Reading to learn languages is the most powerful way to learn any language anywhere.

Some activities that I do during the summer to improve my language skills and sort of how the whole five-week thing came to be, and this week, I want to talk specifically about reading because it’s something that you could do anywhere. Dr. Stephen Krashen did a study on hyperpolyglots, and he talks all about what these people who speak more than 10 languages a piece do to learn languages. One of the people he studied, they both … Both people talked about the value of input, right, what you listen to and what you read. One in particular stands out, a man who never moved outside of his native Hungary and spoke multiple languages, and he did it all through doing his pleasure reading in different languages.

So, I think it’s really pretty powerful. I also think that what’s really interesting is that you can use reading anywhere, right? You can control reading. You can’t necessarily control communication. Personally, for example, I can’t teletransport to China right now, right? I can get online and talk to somebody, but I can do reading anywhere, right, with time that I have. Reading, if I focus on a lot on reading, then it’s something that I can do that isn’t going to have a major disruption to my life, right? I can probably find half an hour a day to read, which is what I always recommend for a beginner.

So, one of the difficult parts about reading is not just finding the time. So, for me, I do a lot of reading, of listening, of listening to audio books because of my time, particularly in the past few years since I’ve been writing books and speaking more and teaching, which has been amazing, but the time has to come from somewhere. It’s definitely cut into my pleasure reading time. So, summertime is a time to get to make that up.

Reading to learn languages: my experience with French

I’m actually going to share with you some speaking samples that I did some years ago during a five-week reading period, and it was five weeks of pleasure reading. I want to say this was three years ago, and I did it for about half an hour a day at home. I recorded myself once a week, my fluency. I’ll share those files with you, but back to reading, I wanted to share with you also that I was a kindergarten teacher, and I’m a certified reading teacher. So, I’ve gone through the process of that learning how to read with people. I want to share it with you because I think there are some important takeaways for language learners.

Reading to learn languages: the basics

Now, when you’re literate, of course, those skills transfer between languages, right, but at the end of the day, you got to learn to read, and then you can read to learn. When we’re learning how to read, we’re learning what the words we say look like, okay? Then, as you read to learn, you can learn anything, right? Once you’re a proficient reader, you can pick up anything and learn whatever you want because you could read about it. I think those are two really important things, which means that you get to use reading to learn a foreign language. If you’re already literate, then that’s just amplified.

With all of that said, when we’re teaching people how to read, we really pick a certain range of reading for them to be able to do, so we don’t want it to be too easy because they won’t learn anything,