I don't think there's a set number of books one should / needs to read. It really depends on the books, on the language, on one's current level in that language and so on. Just read as many as it takes and then go on reading.
It's really the only way to achieve reading fluency; read, read, and then read some more, even if it's a struggle at first.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
It must be extremely scary to any foreigner trying to learn Slavonic language, such as Russian, Czech or Polish ...
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Only seven cases, pfft.
Almost all Finno-Ugric languages have well over ten. Estonian has fourteen, Finnish has fifteen (although they don't really use some of them for some weird reason and there are disagreements over whether accusative should be considered a separate case or not), Hungarian has, er, lots more (eighteen regular cases but "altogether 34 grammatical cases and case-like suffixes", Wikipedia tells me).
And while some of the languages, such as Finnish, are extremely regular in how the cases are formed (at least in written language), Estonian is rich in stem changes and irregularity, so you can't really just "learn the rules" and go from that but you just need to learn the words and the stem changes in genitive and partitive in order to be able to inflect/decline the words.
On the other hand we don't have grammatical gender, which makes things a whole lot nicer. Or articles. And no prepositions (although I think in modern language the usage of two words that used to be strictly post-positions has shifted and they're often used as prepositions now). And verbs are much easier (well, to me anyway) than, say, the Russian verb system. Then again, I think the English verb system and tenses are easy, too...
In general I think most languages have their "easy" parts and their difficult, more complex parts. And the level of difficulty also depends on the learner's mother tongue (if there are structural similarities, it should make things much easier) as well as on what other foreign languages the person has studied before.