So, at least in my own personal experience, reading is a really good way to improve your foreign language abilities. At least I can’t remember a time that I felt like my English was improving faster than back when I started reading lots and lots of books in English. I really do feel that reading had a really big impact especially on my ability to construct longer and more complex sentences. And of course it also expanded my vocabulary a lot.
So, when you’re reading in a foreign language there are generally two different ways you can go about it: 1. Read while looking up more or less any new words, expressions or grammar points or 2. Reading while just trying to understand as much as possible without really looking anything up (or maybe just the odd word if it keeps popping up). So basically there’s the more intensive reading and the reading where you’re just doing it for fun. I think that there are different things you can gain from different ways of reading and that’s what I’d like to talk a bit about Today.
Let’s first take a look at just reading for fun and for your own enjoyment. With this kind of reading you obviously have to be able to understand most of what you’re reading or at least be able to understand enough that you’re able to get the general meaning. Otherwise you’re sort of just looking at a bunch of incomprehensible symbols and you’re probably not going to gain very much from that. When you’re reading this way you of course get to review things that you already know and it will further solidify that knowledge. But you’ll also be able to pick up new words from the context and learn new ways to express certain things. One advantage of this way of reading is definitely also that it really doesn’t require too much energy and it’s something you can just do to relax. Thus it’s something that easy to do a lot of.
Then there’s also reading more intensely while looking up anything that you’re not already familiar with. So obviously what you gain from this is that you’ll be able to learn a lot of new vocabulary, fixed expressions and grammar. In my opinion I think this is pretty much the best way to expand your vocabulary. Because you’re reading (vs. listening) you’re able to look everything up that you don’t understand and you also get to see all the new words that you learn in context. With this type of reading you also have a lot more choice of what to read since you’re less restricted by what you already know. You can pretty much just read about anything that interests you, even if there are lots of unknown words.
Personally I also think it’s nice to switch between reading easier and more difficult reading material in this way. It’s nice to have a balance between the two. Because when I’m reading stuff that (relative to the current level of my Korean) is easier then it feels like I’m sort of harvesting the fruits of my labor and I get to see my progress. Whereas if I’m reading materials that are more difficult to understand it motivates me to work harder because I become more aware of all the things that I still don’t know.
In the Korealm 