Reading in foreign languages

”Books should always be read in their original language” is something I often hear from book lovers who speak more than one language. Though I am not entirely convinced that this is true (I may return to this issue in a later post), I thought it might be helpful to dwell a moment on the art of reading texts in languages that are not one's mother tongue.

Whether you find that you need to read a book in a foreign language because it is not available in yours or you choose to voluntarily challenge yourself, there are a few things that I have found help me to not only work my way through foreign texts but moreover have a good time doing it. In this post, I focus on languages that one is not fluent in. To most of you who read this post, English will be a second language that you feel quite comfortable with. But if you took two years of Spanish in high school and have had no exposure to the language since, you may find some of the below thoughts relevant.

Before I get to my advice, I would like to share a little experiment I did the other day in preparation for this post. I gave my wife a simple text (212 words) in her native language but where I had replaced 25 words with native-sounding but completely nonsensical made-up words. I asked her to read the text and then tell me, in general terms, what it was about. She could not do it. The 25 words that she did not know trumped her understanding of the 187 words she did understand. I then changed the text to put blanks instead of the words I had made up. Now she understood the text perfectly well. My point here is that the brain will focus on what it does not understand first, and what it does understand later. It can easily fill in blanks (no information), but when the empty spaces are occupied (unintelligible information) it causes a tilt in the system.

So on that backdrop, here are five pieces of advice for readers of books in foreign languages.

1. Don’t be afraid! It is easy to be taken aback by a wall of words which at first glance seem impenetrable. Maybe you have sometimes read the first two or three sentences of a book and realised you have not understood anything so you put it away from you with a depressed conclusion that the text is beyond your reach. My advice is, do not fear. The text is not your enemy that you need to conquer or die trying. Try instead to see the text as a friend that gives you clues to the story. Approach it with curiosity and love instead of awe and suspicion.
2. Don’t stop! We commonly focus on what we do not understand and take what we do understand for granted. If you read a text and understand only half of the words, you are therefore likely to discard the whole text while in reality you have understood as much as you have not without noticing it, like my wife did. With some imagination and power of deduction you will soon realise that you can actually make out most of the message even though you do not understand all the words. My advice is, keep going. Sooner or later you will find that key word that explains the entire setting or plot. You will stumble upon a phrase that makes what you have just read make sense. Do not go back and re-read the same sentence one hundred times. Keep pushing forward and remind yourself that it is perfectly fine to understand only the main outlines of a chapter.
3. Don’t overuse the dictionary! If you are used to reading in your native language you will also be used to understanding practically every word you encounter. If you, like me, like to look things up in a dictionary or Wikipedia you will sometimes pause your reading to go down some rabbit hole triggered by a term, name, event, or concept that the author has mentioned and that you realise you do not know enough about. If you are reading a book in a different language you will have to stop doing this. If you try to look up every word you do not understand your reading will become unbearably tedious and spasmodic. My advice is, if a word you do not know appears more than twice on the same page, you must look it up. If a word appears more than twice in the same chapter, you may look it up. If a word does neither of the above, you never look it up. Of course, exceptions could be made for words that from context can be understood to be extremely important and which could be looked up despite not appearing very often. Speaking of context, understanding a word from context counts as understanding. Do not look up words you already understand just to reassure yourself. Trust your instincts!
4. Read out loud! When trying to take in complex information make use of as many of your senses as you can to help you. One way of doing this is to read portions of the text out loud. It will force you to pay attention to intonation and punctuation and it will give your brain the opportunity to learn more about the text by not only seeing it but also hearing it, which is the way the brain is used to normally processing language. Most of us speak/listen to language much more often than we read/write it. My advice is, read a paragraph here and there out loud to yourself. You might notice that even though you still do not know the meaning of any more words than you would reading it silently, there is a chance you will understand the general message of the sentences better. I have also noticed that when I feel stuck and re-read a paragraph or two that I have not understood an iota of out loud, I not only understand those paragraphs better but also the following ones after I have returned to reading in silence. Still, if after re-reading a paragraph out loud you still do not follow, advice #2 above applies.
5. Summarise! I have noticed that I sometimes concentrate on the words more than on the story. Especially when I follow my own advice to read out loud. It happens that I pay so much attention to my pronunciation that I forget what I am reading about. My advice is, take some time at regular intervals to recap what you have just read just to remind yourself of the story. The end of each chapter is a natural place for this exercise. Also, when you pick up the book after a break, begin by recapping the story so far before you start the next chapter. Try to evoke pictures, feelings, sounds, and smells. Everything is easier to understand if you are familiar with the context.

I hope that some of these points will prove valuable to you. My only claim to authority in the field is that I speak four languages fluently and can speak and read in another three which I from time to time try to do, as will be evident as this blog develops.

Good luck with your reading!