How can you read when you're still a beginner?

In this LIVE recording of the I Will Teach You A Language Podcast, I answer the question: "I'm a complete beginner. How can I possibly start reading?"
❓Ask Olly a question:
iwillteachyoualanguage.com/ask
📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED:
How to learn a new language with stories:
• How To Learn a New Lan...
Olly's language courses:
iwillteachyoualanguage.com/la...
Olly's short story books:
iwillteachyoualanguage.com/books
LingQ: Learn Languages from Content You Love
www.iwillteachyoualanguage.co...
⏱ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - A fatal flaw in the StoryLearning method?
01:29 - How and why to start reading stories as a complete beginner
05:28 - The 3 keys to learning through stories at ANY level
08:51 - Where can you find stories for beginners?
9:14 - Aren't beginner materials dull?
11:21 - What about languages like Japanese and Chinese?
14:50 - Summary
16:24 - Live Q & A

[@xbluebells]

Cut to the chase! 1) Get a simple story 2) Read 1st time and accept that fact you don't understand. 3) Repeat many times. 4) Learn the words by slowly weaving the meaning together. 4) If you need to learn a new character system, learn that after the stories have been converted to Roman characters.

[@donaenoble7835]

Thanks a lot. Stumbled on this today and after listening to two videos, I didn't know what it was meant regarding stories. Still don't

[@GetStoned_]

@@donaenoble7835 @xbluebells for commenting this because I've found with Olly's videos is he says he'll teach you something then spends the next 20 minutes selling you his course on Learning through stories and never answers the original Question.

[@HeroOfTime303]

@@GetStoned_ Familia Romana is an example of story telling learning (for Latin).

[@trenthammer4127]

thank you human. you saved me 24 minutes.

[@Kalmaro4152]

If you need more than 15-20 minutes to explain something with 5 points, you need to fix your script.

[@alice_hml]

I’ve been learning German for two months (with Duolingo, Seedlang, Easy German, Nicos Weg, Coffee Break German…) and I can already read Olly’s beginner German stories! I encourage beginners to try it early :) You do need vocabulary but you can start after only a few weeks.

[@undeadwerewolves9463]

Ayyy! Ich lerne Deutsch allzu! 😄 Viele glück! 🇩🇪

[@jiafeistan7657]

Are there other stories you've read that you can recommend?

[@ralfj.1740]

Ist bestimmt nicht so einfach Deutsch zu lernen.. aber Sie schaffen das! 🙂

[@shellee888]

I’m with you. I trusted the process. I stopped looking up words. Looked for the gist. All of a sudden! Oh, Snow White saw seven little plates and seven little……. It’s more enjoyable to not constantly look for words in the dictionary. It’s hard. But it’s better and it’s working. In three days I have made more progress than I had in three weeks. I’m teaching myself Modern Hebrew. Thanks for these videos. It’s very helpful.

[@christybontrager3896]

It just dawned on me that I have your "Short Stories" in Swedish book, I found this channel by accident. Just wanted to say that this has been my favorite resource! I always return to it and find more to learn (Also have the audio book, I just wish it was separated into each story instead of one long track)

[@ronlugbill1400]

I used your book to teach beginners in French. I read 1 chapter aloud in French. Then I go back and translate the same chapter. Then, I read the next chapter in French and then translate it into English. With easy books like yours, you can translate on the fly. Works for my French classes.

[@AlmaCatholica]

Gracias por su aporte

[@teamjipper2495]

The best true beginner foreign language book I have ever seen is Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, part 1: Familia Romana, by Hans Ørberg. It teaches you Latin from the first sentence - it remains shockingly comprehensible as you progress. I wish every language I wanted to learn had a book of this type and quality. There is nothing better. Olly are you reading this? (By the way, I really like your books!) I doubt anyone has done a better beginning reader book than Ørberg and his Lingua Latina. A person CAN read Lingua Latina from day 1 (for those who know the latin alphabet).

[@gregorde]

That book (LLPI) is the gold standard of the natural method. Add in Luke Ranieri’s KZbin reading series and it’s perfect.

[@jennifermckeithen1498]

I agree! It would be fantastic if we had books like Lingua Latina for every language. ☺️

[@theprussianempire8931]

For sure! I use this at school.

[@fill0llif]

I actually don't agree with using romaji when starting learning Japanese. It's easy to learn hiragana and katakana, you could learn them in less than a week. I believe it's the right price for not having to fix the pronunciation later on, because it's more difficult associating the right sound with the romanized syllable, while it's easier to do that with a new character.

[@storylearning]

I agree completely, but it’s not an either or. Start learning kana right away yes, but it takes time to read them comfortably, and in that time you can be getting a lot of useful input. Either way, it’s vital to shift to reading real Japanese ASAP.

[@fill0llif]

@@storylearning I see, I get it, I'm probably biased on this, because I obsess over pronunciation, so I would prefer sacrifice that time to have a solid basis of pronunciation

[@Bmonkeygurl]

I find reading without Kanji kind of hard. I picked up children's books with just hiragana, and found it much more difficult. I realize I might be in the minority.

[@Kannot2023]

@@Bmonkeygurl You are not, I started to learn Japanese and romanji is more natural for a silabaric language as japanese. Kanji is good for tonal languages as Chinese. If japanese will use latin language it would be easier to write and it can spread farter

[@ashervaldez9975]

My problem before was I can't memorize anything I read a word I translate it in google and the next day it's gone like I had no memory of it. I think in Roman Alphabet so I just think like the word for Help is tetsudau I know the Kanji for tetsudau and the kana is just from a conversion from the romaji writing. I think not in sound but in letters so learning with romaji is better for me (not saying reading just seeing it will make it stick much better really)

[@LauraBCReyna]

When I started learning Italian I mostly used *translated passages* to learn new word. I got these short passages /phrases from textbooks or by copy/pasting online Italian text into google translate. I pasted a lot of KZbin comments written in Italian into google so I could understand convos ppl were having. I also bought a book called 2000 Most Common Italian Word in Context which had important words in sentences-- all translated. Within 2-3 months I had a pretty big vocabulary. I did not use Anki or physical cards. I bought Olly's short story book right at the beginning of my studies, but like a lot of ppl I couldn't read it (even tho I know quite a bit of Spanish). It wasn't until I used translations to build up my vocabulary that I went back to read Olly's book and found I could understand enough of it for it to be comfortable (not frustrating).

[@jessesjapanese8484]

I also bought Olly's book at the very beginning of my Italian studies. I ended up looking up 10 - 30 words per page on the first go through. While not necessarily advisable, I did find that when I went through the books again a few weeks later I had a much better grasp of the vocabulary and sped up quite a bit. That's without deliberately studying those words (beyond looking them up once).

[@selvyngilbert9032]

Oily, I got your Portuguese book. Love it! Really enjoy reading the stories. Obrigado!

[@reganredding7536]

I spent 5 months learning Serbian online. After 100 lessons, 102 to be exact, i was disappointed that I wasn't fluent and actually felt like a beginner. I learned grammar, tenses, verb conjugations ,numbers, etc. But couldn't understand basic conversations. I am now reading stories to become fluent. I think the stories will teach you fluency, but a good foundation is the key to reading and understanding. Thanks for your videos. Do you think learning Cyrillic at the same time as Latin script is a good idea?

[@ksenijabulatovic1426]

Story time! Native Serbian here. I had a friend, he was French, we were hanging out a lot, so at some point he wanted to learn Serbian. I had a small Serbian-German dictionary by my side, and the Serbian part was written in Cyrillic. So I explained him quickly how to read both Cyrillic and Latin. He picked up pretty well, and soon he was able to 'read' everything (he wasn't able to pronounce everything, but that's a whole other problem). So in the next few days/weeks he was playing a lot with the language. I was amazed how well he did. At some point I gave him a text or a post to read for practice. But it was in Latin script. I thought okay, even easier for you, isn't it? But no. Then he explained me that it was much easier for him to read Serbian in Cyrillic script because he had no previous knowledge to be in conflict with while learning. Most of the times I have no idea which script I'm reading or writing. The writing part can annoy me. One word in Latin the next in Cyrillic... You can call it poly-script problems 😂 One more great thing about Serbian Cyrillic systems is that it is 100% phonetic. 1 letter 1 sound and that's it 😎 I hope you're still learning Serbian. Btw I would LOVE to see Olly's Short Stories in Serbian 💖

[@sirisaac8727]

Just keep at it, unfortunately, Serbian is quite difficult but in reality, once it clicks it makes so much sense. Every word is both read and written the same, and people talk somewhat understandably. We don't silently "say" half of our sentences like many languages

[@terrysanders2817]

How extremely positive was your presentation!

[@daviedmmcg]

I have concert tickets to see a Norwegian artist called Aurora next year on the 29th of March, I'm going to use your materials and methods to try and learn Norwegian as much as I can between now and then (she sings in English so this is just for fun). I've never learned a foreign language before but I'm excited about learning, especially as a fan of reading. Wish me luck and thank you for taking the time to help people discover different languages!

[@mariacrist101]

It's great to see an Aurora's fan here! Norwegian is a beautiful language, I know a few words and I hope you're progressing well. Best wishes 💞

[@jeremyh9033]

Lykke til! I've been learning Norwegian for a year now and I love it! :)

[@cant_findmypen]

Omg I’m seeing her on the 30th of March what a coincidence

[@daviedmmcg]

@@cant_findmypen Awesome, hope you enjoy the gig. I would look out for tickets sooner, last week she released tickets for a different venue and I managed to get a couple and it's on the 6th of November. That's for Glasgow but I'm sure she will have similar dates for the rest of the UK and EU. Edit: a word

[@helenlouiseadams]

How was your concert? And hope you are still getting on well with the language. Did you ever see that video of a guy who learned basic Norwegian in 2 weeks and was then interviewed on Norwegian TV?

[@jokerzyo]

Holy shit! I just realized I already bought your book before ever seeing your videos. Tack så mycket

[@beesr]

I find your Spanish books very useful and they are great for keeping me motivated! Do you have any plans to bring out a Polish short stories book at all?

[@johnhasty3411]

Duolingo, drops, Memrise…are great for starting a journey into a new language. I like your stories for fleshing out my learning.

[@mariabarking1751]

I have read several of your books in Spanish. My favourite was WWII and I have just bought your 2 latest which I think will be great for conversation topics.

[@roninkoans6065]

I literally took google translate and read each chapter several times and I took the problem words and made spaced repetition decks out of them (I never actually did the decks lol) but for some reason it actually helped alot

[@janerussianchannel4669]

I'm so glad that you Sale your books on Amazon, I love Amazon! And thank you for your helpful videos and for writing your books to help people like me learn languages. I'm learning Russian, German, and Spanish, and I see that you have those on Amazon.

[@sailorcat]

I bought some Japanese children's books (from Sailor Moon).^^ I still have to look up a lot of words, but it works really well. They use simple structures and are written in Kana only.

[@Arctagon]

When I started learning Japanese, I was fortunate enough to be on a university exchange in Japan, and my university had a bookshelf with a decent number of Japanese graded readers of all levels. These particular series even had a level 0, whose stories were comprised solely of exactly the kind of sentences you'll find in a beginner textbook - extremely short and basic. Each page was also mostly occupied by meticulously crafted pictures that would give enough of a hint as to what each sentence was saying. These graded readers were phenomenal, and I sorely wish graded readers just in general were more common, but particularly ones that are so simple one can start reading them straight away, like the ones I just mentioned. They are nigh on non-existent. P.S.: Great t-shirt, Olly.

[@unnoticed9988]

I’m in the process of learning Japanese, would you know the books you were reading and where I can possibly find them?

[@JK-ot6ek]

Do you remember any of the book titles?

[@donaenoble7835]

I am still desperately waiting for someone to explain what they mean by stories??? Does this mean stories well k own ones like Cinderella, Snow White etc, but written in another language?

[@Arctagon]

@@donaenoble7835 That's exactly what it means! It can be anything!

[@Arctagon]

I don't know why, but it looks like I'm being censored for whatever reason, when trying to respond to the other replies here. If you didn't see my comments in time before they were deleted, or if you're just wondering about the books I read or have any other questions, feel free to DM me.

[@ALVARITO2370]

I learn Esperanto. I would like to adquire the languaje by listening music and watching videos and stories for children. I enjoy it all because I have fun while learning .

[@daverd6434]

I created a method for total beginners to learn through stories. And it’s to have full literal translations (word by word, not the way digital translators does) for A1 books. And it seems it works.

[@ronlugbill1400]

I am doing that with my French classes. We are reading Olly Richards' book, "101 Conversations in Simple French". I read a chapter in French, share the vocabulary, then translate on the fly into English. They have copies and follow along. Seems to be working.

[@jaydee9331]

I hope the Chinese lesson this September has a traditional character version.

[@namless3654]

Instead of using romanji I suggest using hiragana. It's the phonetic alphabet for japanese. Just a suggestion i would rewrite all your books using that instead. It's easy and quick to learn. Plus this way will also give you a heads up on what grammar and conjugation looks like because almost all of it is in hiragana.

[@JoaoSilva-mk3vm]

I'm study English by myself, I like your videos and how your experience to learn other languages. I would like you realeased books to English study.

[@gianniritschard9227]

Very interesting approach, I've seen you have no stories for beginners who know little words yet in Thai, can you recommend any ressources for that?

[@Volleyball_Chess_and_Geoguessr]

I took 5 years of Spanish in high school but I was never fluent. Probably because I never had anyone to ever speak it to. That was over 10 years ago now and I feel like I've forgotten a lot. That was really discouraging to me that I put in all that time and didn't come out fluent. Now I've been learning Hebrew (mostly on Duolingo) for the last year and a half and I'm trying to be more positive.

[@shariecebrewster5962]

Thank you for your vidioe

[@HablaConOwens]

I read what i can. Simple short stories. Reading really helps

[@tiddlypom2097]

I'm a beginner in Chinese - I'm interested in your upcoming course. Are you doing a traditional character version?

[@heerbrahmbhatt6917]

I usually start with good music of that language now music makes it so easier, interesting and fun to remember when to use which word etc… but this is pertaining to the language which have alphabets similar to English!

[@sofialmeidah]

I study languages by translating, doesn't matter the material, I use many different types so I won't have major problems regarding reliability. To start I only have to know the basics of how the language works and the writing system, if possible. I use a reliable dictionary online and just translate bit by bit of the sentences and try to find patterns and these are the responsibles for teaching me grammar, while the vocabulary is learnt throughout the process. Of course I need and "official translation" as proof to check what I'm doing, so it's not like I just grab anything randomly. I believe it is really useful when reading stories as a complete begginer, it can help to get you started.

[@Asrashas]

I started to try to do that with Japanese, but found it a bit hard to do. How would you go about that? Problem is: Word boundaries are often not obvious without knowing the words that are used. Particles and the three different scripts they use usually help to split the sentence into segments. But not always. Japanese does usually not use spaces to separate words. Another problem could be just finding the right kanji in a dictionary. But that can be partially alleviated by getting stories that have furigana. Though these can be absolutely tiny. Tiny enough to be a bit of a hassle to decipher on scans, if you have bad luck and can't find high-res ones. And even in print, I have a manga with furigana, they are hard to make out. So it can be absolutely straining to even just scrap together the vocabulary for a single speech bubble. Or a page. Trying to do that for a chapter would probably be frustrating. So, any Ideas how you would go about it? I can probably give concrete text samples, if you want to engage that much.

[@sofialmeidah]

@@Asrashas you can draw the kanji in the keyboard, some allow that, and if the resource allows you to, you can simply copy it and use online dictionaries. as for grammar, I would definitely council to see a bit of particles, sentence order and how verb conjugation works beforehand. to know when a word ends and another starts shouldn't be as hard if you know how particles are supposed to be, even though they can be tricky, so you can go trying to reduce characters to see when the meaning stops being the same and when you get a translation that makes sense. I understand it can be a bit complicated if you don't know much vocabulary and maybe japanese isn't the best language to start from the very first day with that, but you wouldn't need more than a month or a couple of them of accumulation of vocabulary and basic grammar studies to be able to do that.

[@oscarmorales6538]

Wow, that's amazing! You're great!

[@crystalclear6660]

I’m not at the very beginning of learning Spanish. But I think I would need a pretty simple book. When I hear or read Spanish one of three things happens: I understand completely what was said, I understand the gist of what was said and at my worst level of understanding I can only pick out a couple of phrases here and there.

[@Darkdally]

I've been learning Russian, and I do have your 'Short Stories in Russian' book, as it happens. It was recommended by my main go-to for learning. Of course with Russian, you lose the familiarity of the Latin alphabet. I spent a while familiarizing myself with the Cyrillic alphabet. I immersed myself in it and pronounced everything I could until reading it was natural, and then I began learning. I honestly let it soak in for a long time before I started really, properly learning, but then the learning came much faster. I mean, any language with a different alphabet is going to at first require your brain to kind of switch modes. Anyway, I knew of your channel and had one of your short stories books, and it is good, but yeah, at the start, even knowing how to pronounce the words, they meant little to me, with so little vocabulary. What I did and recommend prior to reading stories, which is really easy is to watch movies or TV in your target language. You get context because you see their body language, etc, and you hear inflection and intonation and things.. I do read. I also translate many of my video games to Russian - this kind of forces you to recognize some key words, but really, just went to Netflix and searched Russian TV/movies and watched those, or any other place online.. easy at the start, and continues to help. And obv not only vocabulary but pronunciation. :) thx. I like your book.

[@ralfj.1740]

When I started to learn Dutch I read some books that were written for children, was much easier and helped me progress quickly, I also read comic strips

[@rafaeljonathancamiloveraro4199]

I will give this method a try with Finnish. I have two books on “easy Finnish” language. Will come back with my conclusions in some weeks.

[@muskyoxes]

On your other videos on story learning i got frustrated seeing comment after comment after comment of "this is great! I read Harry Potter in my target language!" Those people, from my perspective, _already_ _know_ _the_ _language_ they say they're learning! I'd consider myself done if i was that good at a foreign language. It's sounding to me like it's not worth crafting a story style for beginner learning. Standard textbooks aren't fun, but neither are children's books, and even the simplest book needs a baseline of a couple hundred words. And textbooks at least are available. Stories that are crafted ideally for beginning language learning are often not.

[@jay67937]

What about writing for beginners? How do you start writing in your target language, or better yet; when should you start writing in your target language?

[@someperson9536]

Do you have any recommendations for beginning reading material for ancient Greek?

[@russelsmithard7566]

Does anyone know where I can get beginner short stories for Egyptian Arabic. I want to try the story learning method but there is a big lack of resources when it comes to Egyptian Arabic

[@Gigusx]

Did your neck get burned? :P The question of the podcast is something I've been wondering too, because although you mentioned many times that one has to read at their level, I never heard you answer just what is a complete beginner supposed to do when they're in a way, not at any level, because they don't know any words. I've never enrolled in any of your courses but I have your short stories in Spanish, and it surprised me how much I understand the stories I've read, specifically the first story (all chapters) in volume 1 and 2 (weird order of reading, but I was waiting for the delivery of vol. 1 which isn't on Kindle yet :D). I understood most parts, the entire plot, but there were definitely some gaps regarding details, and I also know very little grammar but that didn't stop me from getting the plot. And, after rereading a few times I can understand nearly everything in these chapters, and many words I can easily recall days/weeks after just by thinking about them, and I've also picked some grammar. It surprised me how much I understood because I've had very little exposure to Spanish before getting into reading, I had no formal classes or Spanish speaking people around me. I've only gone through some parts of introductory audio courses (Language Transfer, Coffee Break Spanish), and I'm talking

[@storylearning]

Really helpful comment, thanks!

[@Gigusx]

@@storylearning Absolutely! Thanks to you as well :)

[@contrevaloir]

He get's to the point at 11:45.

[@shariecebrewster5962]

Yes dp have a qustion on your book or vudoe

[@slongf15]

What kind of books do we read to our little children and how do we read those books to them?

[@johncampbell3806]

Ok now I am going to show my age but when I was a kid most of us learned to read through comicbooks. So my question is,is this a good way to read a new language. You can find Spider-Man comics in various languages. As a benefit I can read the same issue in English and read that same issue in another language. Any thoughts.

[@garythomas738]

I haven't seen past the 1:00 mark of this video yet, but what I can say is that I'm a complete beginner in Portugese (purchased Short Stories on 13th Nov) and I can already read the first chapter (and much of the second) of Feijoada Maluca. There are words common to English, common to the Spanish, French and Italian that I've picked up over the years. Obviously I'm not picking up every little detail but I know that Daniel and Julia got on a plane. Haha. I'm loving the StoryLearning Method. Keep up the great work! I have used my own method for Indonesian and Hindi, by singing all the songs in those languages. I'm not too far from starting the same trick with Portuguese. Now to see the rest of the video.

[@andrewnunes3610]

Although Portuguese is similar to Spanish, there are words for example embarazada that means grávida in Portuguese.

[@helenlouiseadams]

Great! What Portuguese songs do you like?

[@troythevis4456]

Olly, do you have any bisaya (cebuano) short stories. That is the language I am trying to learn. I tried the Cebu newspaper today only reading a paragraph of one story. I read the paragraph several times and have no clue what the paragraph was about. I will continue going over my common phrases and words in bisaya and hope that will improve my reading. I am having a very hard time finding short stories in bisaya as of now. Thank a for all your great videos on language learning. I will not give up and continue to read.

[@misscamay]

I was browsing to buy your Spanish books in apple but you only have one Mexican Spanish - most commonly used in the US

[@edcrfvtgbyhnujmikolpqazwsx]

I would suggest absolute beginners to take the Michel Thomas course before anything else. After completing his program in about a month (if you take one class a day, for example), you can read texts at an upper intermediate level and beyond, which allows you to explore stories you actually enjoy reading.

[@someperson9536]

What do you think of making up your own stories in your target language and having your instructor or tutor check to see if they are correct?

[@mathematix-rodcast]

Writing and writing a lot makes a huge difference. Having someone review it for you would be very helpful if your instructor is good. Writing in a journal helps a ton.

[@ZohaibKhan-jp9mv]

My name is zohaib khan I have been listening your podcast for many months I have a question I want to buy your short story ebook in english but website says you can't purchase ebook and they say you have paper book it's too expensive plus it takes a lot time come my village how can I buy ebook

[@harunhernandez]

what's the difference between olly's stories and the normal graded readers by the major companies?

[@maryvictorious5893]

I'm reminded of kindergarten picture books.

[@robertg8303]

Should you just read. Or should you read abs listen to audio book same time ? How is the best way?

[@evilsnake343]

Where to get short easy stories for hindi beginners? Or what would be the best way to go about creating my own short stories, if needed?

[@shariecebrewster5962]

Yes i am new on for my class::::::::::

[@talesfromapartment8497]

The contact form on your Web site is broken. I'd like to know if the $297 course fee is just for Spanish Uncovered, all of the Spanish courses, or all of the content on the Website. Thank you.

[@GKEK]

Do you teach simplified or traditional Chinese characters?

[@CarlosDuran-dy3cf]

WHAT ABOUT THE AUDIO FOR ENGLISH 101 CONVERSATIONS?

[@Roywebcafe]

I have German and Dutch short stories. Have reasons for learning both but advised that it is a bad idea to learn two languages that are similar. Was at A2/B1 in German but A1 in Dutch. Have you learned two languages that are similar with success?

[@notwoermi9750]

Well, he can speak french, spanish and italian

[@leonidassavvides]

The Short Stories series, in the different Languages, are the same stories in all series --- just is the target language that changes??? e.g. Russian, Spanish, French, etc. are the same stories

[@nishanair723]

Main context of stories would be same, but items, names, places, etc. would be different. Like the first story about a food item has different food item in French, Spanish, Italian, Korean. So probably it would be same case of others too...

[@coolbrotherf127]

Me: I want to learn through reading! *Opens Japanese book and sees a wall of Kanji* ok, nevermind. That was my initial reaction to reading Japanese. First I learned the kana syllabaries then I did study the kanji a bit everyday and found ways to quickly search for vocab. Eventually I had picked up enough vocab that things started to slowly make sense. That beginner phase took about 7 months for me, but after that, I started to be able to watch anime with Japanese subtitles and more or less understand most of the dialogue without having to look up every word. Now I have just finished reading through some of the Harry Potter books in Japanese along with the audiobook audio.

[@JohnDoe-rn8rz]

Pretty much what Assimil does.

[@dangan_kokichiyuhhh6340]

what if you know hiragana already? im still learning katakana but i know hiragana with a few mistakes here and there

[@dorothygarriott9721]

What about pronunciation in the language one choses as a beginner?

[@marisameans9859]

So I have some Spanish experience (decades old) and I'm thinking reading Dune (a favorite book) in Spanish is a bit advanced.

[@sandorMrBeen]

I'am interested to learn persian. I still don't understand how to get the right comprehensible input stories.... I couldn't find transcriptions neither....

[@faedollin5421]

The question is, what stories dose olly use?

[@gillwillows]

Is it possible to access the comments which popped up during the live?

[@maa7528]

Yes, in case you will watch the video in your laptop or desktop

[@Harry-Sachs]

There's an option to do that.

[@shariecebrewster5962]

Catch yp on my learn my skill

[@andreapreku3652]

How do you read foreign language as a beginner? Very slowly...

[@mlsmith67]

The one thing I find disappointing and frustrating about Ollie's videos her is that he refers to things that he says have " a link below", only there never appears to be a link! For instance, today I watched the one about the various "lingua francas" that have existed (currently English) and which one he believes will be next. He pointed down to a document link (which he said would appear below) which was not there. And then KZbin immediately switched to something else.

[@liontitties]

Esta camiseta es súper cool

[@ryanagar7498]

Does anyone else feel the short story books are closer to intermediate than beginner? I know about 1500 words give or take and I still am nowhere near 80-90% comprehension (in terms of understanding all the words). I can roughly get the plot. Am I aiming to understand the plot or 80-90% of the words.

[@storylearning]

hey Ryan, hopefully you find the answer to your question in this video!

[@ryanagar7498]

@@storylearning hey Olly, I think you said words right? I watched live and just catching up 🤣 thanks for the content Olly

[@justjoshininjapan700]

I still don’t know how to “go with the flow” story reading, not looking things up in Japanese. When it’s all new kanji, I can’t sound it out and I can’t infer the meaning. I understand in phonetic systems you can keep reading then realize what a new word means and pronounce/use it readily. But in Japanese without looking it up, it’s literally completely unknown. I won’t know how it’s pronounced at all.

[@user-rx9zl7iz4d]

yeah. with a language like arabic or hebrew for example, you can use the “alphabet key” to figure out what a word says, but with japanese or chinese, it’s not that simple. you have to memorize and if you don’t know a word, then there’s not much you can do other than looking it up.

[@troythevis4456]

👍

[@atahualpaarias1840]

does reading early worsen your accent?

[@matelo1433]

i want that shirt it is clean!

[@justread1530]

I think you needle the audio to, because if you begin to learn a language from scratch, you williams learn wrong. Do you have audio on your stories? I sow one of tour bolos atlético Amazon, but without audio

[@jonathangamble]

Olly, Can you get to a high level with extensive reading only? Don’t want to look up every word nor use ssr…

[@jessesjapanese8484]

Depends on how much you don’t already understand and how much you’re willing to look up. If the max number of lookups you’re willing to do is 5 per page for example, maybe you could get away with extensive reading while not knowing 5-10 words a page. You’ll hopefully pick up the other words through context. You could also go based off of the “greyness” of your understanding of the word. If you think you kind of have an idea, skip looking it up. If you have no clue and it seems important to the sentence, go ahead and look it up. If you wanted you could also go for a “this seems familiar…” style where you only look up words you know you’ve seen a bunch before but don’t know the meaning yet. Any of those strategies ensure that the number of lookups your making decrease while hopefully still leaving the gist of the story understandable. I highly doubt that anyone has to use SRS. it’s convenient in getting you through reading certain sentences over time, but I don’t think people were using that type of system before computers came around. I could be wrong, but I haven’t yet heard of an SRS being effectively used before computers.

[@Soulskinner]

(I haven't watched the video yet, but I'll watch it) But can you make video about reading Japanese (and Chinese?)? Because it's kinda easy with other languages. You just get some stuff and read it. But what to do with this kind of languages? Where you don't really know how to read Kanji words? And which is more important, how to read to actually get some progress? Someone can say "read children books!", but these have some problems like low amount of Kanji and they usually don't contain much text. So this variant isn't working. %) (I'm asking, because I haven't seen a video on this topic, on KZbin, like with details)

[@jessesjapanese8484]

13:30 He basically said to use stories which have romanization at the very start to at least be able to engage with stories while learning the script on the side. You do need to learn the script so that you can read anything you want. Especially for Japanese, there’s something called furigana, which is hiragana or katakana characters written over kanji. These are often found in Shonen manga, so the stories are still quite varied and interesting. To learn hiragana and katakana you could just power through them. Doing like 5 a day or each (5 because of how the script is set up). You could use mnemonics. I don’t know where my teacher found them, but we watched a video that gave the character, a picture, and a word which has a similar sound to that character (ex. い was EAgle and れ was WREck). Good luck

[@Soulskinner]

@@jessesjapanese8484 I'm talking about more advanced levels (which you can get because of complains about not many Kanji, in children books). ^_^ "He basically said to use stories which have romanization at the very start to at least be able to engage with stories while learning the script on the side." - No! I'm completely and totally against usage of Romaji. Maximum only for more easy input in dictionaries. Or, like some courses for complete beginners, but it's a questionable too. You can learn Kana in like couple of weeks. Maybe even quicker. But! And that's important but: you really need to practice to actually learn them. And by actually learning, I mean when you don't "remember" what sounds one or another Kana symbol have, but reading as... Well. As your native languages letters. And romaji, just takes this practice from you. So I think, everyone should start from learning Kana, and then, using actual Kana, while reading and stuff. "He basically said to use stories which have romanization at the very start to at least be able to engage with stories while learning the script on the side." - and the catch is: you just have no idea what the heck is going on, in these stories, if it's way beyond your grammar level. ^_^ So you need to look up grammar, to get it... Which breaks all that idea if just immersing. Or something like this. So it would be nice to get instructions how to work with this kind of stuff, while actually learning the language. Not just translating it. "Especially for Japanese, there’s something called furigana, which is hiragana or katakana characters written over kanji." - and it's actually quite rare thing. At least, as I've found. Because you usually see children books almost without Kanji, or teen/adult ones with Kanji, but furigana only for some Kanji. "These are often found in Shonen manga, so the stories are still quite varied and interesting." - but if you know some Shonen manga, with active usage of Kanji (like in books for adults) with Furigana, can you recommend me titles? And it would be nice, if you know any Ranobe with Furigana. "we watched a video that gave the character, a picture, and a word which has a similar sound to that character (ex. い was EAgle and れ was WREck)." - The book I used to learn Hiragana had mnemonic pictures of these. But hm. I think they was waaay too complicated to become good mnemonics. At least I think that it's more effective, when you have some simple mnemonic images, which rather represent one or another idea. With Kanji. Actually, I really liked (and it looks quite effective) The World Of Kanji, book. (but Mnemonics is another... and really long story)

[@jessesjapanese8484]

@@Soulskinner I was just pointing you to the time in the video he gave an answer to your question and paraphrased what I understood from it. I personally don't think using romaji is great in learning Japanese mainly because the sounds you automatically associate with the English alphabet will frequently be different from the ones you'll associate with the Japanese characters. I have never attempted to learn any Chinese language so I have no idea how helpful or harmful using English letters would have, though I frequently heard it can be helpful. I think it mainly depends on how in control you want to feel. If you want to understand 100% of everythiは and が.ng all the time, you're in for a rough ride in language learning. Even if you attempt to learn whatever grammar is relevant in the story, you might not "get" it for a long time. A good example in Japanese is the difference between は and が. Native Japanese people who have no studied the grammar at a high level generally can't explain all the differences between those two particles. They have a feeling for what's right. You can probably guess what some grammar could be in many cases. You might be wrong, but that's also okay. With more repeated and novel exposure to the same type of grammar you would get a stronger grasp of the idea over time (though it is, admittedly, slow). Yeah, furigana is not all that common in books, newspapers, or the like. What really boggles my mind is when there's a two-kanji word, but furigana for only one of the kanji. Anyway, I think just about any manga from "Shonen Jump" would have furigana over every kanji. Sometimes they have furigana over things like "That guy" to make it clear who "that guy" is. I don't know of any light novels with furigana off the top of my head. One thing you can do: get a Chinese keyboard on your phone and write the kanji in as you see it. When you look it up you'll see the potential readings. It's a slow process, but you'll just have to trust that you'll get better over time. The other option would be to go through a course like Remembering the Kanji by Heisig. Personally I only ever got through the first half of the list..... I always got too frustrated with the process. I don't know... I don't remember all the mnemonics, but I do remember a fair amount of them and they'll sometimes pop up in my head. You don't have to do any of the things I said. They're just potential ways to give one a leg up to get to that next level. Good luck!

[@Soulskinner]

@@jessesjapanese8484 Heh. I was going to write my answer a better way. (because it's kinda messy, when you're answering to this kind of stuff in 4 AM XD), but you've answerd more quickly. Lol. But I kinda feel more stupid. I was thinking that Manga with furigana (while using lots of Kanji) is rather exception. Or with things like Dragon Ball (I've noticed that there's not much Kanji used), Pokemon and this kind of stuff. But it looks like, not that often, but it's a quite common thing. Like Demon Slayer have it. But Tsugumomo uses furigana only whith more "complicated" Kanji. (I've only checked out these two) While in Visual Novels and Ranobe it's a really rare thing. If there is any. Cuz I've found only one Visual Novel with furigana (on Steam) - Tokyo School Life. Ok. Here is more clear explanation of what I've meant: When we're talking about completely alphabetical languages, it's easy to talk about reading. Like you take something more, or less close to your level and just read. Like starting from the children books. To some technical stuff. And all this. From time to time you can just read. Without thinking about completely understanding it. And in general, I think reading is one of the most effective ways to learn vocab. While it's helping with lots of other stuff. But with Japanese... You can kinda start from children books. But to go further. You need to actually know all these Kanji words to actually read. Meanwhile, children books usually don't use many Kanji. Only simplest ones. While books for adults (and teens?) usually contain tons of Kanji. You can actually look these up. I can say even more: if you're reading something in your browser, you just can use addons like "Yomichan", to get fast translations. ^_^ You just hover your mouse cursor over unknown word and just press "Shift". And get translation. But it breaks "the flow". Because you're constantly looking up reading of these Kanji. But yeah. It looks like that Manga can be that "middle ground". He just speaks about complete beginners. That's the problem. While (at least to me) in reading, hardest part looks when you're somewhere in the middle? For example, childern stories just annoys me. Because grammar looks too simplistic in these (and not many Kanji, lol). While in even easy to understand Ranobe I constantly need to check grammar and Kanji readings, to understand what the heck is going on there. And no. I'm not talking about 100% understanding, but rather understanding in general. And I rather have troubles with how "words are glued" and "grammar words" (stuff like たい, らしい, すぎる). So it's getting kinda messy. And in general all that "reading in Japanese" topic looks quite different, but... There are lots of promises from various KZbinrs that they'll make videos on exactly this topic, but no video from anyone. XD (but reading Manga looks promising %), at least it'll save from these troubles) "The other option would be to go through a course like Remembering the Kanji by Heisig." - I would rather recommend The World Of Kanji. I've actually tried RTK, but got frustrated with adding Kanji to Anki. But more important thing, after some time it turns into mess. At least, it was for me, and I've started to forget lots of Kanji. While with The World Of Kanji, I've finished 1K Kanji and still don't make many mistakes. Actually, I'm going to try to learn grammar by sentences... from The Dictionary Of Japanese Grammar. Because I've noticed that it've became more easy to understand (?) one or another Kanji. Or rather to _see_ these better and remember. While usually complexity of a text for me, is question of the Grammar. If there's grammar which I know more on less, it seems simple, while if it's (way?) higher from my level, then it seems really hard. And it's much more easy to look up translations of words, than grammar points. So I just think that it would be more effective to grind this aspect. And yeah. Learning readings of Kanji, I found too... Complicated? Like tons of Kanji have lots of readings and exceptions, and this kind of stuff. And even another "and" - it's hard to "connect" these readings with other aspects of a Kanji. Like you can't do tricks like with meanings. When you know components, maybe remember some visual representation and kinda "build" from these the meaning. And mnemonics are too "unstable" to use them. They have lots of cons. While learning words is too ineffective. Like you ran learn some Core 6K words, open some book... And understand that you have no idea about meanings of most of the words there. Because that book have it's own "Core 6K" words. XD So I think that it's useful to learn Kanji meanings and this kind of stuff. But Kanji readings maybe better to keep until "you" get more advanced in Japanese. Like you know the word itself, you just need to learn that "these" Kanji are used for that word. "I have never attempted to learn any Chinese language so I have no idea how helpful or harmful using English letters would have" - yeah. Same story for me. I wonder how kids there learn hieroglyphs, and how they check out readings of these. %) So I was talking only about Japanese.

[@jessesjapanese8484]

@@Soulskinner I think the presence of furigana depends on the source of the manga to a large extent. I read some webcomics and you almost never see furigana, but then it's everywhere in Shonen Jump. With books, the furigana sometimes seems really random. For example you might see the furigana written over "boku", even if it wasn't the first instance of that kanji on the page and even though it's an extremely easily understood and common kanji. I actually think picking books is kind of hard. I'm not all that into reading children's books, so I've gone the graded reader route, but I'm not all that crazy about most of the stories and books that I've found so far. I've tried to get into reading native material a bit early, but it's really hard, even for things that seem like they should be relatively simple. I know what you mean by breaking the flow. I think that's why many people suggest reading stuff that you already know 95-98% of the content. I can personally never find things in that range until I get pretty good, so I haven't bothered. To give you a personal story, I tried reading a novel in Japanese after taking classes for several years and doing an intensive 3-month study abroad. Since it took me so long to get through a page I tried reading two pages a day, no matter what. Halfway through I gave up because I had no idea what was happening in the story anymore. Shifted to manga (One Piece) and read 50 volumes of it until I started getting a little bored. I then went back to that first novel and, to my surprise, my speed had increased enough to where I could easily finish a section (maybe 3-5 pages?) in half the time it took me to read a page before. Reading manga was a godsend in my case. Yeah, I think grammar is a tricky one. At least with syntax or those endings, what might be a good idea is to do a reading session, make a note of which grammar point seems to be the most important or interesting, and then only look up that point. Then try to notice that point during the next few reading sessions and see if you can remember the rules or whatever. It's a bit more "learning" than "acquisition", but it might give you some feeling on control and ease. I'm attempting to NOT do that with Italian (like literally no grammar at all -- just to see if I can), and while I can sometimes roughly guess what verb endings (for example) are referring to, usually I have no idea and it is really frustrating lol I've never heard of the World of Kanji, but if it works, it works and you should keep using it. Like I mentioned before with my Italian, a lot of my strategy is to look up words and then just straight up guess the grammar lol. Don't know if that's more efficient or effective, but as you said, looking up grammar can be really difficult. Yeah, when I first started learning Japanese in school I tried to learn all the readings and found it ridiculously difficult. Especially since I didn't know which readings were the most important. In the end, through manga, I just kept reading and eventually got a sense of what readings for kanji probably are in certain contexts. I'm typically correct but sometimes I'm way off or even have no guess, so maybe it's not as effective as other methods......but that's what I was comfortable with doing, so it is what it is. In Japan, at least, that's the main writing system kids learn... so it's sink or swim. A lot of kids go through a drill and kill kind of strategy when learning kanji and will do some rote memorization as well as figure out which kanji would appear in combination with other kanji in worksheets and the like. It's a lot of work for sure, but they all come out masters, so there you go.

[@heidicowan6142]

"Your brain is smarter than you are". Lol That's great. 😂

[@emerson3853]

I think stories are great, but why not using a dictionary straight away for the new words?

[@acrawford01]

I’ve been working on Korean for a week now and reading is still very difficult. I’m getting used to seeing the patterns for different endings but using a new alphabet to read is so frustrating.

[@leeanntan9030]

Same 🥲😭

[@SQ8MXT]

know what you mean. I started learning korean by reading harry potter. It was painful to say the least. It gets easier with time.

[@GChan129]

Korean is hard af. Be kind to yourself and patient with your progress. Not only do you have to learn another language, there are lots of words which don’t translate well to English so you’ll be learning new concepts almost.

[@Blueish_Blue]

I know it's been a while but I was just wondering if reading in Korean ultimately worked for you? The reason I'm asking is because of that fact that Korean has a different written form to the spoken form. I can read and write 한글 so that it not a problem for me and I am familiar with the verb conjugations for different tenses etc and I have a decent-ish list of known vocabulary however I would still say I'm very much a beginner. I have been looking for ways to progress as I seem to have stagnated a bit and came across this method, but I'm worried that I'd be ultimately wasting my time as what I'm reading would never be spoken. Sorry for the long comment but you're the first person in the comment section that has mentioned Korean.

[@Jasna88]

im lets say medium beginner in spanish (still a1,but i know quite bit words, i listed to lots of yt and i can understand a lot), but im disabled, 2 illness, in wheelchair, so i dont really have money for hobby. does someone has some free pdf for someone who is still a1? Being learning for 2 months

[@Gigusx]

Hey. There are many Spanishh Kindle books that cost under 5 dollars (and some even around 1 dollar), including Olly's, and they'll last a while, so I don't think the money should be a big issue here. There are also libraries where you can always find some material, classics, translated texts. Beyond that, I can't give you any links right now but you can easily find some translated older works, the ones that are in public domain at this point.

[@Jasna88]

@@Gigusx i really think it is very dumb talking about someones life u know nothing about and saying money shouldn't be problem kindle books are cheap. well for me, they are not. also i dont have kindle on my own laptop (friend went to Greece for 3 weeks so he gave me his). But it seems u dont have money problem, i guess u can buy me kindle and books, no?

[@Gigusx]

@@Jasna88 Hey Jasna! I've considered potential individual circumstances before I replied and I still stand behind my advice. Consider that each book will last up to a few months, it's not a recurring weekly/monthly payment. Also, you don't need a kindle to read books, the kindle app is free for all devices.

[@maryvictorious5893]

The answer is LISTENING to stories, like you were a baby.

[@jinobetti]

Hi my name is John. I'm going to the shop... Almost sounds duolingoish... Ok i'm being a little sarcastic 😁

[@chuyhuezo]

Your shirt is padrisima.

[@shariecebrewster5962]

And i am can't reed as well::::::::

[@daniloluque3608]

If what you're saying is this videos is true that means that you were able to read English even before anyone taugh you to read, as long as the reading material was basic enough.....right? In other words everyone can read their own native language before anyone even teaches them to read......right?

[@AmusedChild]

These "questions" sound like toxic egotism from trolls - "how can I look up a word in the dictionary if I don't know how to spell it, hahaha." I'm studying five languages while working multiple jobs and I'm already reading.

[@alistairmcelwee7467]

So, you don’t mean how to read your own language as a beginner? But, there are folks who, at any age, are complete beginners in their own languages.

[@shariecebrewster5962]

And i am a teacher can't reed

[@agnesdo9802]

Vijf minute intro is a bit long

[@misscamay]

Olly looks like an Albino here hehe

[@theresasodar267]

please come to the point

[@saila456]

5minutes in, he has still not started to answer the question.

[@anitamccoll1865]

The erect ton methodologically scatter because mimosa climatologically book below a obnoxious stopwatch. placid, shocking rub

[@joegillum]

Advice... get to the point faster. You ramble on about useless info for too long.

[@alicantuncer4800]

I like your method and content but, god, you beat around the bush.