Five Observations on Reading in Other Languages

What’s the best way for a bookworm to learn another language? Reading, of course!

Victoria Kelly
Sep 8, 2018 · 7 min read
Photo by XiaoXiao Sun on Unsplash

I’m originally from UK but have been living abroad since 2010. My first experience was a study exchange in Austria, followed by a few years in Sweden. I’m now settled back in Austria. After 8 years as an immigrant, I can honestly say that trying to master a foreign language is one of the best and worst things I’ve ever attempted. It’s the only thing that can raise you to such heights of satisfaction, then knock your self-confidence to practically zero, possibly within the same day.

One of my first German teachers gave me advice about using reading to develop my language skills. It was obvious that she considered it to be an important tip, because she switched to English to say it (the rest of the class, was relentless German).

“If you want to master German, or any language really,” she said, “you have to READ as much and as often as you can. It will expand your vocabulary and it will give you a gut feeling for the language.”

Being a bookworm, this was of course great news for me. Just do your favourite thing, and it will help you master any language!

I was eager to follow her advice, and it seemed like a good idea to start with children’s books. I bought a couple from a second hand shop, and got to work on them right away. But I hadn’t got further than a couple of sentences before I ran into difficulties. It might seem like children’s books would be ideal material to start with, but actually they’re far from ideal if you’re a beginner in the language.

For one thing, they often have magical or fantastic themes. I tried to read a book about a witch’s cat, thinking it looked interesting. But after spending hours looking up words like dragon, broomstick, cauldron, potion etc — none of which were going to be particularly useful in my everyday life in Austria — I gave up. Anyone who’s tried to read Harry Potter in another language might be able to relate to this.

Another thing is that children’s books run the risk of being boring for a mature reader. The events and issues that they deal with are just too simple to keep an adult entertained. And if you’re not being entertained, then it defeats the point of reading as a way to improve your language skills. You might just as well just do some grammar exercises and probably get more benefit. In order for reading to really help with language learning, you have to really enjoy what you’re reading so that you’re motivated to continue and it becomes engaging, rather than a chore.

But it’s hard to find a book that you might enjoy when your German isn’t good enough to even read the blurb on the back of the book…

It really helped when my next teacher assigned us a well-known and popular modern book to read in class: Gut Gegen Nordwind, by Daniel Glattauer (translated as Love Virtually in English). It’s a book written in the form of a series of emails between a man and woman who email each other by accident but then strike up a conversation, which later becomes and friendship, and then attraction.

It was a great choice for a language learner because the style of writing was simple, everyday language with plenty of common idioms, and the book was really engaging. Plus, it was organised into short sections (the emails), which is really great when you’re struggling to make it to the end of a page. Each email section that I successfully read felt like an achievement, and I eventually got caught up in the story and was able to go faster and faster thanks to the words I’d already learned.

Becca Tapert on Unsplash

Finishing that book felt like a real achievement. But it was only the beginning of my journey through reading in another language. There have been plenty of other books since then, in both German and Swedish.

Here are some of the things that I’ve noticed about reading in another language (Yes, yes, aside from the obvious fact that it’s another language):

1. To dictionary or not to dictionary?

When you first start out, you feel that you can’t possibly understand what’s going on unless you look up every single word that you don’t recognise. Well don’t.

Of course, it’s nice to know exactly what the sentence means, but constantly stopping to consult the dictionary slows things down considerably. (And that’s using google or an app. Just think how slow it was in the good old days with a paper dictionary!) And you really don’t need to understand every word to make progress with the story.

After a while, you notice that there are an extraordinary number of words that you can guess just from the context, or because they look like an English word, or because they look like a Latin word, or because you just have a hunch what it means. After realising that my hunches turned out to be 80% correct, I stopped stressing so much over looking things up. And I also stopped stressing about understanding every single sentence. As long as I’ve got the gist of what’s going on, it’s all good.

These days I’ve found a great compromise, which is to read the foreign book on my Kindle. Did you know that Amazon lets you download free language dictionaries that you can use when reading in another language? I just have to touch a word for the English translation to appear. Soooo useful!

2. Reading translated books is actually a good idea

If you’re choosing between a book that was translated into German and one that was originally written in German, it would be better to go for the latter, right?

Wrong! As an English speaker learning a foreign language, it’s far easier to choose a book translated from English.

It’s partly that there’s just so much more choice. As I said before, it’s important to choose a book that draws you in and engages you. The German literary world is far smaller. And you could probably count the number of native Swedish writers on one hand (Ok, ok, that’s an exaggeration. But still, it is relatively miniscule).

The second (and more important) reason, is that it’s just easier to read a book translated from a language you already know. Although the quality of translation can’t be faulted, the translator cannot completely erase the pattern of the original language. The idioms, the constructions, the WAY that people talk in the book, it was all originally English, and that comes across somewhat in the translation. This is great for beginners because it’s easier to guess what the people might say if you can imagine how they would talk in your own language.

Obviously, once you get better at the language, you can aim for books that are originally written in the language you’re learning. Reading them gives you a deeper feeling for and much better appreciation of that language. But at the beginning you really NEED that sense of achievement that comes with understanding 80% without needing to try too hard.

3. The jokes aren’t funny. (They’re hilarious.)

Humour is one of the hardest things to master in another language. It’s not just the words themselves (though puns can be the bane of a language-learner’s life), it’s that there are so many cultural references that you cannot grasp if you didn’t grow up in that culture.

Furthermore, the humour of different countries is just different. Things that have Norwegians laughing their heads off might just leave the rest of us scratching our heads.

So assuming that you understand the joke in the first place, AND find it funny, don’t be surprised to find yourself laughing a lot more than you expected. I think it’s something to do with the relief and triumph of realising — “wow I just understood a joke written in another language!” that makes it so very funny. I’ve found myself laughing out loud at things written in German, when I know that the joke wouldn’t even have prompted a smile if I had read it in English.

4. The expressions are even worse

And while we’re on the subject of funny things, some of the expressions you encounter in other languages are just downright hilarious. Take this one in Swedish:

“Smaken är som baken. Delad”

Which literally means: “people’s tastes are like an ass. Divided.” (Eg: people like different things)

Or another example. Something that I hear a lot here in Austria:

“Das ist mir Wurst”

Literally: That’s sausage to me. Meaning, I don’t care. It’s all the same to me. Don’t ask why the expression is about sausage. I don’t think anybody knows.

5. Some things will never make sense

…and aren’t to be found in the dictionary at all

Take this one thing that I kept finding in a book I recently read.

“Stehst du auf ihm?”

I understood from the context that the character was asking another character whether she had a crush on a certain guy. But it could have been harder to figure out when the most obvious literal transaltion is “are you standing on him?” Looked it up in the dictionary… nothing.

I think the moral of this story is that even when you’re using books to help you learn another language, it can also be nice to have a native speaker standing by to help when you run into difficulties.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’re a Medium user, please leave a comment with your own experiences of language learning below. If not, feel free to interact on Facebook or Twitter.

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Victoria Kelly

Written by

Writer of short stories, flash fiction and serialised novellas with a fresh and quirky feel. Originally from UK, now settled in Austria.

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