How many books should you read to become fluent in a second language?

[Billi]

Originally Posted by ficbot

Someone on another thread mentioned something about a teacher who told them to read a certain number of books in English in order to be fluent, but I can't find the thread and don't remember the number Has anyone ever heard of a number for something like this?

It was on post 5 in this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=177601


and it said 10.000 pages. It remembered me a little bit of one other "rule" I have heard of that says if you spend 10.000 hours on some topic (like training chess) you reach master level.

[Kumabjorn]

First; You need to clearly define what you mean by fluent. That is a very loose term with different meanings for different people. Assuming you want to be able to function socially in a language is not as hard as being flawless in your chosen field of expertise. If you happen to be a connoisseur of poetry, it will require huge amounts of reading in order to fully appreciate and being able to discuss that topic in a foreign language.

Second; Reading silently or out loud? Silently means that you improve your passive understanding of a language. In academia you will find a lot of people that for example are very well versed in Heian literature, but if they order a beer and it isn't cold enough for their liking they will swallow their embarrassment rather than attempting a complaint. They have read a lot but they have never practiced the language. If you are aiming for active knowledge of a foreign language you need to read out loud, even if it is embarrassing, in order to train your mouth to form the necessary sounds and words.

Third; Once you have a working knowledge of the foreign language, reading modern literature is a great aid in acquainting you with idioms and socio-linguistic features of said language. You can almost always catch the foreigner on her odd usage of some idioms, or sometimes trying to shoehorn in an idiom or socio-linguistic feature from her native language in the foreign environment.

The rule I apply with my students when they tell me they think they have become fluent in Japanese is; "Ok, then please tell me a joke I haven't heard before". The reason being that humor is the one feature in a language that needs to transcend almost all the features that make up a language. If you can create something funny in a foreign language, then, in my book at least, you have arrived.

[VaporPunk]

Originally Posted by afv011

In my experience, writing is more important than reading. I used to have pen-pals I communicated with (letters, you know, a piece of paper you write on, put it in an envelope and mail it, none of this electronic nonsense we have nowadays), and it helped me immensely.

Reading is good, but you exercise your brain way better when you have to go fishing for the words and put those sentences together yourself.

Agreed. There are many ways to learn languages but writing works best for me. I'm learning Dutch, and while writing out sentences I pronounce them in my head and learn more about the structure of language then I do when speaking. I just need to try and write Dutch more often.

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

The rule I apply with my students when they tell me they think they have become fluent in Japanese is; "Ok, then please tell me a joke I haven't heard before". The reason being that humor is the one feature in a language that needs to transcend almost all the features that make up a language. If you can create something funny in a foreign language, then, in my book at least, you have arrived.

Also agreed. Humor is hard in other languages. When you can be consistently funny (for the right reasons, not because you are mis-pronouncing words ) you are pretty much there.

[charlesatan]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Actually "read a lot" is much more important for Chinese than it is for languages with phonetic scripts. Learning 25-50 symbols and sounds only takes a matter of hours. But reading Chinese is definitely a skill that must be practiced all the time, writing by hand even more so. Even native speakers lose the ability to read at an acceptable speed fairly quickly (about 6 months) when they don't read anything at all --- if they immigrate to another country, for example, and don't have access to any reading materials. And non-native speakers, like myself, have to use it almost daily to stay up-to-date. Much easier this day, of course, with the internet.

Yes, that's true, but for me it's a different dynamic. With Chinese for example, it's significantly harder to read/write than it is to speak the language (listening to Chinese, context becomes more important and the accents, but with reading, there's no mistaking the context of the meaning of the word--assuming you remembered the ideogram or the ideogram combination).

Very different from English where if you know how to read/speak it, it's more or less the same in conversation.

[Freeshadow]

In my experience the only way to truly learn an other language is the cold-water approach. Jump in. I needed 2 to 3 years for german. (C2 level, i. e. native speaker equal)

[Ekaros]

To read, hmm a few dozen. Maybe a less.

[ficbot]

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. To clarify, I am not starting from zero here. My vocab, grammar knowledge and oral fluency is on the high intermediate end. I am just weaker in reading and writing. So it is my reading fluency, specifically, that I am hoping to improve. I will consider myself successful if I get to the point where I could pick up any French book and read it without too much difficulty. I am okay with always needing to look up the odd word here or there, but not as often as I am now, and I want to be more comfortable with the verb tenses.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by ficbot

Has anyone ever heard of a number for something like this?

Not heard. I did it.
I have started to learn English after I reached 18 years of age. At that time I was fluent in 3 languages. One mother language, another that I was exposed to from a very early age and a third, learned in school during some 9 years of study.
So, after a couple of years of learning English I have decided that I want to use my love for books to improve my English. This is how I learned my second language - reading, listening, watching TV.

So, I went to the Library and started to borrow simplified editions of books in English. We have nice library system here in this country, and I was lucky, because my library had nice, if rather limited (perhaps 6 meters of standard library bookshelves, 2 meters high, of fiction) selection of English language books. There are many levels of simplified books and I started with the lowest one. You have to build skill reading in particular foreign language. So I went through perhaps 70 books (with average page count perhaps 50 pages) in increasing difficulty.
In the meanwhile I continued to study at [evening] language school. The last simplified book I have tried to read was "Call of the wild" by Jack London. I had to abandon the book, it was so difficult for me. It was also the highest level of difficulty among the simplified editions. I never used dictionary to read the books, and I couldn't understand Mr. London even when I tried to use one. I went back to the library, very, very unhappy. At the library I noticed a book by Dick Francis, one of my very favorite authors. So I took it home and went through it in a few days. Little did I understood at that time, how incredibly lucky I was. Mr. Francis is one of the most accessible authors for non-native English readers. So I returned to the library and brought some 5 "regular" fiction books home. I was able to read one. Slowly I went through library books, and eventually I was able to read most of the books in the library.

After some three or four years (of reading a book a week) I saw I was way ahead of my classmates. When there was an exercise where you had to choose one of very similar words to finish a sentence I was starring. I could just look and see, somehow, if the text looked right or not. Most of the time I was right.
When it came to memorising grammar rules I was at, or below average. But understanding the text, talking and USING grammar was easy.

Eventually I have exhausted the English books selection in Library in my town. I haven't read all that stuff, because I wasn't interested in about half the books - stuff for girls, compulsory reading for school (Dickens and company). When I was almost desperate for a new, good quality English fiction (at that time new books in English have been prohibitively expensive here in this country) I have discovered ... drumroll ... EBOOKS. This was long before the first reading devices. Even pocket computers were very expensive at that time. The selection of ebooks was much, much smaller than it is today, but you can always get something good to read on the net.

Until now I have read *well* over a thousand books in English. I lost count a long time ago. Recently I took a test at www.testyourvocab.com and I was very pleased with the result. It measured my vocabulary at level of university educated native English speakers (Americans). Not bad for somebody that learned English as an adult, as fourth language.

Writing on the forum (at least one post a day), a few months in a foreign county, studying for 8 years in an "evening" language school and constant watching of Discovery channel helps too ;-), but the books DO have significant impact. Especially if you read them every single day for years and years. For quite a few years I read 99% of books in English.

At this moment I can read almost any fiction in English with full understanding. I say almost, because I haven't tried Finnegans Wake, Ulysses and similar books. I can enjoy play with words and nuances in fiction books. At work I am (among many other things) also translator and interpreter.
Some of the words I have learned reading books most recently:
Clairvoyant, adze, sorghum, atlatl

Recently I have started to use dictionary built-in in my reader. It is OK to use dictionary if you do not *need* it to follow the book. If you find yourself using dictionary often, get an easier [to read] book ;-). Reading a book that you wouldn't read in your mother language (just because it is in French or English or whatever language), or reading a book where you need to use the dictionary to follow the book quickly becomes a chore and you will read less. I think that it is more valuable for your education to read a book that you can follow easily - because you read more and you read with joy.

[ficbot]

So my next question would be where can I find lists of boos in French which I might enjoy? I'd love to see a list of popular books grouped by reading level.

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by kacir

Not heard. I did it.
I have started to learn English after I reached 18 years of age.

If this helps you, I have to say that even though I recognize your avatar as somebody whose posts I have read many times, I never noticed that you weren't a native speaker until you pointed it out. Now that you said it [plus, this is one of your longer posts], I see it, but before it didn't catch my attention.

Good job...

[afv011]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Learn some Asian languages, like Chinese. They don't have tenses. You just add something like "yesterday" or "tomorrow", they also have a simple word that you can add to a sentence to indicate that everything happened in the past. Europeans have build up these hugely complicated grammatical structures that are not really necessary for understanding. You only start to realize that once you step outside of that circle.

Yes, but there are too many nuances you can't express with "yesterday" or "tomorrow". You can't sweep half a dozen tenses into "tomorrow" and another half into "yesterday" and expect to have the same meaningful sentence; it'll still convey what you want to say, but part of it will be lost.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by afv011

Yes, but there are too many nuances you can't express with "yesterday" or "tomorrow". You can't sweep half a dozen tenses into "tomorrow" and another half into "yesterday" and expect to have the same meaningful sentence; it'll still convey what you want to say, but part of it will be lost.

There are always some fine nuances lost in some cases. An example is 'intentional ambiguity' that can get lost going from Chinese to English. Since there is no plural form in Chinese you can say "there is book on the table". And you leave open if it is one or several books. It would take a very awkward sentence to covey that same meaning.

By the way, there are very easy ways to express the same meaning in Chinese that compound tenses do in Western languages. No changes in the verbs, again just two simple words are added. Not tons of new forms to learn for every verb, every tense; just 2 words that always stay the same.

[Rizla]

I dislike reading French because of the use of literary tenses. They have something like five or six! I find this actually gets in the way of speaking French as I begin to lose the passe compose! Still, reading is very good for learning essential vocabulary. Just check the words that keep coming up and you develop a pretty good base.

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

There are always some fine nuances lost in some cases. An example is 'intentional ambiguity' that can get lost going from Chinese to English. Since there is no plural form in Chinese you can say "there is book on the table". And you leave open if it is one or several books. It would take a very awkward sentence to covey that same meaning.

By the way, there are very easy ways to express the same meaning in Chinese that compound tenses do in Western languages. No changes in the verbs, again just two simple words are added. Not tons of new forms to learn for every verb, every tense; just 2 words that always stay the same.

How does irony work in Chinese? It doesn't in Japanese. If you say something ironical they will believe that you are sincere and actually mean what you say. When I studied Japanese, back in the day, I noticed that Brits where usually more frustrated than Yanks, simply because they had an inherent need to be ironical and use understatements. The latter simply doesn't go over well. I remember a friend who in a full typhoon said "We're getting a few drops today" and the Japanese person he talked to started correcting him.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Rizla

I dislike reading French because of the use of literary tenses. They have something like five or six!

According to my English teacher, English has 13 tenses. My classmates were scared shitles when they heard ;-)

If you look at this nice round-up, it is more like 17 ;-)
http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/gra...enses_satz.htm