Learning a foreign language by reading
The probably most important activity during language acquisition is listening to and speaking in the language. There’s just no substitute for that if you want to become a fluent speaker yourself.
That means: you will not be able to learn a foreign language by reading alone. But it can be very effective. If you enjoy reading as much as I do, all you need is a basic vocabulary and an understandig of the main grammatical concepts of the language. Then find a book you know you will like. In my case, it’s “Innan Frosten” (“Before the Frost“) by Henning Mankell. Armed with a dictionary and some means to collect newly learned words, just delve in and start reading.
In the beginning, it may be tedious (ok: it will). But soon you’ll realize that this works astonishingly well. Some of the reasons are:
By reading, you harness the power of recognition. It is so much easier to recognize a word or a grammatical structure you learned earlier than to actually produce it yourself while speaking or writing. But each time you recognize and understand something, you consolidate your memory of it.
People have an innate ability to detect patterns of any kind. By reading a whole book, you will gradually acquire a “feeling” for how words, expressions and grammatical structures are used. To get this feeling is a big step forward from textbook knowledge, where basically all words and rules of grammar seem to have the same importance.
It’s motivating because it’s a combination of fun and work. One thing that might spoil the fun in the beginning is the constant need to look up unknown words. I counter this problem with the following rule: look up a new word only if you would not understand the current sentence or paragraph without it — or if you encountered the word often enough to get the feeling it might be important.
If you are learning a language that shares elements with languages you already speak, discovering commonalities and hidden connections between them can be very fun and inspiring and often helps with learning certain words or concepts.
To use my own example: Swedish is historically related to German and English (being also a germanic language, albeit of the northern variety). In the past, there has been an influx of words from German to Swedish and from Nordic languages to English (the Vikings!). Lots of interesting connections to discover!
The bottom line of all this: if you like reading anyway, reading novels works wonders for your vocabulary and for your subconscious grasp of the nuts and bolts of a foreign language.
