Learning to Read a Foreign Language (William G. Moulton)
How not to read. Start off with the first sentence and stop at the first
word you don’t know and look it up in a dictionary. Repeat this step over and
over and you will be guaranteed to spend a much longer time reading than you
want. You will likely miss the main idea of the article and not be able to
remember many of the words.
Translating vs. reading. The idea is to understand what you’re reading. You
will not get this by doing word-for-word translation. You must try to read
for meaning and content and not for translating.
Intelligent guessing. In order to read for content, the most important skill
is intelligent guessing, i.e. figuring out what a word means because of the
context. We do this in English a lot because there are many difficult words
that we don’t know the meaning of but which we ascertain through the
general idea of the article.
Repeated reading. In order to deduce the meaning of words from their
context-or remember the meanings of words you looked up-you will obviously
have to read them more than once.
How to get started. When you start out to do some reading in a foreign
language, the main rule to follow is this: NEVER LOOK A WORD UP IN THE
DICTIONARY OR GLOSSARY DURING THE FIRST READING.
What to do next. After having read the whole reading once through, go
back and read and underline the first word you can’t reasonably guess; look
it up in the dictionary; find the translation that fits the sentence; put a
pencil dot in the vocabulary margin beside the word to show you have looked
up the word; re-read the phrase in which the word occurs, trying to fix its
meaning. Go through the first paragraph this way, looking up only the words
you absolutely have to and making intelligent guesses at the others. Then
tackle the following paragraphs in the same way. Do this for half the paper
and then take a break and relax. Go back and do the rest when you’ve
recuperated.
Trouble spots. Two areas give readers trouble. First, there are the socalled “idioms”—expressions with specific colloquial meaning. Secondly,
there will be passages here and there which you just can’t understand. The
most important thing to remember here is: DON’T WASTE TIME ON THEM.
If you can’t understand such a passage the first time through, put a vertical
line in the margin beside it, and read on ahead. Quite often you will pick up a
clue later on, and difficulty will be cleared up when you do the rereading.
But don’t waste time on it even then. If after a second honest try, you still
can’t figure out what it means, put a second vertical line in the margin, and
ask your teacher to explain it to you.
Nuisance words. The above method, besides helping you to read efficiently,
carries with it a number of interesting by-products. The underlines
automatically furnish you with a list of the words and idioms you had to look
up; the single vertical lines in the margin show you which passages caused
trouble the first time through; and the double vertical lines indicate the
passages you had to ask the teacher about. All of this is extremely useful
for reviewing later on. But perhaps most important of all are the dots you
put in the vocabulary margin each time you look a word up. It is a well known
phenomenon that every reader has his/her own private set of nuisance
words: words that he/she just can’t seem to remember, and has to look up
again and again. The dots in the vocabulary margin will automatically furnish
you with a list of your own nuisance words.
Don’t do it the hard way. Traditionally, students have used three other
methods. The first is to write out a full English translation of everything.
This is so wearisome a process that, fortunately, it has been followed by only
a small number of people. The second is to make a list of all the words that
have been looked up, together with their English translations. This is highly
recommended for students who have time to kill and don’t enjoy their free
time; but, again, the sheer mechanical labor involved is out of all proportion
to the benefits received. The third method is to write an English translation
over each word that has been looked up in the vocabulary. This cuts down
considerably on mechanical labor, but ultimately it defeats its own purpose;
when you re-read such a passage, your eye will run along the printed line, skip
up to read the translation, and never see the foreign word which is what you
are trying to learn in the first place. If you’ve GOT to write down the
translation, WRITE IT IN THE MARGIN.