I have spoken fluent ( B-level) Spanish for forty years, but despite multiple attempts, I never got past the first page or two of a novel until September 2013 when I attempted a Spanish novel on a Kindle and was astonished to polish it off in four days. (You can find a good summary of current thinking in Paul Nation's " How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?" ). That is, you must know 98% of the words on the page without a dictionary- not counting words you can guess from context. One in fifty is thought to be the limit for pleasure reading. You end up needing to check every fifth word in the dictionary, and that effort defeats you. The "beginners paradox" states that you can only learn those extra 4,000 word families by reading, but you can't read until you know those 4,000 word families. are part of one word family.) But to read "authentic" novels (written by and for adult native speakers) one needs a knowledge of about 6,000. The reason for this is that a strong student finishes a two-year college language program knowing about 2,000 "word-families." (Run, runs, runner, running, runny, etc. Even five paragraphs is more than I think most people could manage, unless they had a copy of the English translation at hand. ![]() If you got five pages into it, you did very well indeed. If you speak a foreign language well enough to puzzle out newspaper articles, you have probably at one time or another attempted to read a novel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |