories in 7 languages with English as a base language. The stories are just one page long and as a reader, it takes only 5 minutes to read one entire story. Some of the stories have audio as well which makes it quite fun.
DUAL LANGUAGE APPS: The most popular app which offers dual language stories is Duolingo. Duolingo is a billion-dollar company that focuses on language learning. It is used by millions of people across the world and has hundreds of short passages in dual language. The app is very user-friendly and one can click on any word which is difficult and the meaning pops up.
Duolingo is considered the best example of a constant repetition method of studying a language. The same words are repeated again and again in the tests and they can thus be easily memorized. Duolingo is considered by many the best free app for learning languages. It has 100s of tests and conversations and paragraphs in many languages which is fantastic. Recently in the July 2021 release, their beta version had Short stories as a feature.
WHAT SHOULD ONE DO AFTER READING MANY SHORT STORIES?
2-3 months later, the reader should be more confident. Move to short novels and comic books. Comic books are easily available in regional languages. There are many famous comics such as the adventures of Tintin, Asterix, Oblex, and even Manga which are available in almost 70 – 100 languages.
For novels, I would recommend any series by the author Enid Blyton. The novels are very small, have a simple language, and should be easy to follow. This kind of short novel might take you a week to read when you are starting off. After three or four novels or comics, the vocabulary starts to repeat a lot and you should be able to read the books much faster.
Even with a decent vocabulary, one must not start with short novels and comics because these kinds of famous books are usually single-language books that are not available in dual language mode.
Finally, you will become more comfortable with reading and you will be able to read continuously and slowly without making many checks against the dictionary. Now you are ready for the final stage of reading which is longer novels such as Sydney Sheldon, Jeffery Archer, Dan Brown, etc. Alternatively, you can also start reading the newspaper after this.
CONCLUSION
Especially for children, this is a proven and fantastic method of studying as it keeps the child fully engaged and interested in the learning process. For adults who are avid readers of books and short stories, this approach is a godsend as the reader gets to remain within his or her own comfort zone and also gets to learn the language of his or her dreams.
Language learners can also succeed by joining a class, by forcibly speaking only in the target language, by joining conversation clubs, etc. The key aspect is that learning must be made fun of else anyone would quit or learn half-baked. And as far as fun goes, reading will always be on top of my list.
bout the Author: Vivek Hariharan
The author of this self-proclaimed magnificent piece of art is Vivek Hariharan, a graduate of the school for the truly gifted folk in Finance. He was so gifted in Finance that he works in marketing to avoid sounding too gifted. He owns and runs a multi-language blog called www.childhood-stories.com which has dual language short stories in 8 languages which makes no money and gives him little pleasure.
Since the age of 13, he has had only one ambition: to become a published and famous author and he hasn’t changed since. He is just as immature and just as broke and just as “not famous”. His passion is to write a fiction series that will create an entire universe in which he can live and in that at least he has money to laugh at like a maniac. His other weird hobbies are playing football like an 80-year-old, hugging his cat until he gets bit, silently looking at the moon and wondering what it’s like to be a dog, and writing short stories.