Learn Languages Faster with Books

[@weritonmarcondes]

I am reading Harry Potter books in english (I am Brazilizan). There's a lot of words that I don't know, but most of them I can understand by the context, it's magical!

[@elizeusoares7983]

Cool man, I am at the end of there first one. It's really amazing the experience. Peace!

[@FingtamLanguages]

Harry Potter books are great for learning languages!

[@weritonmarcondes]

@@FingtamLanguages I'm sure I will use them to learn other languages in the future

[@weritonmarcondes]

@@elizeusoares7983 Harry Potter books are amazing!

[@leonardogama969]

Congratulations!! Read Harry Potter it’s one of the best ways. It’s more easy, and of course, we already know the story. I’ve been studying English alone for a long time, but when I started to read more, different books, everything got better. Keep going!

[@blankb.2277]

true and its awesome that you're learning Thai! I always thought their letters were beautiful. Good advice, too. I've been reading a lot more German lately and I feel much less intimidated by the grammer

[@FingtamLanguages]

Yeah! Isn’t it crazy how that works?

[@quantus5875]

Yes, hard to know exactly how much intensive versus extensive reading you should do. Definitely agree you should try to do more extensive reading, but intensive reading also has value. One of my rules of thumbs is do "intensive" reading on shorter material - and write definition in the book -- or create index cards -- so you can re-read the material quickly -- and use longer material for extensive reading. Yes, hard to say what the split should be.

[@MindfulLang]

Love this!! Totally agree! I can't remember if I've commented this before. I'm pretty new to learning Spanish, but my whole approach this time has been to only learn through comprehensible input (graded readers, yt videos, italki conversation teacher etc). I'm surprised at just how much I'm able to understand and communicate without having "studied" the language (grammar, vocab flashcards etc), compared with when I focused on intensively studying other languages. I think by reading extensively, we are able to build a much much much stronger foundation, as opposed to just being able to pass an exam well. I also just bought a graded reader for Arabic which I'm super excited to get into (definitely a much bigger challenge for me than Spanish).

[@FingtamLanguages]

That’s so great Jessica! Sounds like you’re on the right track for Spanish and Arabic!

[@-joltrast]

It makes perfect sense because even reading in English growing up, you spend lots of time reading books and running into words you don't know. It's how we naturally build vocabulary. The same goes for speech. You hear a word in context and not only learn the word but understand how to use it.

[@FingtamLanguages]

Yeah, that’s exactly right!

[@accent77]

This is why LingQ works.

[@FingtamLanguages]

Yes, 100%!

[@rgrtnyjjc]

What is LingQ?

[@accent77]

@@rgrtnyjjc A terrific website called lingq.com. You can import articles and books into it in the language you are learning. You get the translations, and it stores the unknown vocab in their datatbase, and you read and review the words, moving them up the scale, until you have learned them. There is a huge database of stuff already there, along with the accompanying audio. It costs $10 a month.

[@rgrtnyjjc]

@@accent77 thanks I’ll check it out

[@rgrtnyjjc]

I’ve been learning Thai for good while now & yes I agree it is a difficult language for sure, have had my moments of doubt like you but have stuck with it so far. I was planning to move to Thailand in 2020 but then sh*t hit the fan as we all know. So unfortunately being stuck where I am I don’t have any Thai people to talk to apart from my online tutor once a week, I can only imagine living there and immersing in the language must bring on huge exponential gains. Here’s hoping I can get there before the end of 2021 🤞

[@FingtamLanguages]

There is a fantastic brand new KZbin channel called Comprehensible Thai. I highly suggest you check it out!

[@rgrtnyjjc]

@@FingtamLanguages ผมจะดูหน่อยขอบคุณครับ 🙏

[@paulwalther5237]

I can relate to your forgetting your own language advice you give people based on studying Spanish (in my case German). I studied Japanese at age 34 after studying a lot of German, and some Spanish and French. My big thing with those languages was to read but reading Japanese was just so hard I gave up and ended up learning the language by rote using Anki. Ouch right? The Anki cards had a lot of sentences and native audio so it wasn't too terrible but reading books, not isolated sentences, is where it's at.

[@floraho1366]

Yes that’s me. How to move forward?

[@titanama0574]

Could you learn to read Japanese completely by reading, without studying anything more than the hiragana and katakana? If so, how would you go about it?

[@FingtamLanguages]

Sorry, I’ve never learned Japanese so I can’t help too much in that area.

[@titanama0574]

Ok, could you point me to someone who could, maybe a video or something?

[@jonathangamble]

DL does have a Thai to English course fwi

[@FingtamLanguages]

Yeah, I’ve tried that, but it doesn’t work that well backwards lol

[@paulwalther5237]

Oh I wanted to mention something because I thought of your learning Thai. I haven't tried studying Thai and don't know the resources but I assume e-readers and apps for it are not nearly as developed as say Japanese or Spanish. I stumbled on a new Kindle dictionary series "Advanced Dictionary" " translate X language to Y language". It's a new series that appeared in the kindle store in October of last year. I'm guessing they use free dictionaries available on the Internet and adapted for reading books on the Kindle. They have Korean and Thai. The one problem is that I haven't gotten the Korean book to work yet. But I'm hopeful and wanted to mention it. You can totally browse the dictionary and search it but when I use it to read Korean Harry Potter it just pulls up the same word for "spasm".

[@FingtamLanguages]

Interesting. I’ll have to check that out. Thanks for letting me know!

[@tylertolman1957]

Do you have any recommendations for Thai reading materials? I'm really struggling to find them myself. I'm an intermediate speaker/reader/writer. I just have had no luck! Any suggestions are much appreciated. 🙇🏽‍♂️ สวสีครับ

[@FingtamLanguages]

I’ve been enjoying the มานะ มานิ books, which you can get on eBay or Lazada. Also, readlang.com has some good content.

[@tylertolman1957]

@@FingtamLanguagesthanks! I'll check it out.

[@Suleymanakaalp4787]

Can't we do reading by reading subtitles in movies,I made reading big deal in my head and hard to continue

[@quantus5875]

Yes, It is a little different, because with a book there no time limit -- watching videos forces you to keep pace and read quickly (so it's a little different). Although I guess you can argue you can pause the video every once in a while. One cool think about watching movies with subtitles is you're getting more vocab that people use in speaking. What I'd recommend is mostly reading with books and some watching movies with subtitles. The mix maybe depends on the person.

[@takforalt]

louder, please