Reading is the best way to learn

[Ceicil]

@JeremyinFrance

I have been teaching English for 19 years. I have seen many students try to learn grammar, try to learn long lists of vocabulary, but where does it get them? It is like trying to study people by looking at body parts in a mortuary! A student needs to be in touch with real English. The simplest and most enjoyable is to read, read read in English. Start with books that you find easy (Graded readers). The more you read, the more you will understand. Then you can progress to ‘real’ books. Just choose books you enjoy and read wherever you can - on the train, in bed, sitting on the toilet.
I have written 14 readers and I know they work with the people who read them. I have some free stories on my website and you may like to look at my books as well.
Happy Reading!
Jeremy
perso.wanadoo.fr/jeremytaylor

Thank you sir,
When I meet new words, I often learn by heart all of them but I forget all of them after a week not using. Thank you so much! I have to read more and more.
Ceicil

[Jamie_K]

I also think reading is an excellent way to learn a language, but with English you first need a very good handle on how words are pronounced.

There can be horrible results when someone who hasn’t learned to pronounce learns English from years of reading. They can end up with a very fossilized accent based on their own idea of how English words should be pronounced. You may hear them pronounce “write”, “wreck” and “wrong” as [vrait], [vrek] and [vronk], and some of their pronunciations can be so bad, in total, that native speakers cannot understand them.

However, if you pay a lot of attention to pronunciation before your heavy reading starts, you can end up with fluent, beautiful English.

As for the problem of having to look up too many words, that’s easily taken care of by splitting up the difficulty of your reading. You can do what is called extensive reading by reading a lot of things that are slightly too easy for you. This improves your reading fluency. At other times, you can do intensive reading by slowly reading a few shorter things that are a little too difficult for you. This will improve your reading and spoken English a lot.

[Jamie_K]

@carbonarius

I’ve seen many shortened and simplified versions of classic literature, and I even started reading some of them. I must say that I didn’t like it. That’s why I tried reading children’s stories, as the vocabulary was more likely to be understandable for me, and the stories were original.

A company called Townsend Press now has a large number of simplified English novels, and the parts of them I have read are not so bad. Most of them are versions of English and American novels whose language is so old that now even some native speakers have trouble reading them. So, they’re more like translations than like simplifications. They are by authors like Theodore Dreiser, James Fenimore Cooper, etc. I gave one to a foreign friend of mine who hates simplified novels, and she enjoyed it and had no awareness that it was simplified. (And the books cost only a dollar, even though they may be 300 pages long.)

My favorite things to read when I was learning Czech were the translations of the DK Eyewitness series on various scientific and historical subjects. Those really helped me a lot, and because they had so many pictures, I seldom needed a dictionary.