Reading Your First Book in a Foreign Language
Picking up a new language is hard. Reading your first book in it is even harder.
Over the past year I’ve been working towards fluency in another language: French, my family’s long forgotten mother tongue. It hasn’t been easy, not by any stretch of the imagination — their love of grouping things in threes took my American mind a long time to wrap around.
The process is fairly easy in the beginning, when you’re full of enthusiasm and the desire to learn. But eventually, like all things, the fun of it all begins to wither away and it starts feeling like a chore. Let’s face it, there’s a small amount of verb conjugations that you can do before they start driving you mad.
But what’s the answer? What do you do when quitting’s not an option?
For me, there’s been two main things that have reinvigorated my love and desire to learn the language: music and books. Music was the easier of the two — it’s got the lower barrier of entry out of the two — so we’ll start there.
Find a popular artist that performs in the language you’re trying to learn — it doesn’t matter what language that is, as long as there’s somebody signing in it — and download a couple of their songs. If you’re feeling crazy, go for an entire album.
After that, all you’ve got to do is start listening. It’s that easy. Chances are you won’t understand much at first, but it’s a fun, organic way to learn new vocab words. Once you listen to it a few times, look up the words in English. That’ll give you an idea of what it’s all about, then you can start deriving meaning to the unknown words through context.
In addition to teaching you new words and how native speakers construct their sentences, listening to a lot of music in another language will add another dimension to your fluency. It’ll give you an inside look at the culture and idioms of the country whose language you’re trying to learn.
Once you’ve got a few weeks or months of listening to music in your new language, it’s time to start working on another aspect of your fluency: reading comprehension. While reading’s much more difficult than just turning on a song and listening to it, it’s much rewarding. With every turned page, you feel like you’re making real, tangible progress towards your goal.
Picking your first book in another language can be an intimidating thing, so here’s a bit of advice. Pick something you’ve already read in English, something you know in and out. For me, that was the first Harry Potter book.
If you’re still struggling to make sense of it, or are having trouble pronouncing the words in your head as you read along, look for the audiobook. It’s usually not too much of a hassle to find it online, especially if the book’s popular. Worst case scenario, head over to Audible and take advantage of their free book during your sign-up trial. Having somebody read the book to you will make things much, much easier.
Once you start implementing these two things into your learning strategy, you’ll be shocked to see how much quicker your fluency develops. Don’t be afraid to try other things, either. If you find something that seems even remotely interesting — foreign movies, perhaps— give it a try. What do you have to lose?
À demain!
