How I Read for Language Learning (Intensive and Extensive!)

Books! Reading! Language Learning! How I approach both extensive and intensive reading for language learning.

~~~~Patreon~~~~

~~~~Italki Affiliate Link (get $10!)~~~~

~~~~ Social Media ~~~~

[LeaflingLearns]

Oh also meant to say - THANK YOU for repping both intensive & extensive reading. I feel like sometimes they're pitted against each other, but I think they both have such great benefits for different situations. I love both, it just depends!

[lexiesanders]

In school and university they forced us to write down words even with extensive reading. But when I stopped doing that and just looked up the meaning of the word every time, even if it was the same one, I remembered so many words! Authors tend to repeat many words throughout the book many times. Each time you look them up helps you remember

[Flauschbally]

I started to read a book in the "intensive" way and must say that I really enjoy it. I look up the words which I don't know and discuss the grammar points which I don't understand. Thx for this video. It was really motivating to give this a try.

[AldonaAnna]

I reread Harry Potter in English. I don’t know how much I would like in Brazilian Portuguese (I’m learning now) but reading in the original version was amazing !
Dobby in Polish (my native language) is called Zgredek. Reading in English was definitely great for me as a fan of HP and for my language journey :)

[Steven_]

I started learning German a couple months ago and recently came across your channel and I'm loving your book videos so far, looking forward to binge watch your channel! Thanks for the quality content haha.

[bunnyteeth]

Yeah. I definitely notice that I like to start with intense reading and afterwards do more extensive reading.

[alairis]

Tu sei una grande inspirazione mia da qualche mese e non hai mai smesso di produrre nuove informazioni utili nei tuoi video. Saluti da Colorado :)

[songofmysoul]

It would be great if you could recommend in a video some books you read to learn other languages (in Spanish, Italian, etc.)

[igorcarvalho]

There you go! That was another excellent video for everyone who appreciates reading and learning new languages! I do love the way you express yourself and the way you share your methods of learning new things. Congrats on this vid and thx for sharing it : )

[fauxpace]

For extensive reading, I just keep switching the content so more common things tend to stick faster, mainly acquiring "raw" vocabulary through mass exposure. At the moment I do this for Sorbian and it is a really fast approach (I maxed out at ~1000 lexical items per week when learning Russian, this week I did ~500 for Sorbian) but it's very exhausting. I think of it as a parallelized approach, learning lots of vocabulary by learning words somewhat slower but in mass and through mutual relationships. Each new text is repetition for old texts, kind of recursive.
For intensive reading, I read few texts as thoroughly as I can, i.e. over and over, even beyond memorization, really appreciating single words, grammar intuition, atmosphere, sentence topology etc. Currently that is kind of what I do for Latin, reading De Bello Gallico over and over (one chapter I already read and a new one each day if I manage) and Saxon.
For both I use LWT which allows me to add translations and other info for difficult words and automatically create flashcards for them.
I view both techniques as to points on a spectrum and try to slowly develop from extensive to intensive when actively learning.

My book recommendation would be "Jäö oder wie ein Franzose auszog in Hannover das 'raanste' Deutsch zu lernen".

[JonathanOlelo]

Great methods!
Reading can be tricky when starting a new language
I personally prefer to start with children's books and moving to more "serious" contonet only after finishing a few books

[williambudd]

I think Harry potter books are great tools for learning foreign languages and I think a good approach is to slog through the book intensively looking up a lot of words and then reread the book extensively lookng up very few words. The extensive review solidifies new vocab.

[quantus]

Great video!! Agree with everything you said. And like that you place roughly equal enphasis on ER and IR. You pretty much said this but when I'm just starting, I really focus on IR because I know so little vocab (in the beginning) -- I really don't like doing ER until I have a vocab of at least 2000 words (in the target language) -- and then I do what you do -- try to find stuff that has 10-15% words I don't already know for ER. For intensive reading I use comic books -- which are actually pretty hard -- lthey are ike a 10-12 year plus reading level. I like them because they are short and I can read them over and over until I know every single word in the comic book. I also find that as I get more advanced in a language I start really understanding nuances in the text -- which is super cool.

[kamiljarosz]

I appreciate that, when introducing the idea of reading content at the appropriate level for your abilities, you acknowledge the fact that reading an appropriate level book might simply be unpalatable because of the subject matter. There were so many times where I've encountered people giving advice like "go watch Peppa Pig in your target language", or something along those lines, where I've immediately been turned off from the approach because I simply did not care to read the suggested content. What I did end up doing to get over this hurdle is also not something I would generally recommend to everyone, but it worked out for me: I picked up the first book I wanted to read that I felt would be fairly easy but also wouldn't make my eyes glaze over and I just slogged through it. It was a lot of work and at first I felt very discouraged, but, at the same time, I could see that I was making progress quickly so I stuck with it. It took me 1-2 books before this became bearable and I felt like I could make progress at a somewhat reasonable speed. Once you get to that point where finding compelling and comprehensible text is actually possible, I feel like the rest is just a matter of sinking hours into it.

[gwynnorris]

I always went back and forth on whether I should look up every word while reading, this distinction was exactly what I needed!! Although with German my teachers always expect intensive readings and then give us 20 page articles haha

[SGBullySick]

The Iron Druid “Hounded” Book 1, i finished it last week, such humor mixed with mythology.
It had a Percy Jackson feel. So good

[beforethedawn]

This is kinda cringy, but I swear by the extensive method because I became fluent in English in about a year, just by reading Harry Potter fanfiction lol

[mimsical]

I also want to read more, but being in graduate school does not help haha. It's so tempting to just do easy stuff (like watch Netflix) when you have to read massive amounts of academic content. I think I might try what you talked about, with the intensive reading for vocab for a bit, followed by extensive reading:) even if it's just a page a day!

[peachy__pg]

my favorite books are the perks of being a wallflower by stephen chbosky and fangirl by rainbow rowell, they were both originally written in english which is my native language! i’ve never bought a book in any language i’ve ever studied, i should do that soon.

[aders]

Since I have very bad eyesight and can’t stress my eyes a lot, instead of reading extensively I listen it. Thankfully I can find tons of audiobooks right here on YouTube and then listen to it as I do my chores or am headed somewhere and that helps me also to improve my listening skills in that language along with learning new vocab and learning something useful since most of books I listen to are about self-improvement or my personal interest like astronomy or history