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

[Yapyap]

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.

Originally Posted by kacir

It must be extremely scary to any foreigner trying to learn Slavonic language, such as Russian, Czech or Polish ...

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.

[Laney is here]

Originally Posted by 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.

Hi Ficbot,

I'm French Canadian, and I was just reading an article in a Québécois consumer magazine, and they listed several links for French books. I can't link you to the article, it's only available to subscribers. But here's the list!

Grande Bibliothèque (gratuit)
http://banq.qc.ca/
Environ 16 000 documents en français (romans, livres techniques, livres anciens, etc.). Recherchez le bouton «livres numériques» sur la page d’accueil.

Archambault (payant)
http://archambault.ca/
Le plus important vendeur de titres numériques au Québec. Consultation facile grâce aux 30 catégories de livres et aux thématiques.

L’entrepôt du livre numérique (payant)
http://vitrine.entrepotnumerique.com/
Environ 7 000 titres canadiens-français et des liens vers des sites commerciaux.

Zebook.com (payant et gratuit)
http://zebook.com/
Grande sélection de livres à petits prix (en euros). Recherche facile grâce aux onglets.

Rue des libraires (payant)
http://ruedeslibraires.com/
Portail des librairies indépendantes du Québec. Environ 7 200 titres québécois et 10 000 titres étrangers.

Ebooks libres et gratuits (gratuit)
http://ebooksgratuits.com/
Plus de 2 300 titres dans une interface minimaliste. Moteur de recherche efficace. Sans gestion des droits numériques.

Feedbooks (payant et gratuit)
http://fr.feedbooks.com/
Classiques du domaine public et des nouveautés faciles à trouver en sélectionnant l’option «français».

Renaud-Bray (payant)
http://renaud-bray.com/
Excellente sélection de titres regroupés en catégories. Palmarès et «coups de cœur».

But as for seeing lists of books by reading level, I don't think that's a feature on any of those websites because they're libraries. I didn't check.

When I started reading in English, I started with teenager books. They were easier and with a more accessible vocabulary level. Perhaps you could do that? Another suggestion would be to read a book in French that you already read in English. Also to try: magazines. Or newspapers! My favorite news source is http://cyberpresse.ca

I've been reading in English for oh maybe 17-18 years now? I would say it took me a few years to really get fluent. What helped me the most was reading Jane Austen. Not your everyday English, it helped me broaden my vocabulary. I consider myself to be fully fluent, even though I don't get to actually speak English very often. Watching tv in English also helped me. And watching movies in English with the English subtitles on.

And if you want to work on your writing, you could try forums, but just like forums in English, they tend to have a low level of writing quality, grammar and spelling-wise. You don't want to pick up bad habits now, do you?

Good luck!

[DMB]

The easiest French books I have ever read were some of Simenon's Maigret whodunnits. I think he must have had a limited vocabulary. I also find Voltaire pretty easy and I enjoy his wit. One of the best things for me was my collection of Astérix le Gaulois. I love the drawings and the French is very simple. It is part of French culture that they produce a huge number of picture-book stories (bandes dessinées). Some of them are pretty serious and intended for adults.

[ficbot]

Thank you for the Simenon tip. My dad has those in English. I will check the links Laney posted (thank you so much for those!) and see if I can find any.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by ficbot

Thank you for the Simenon tip. My dad has those in English. I will check the links Laney posted (thank you so much for those!) and see if I can find any.

In English, there are special [thin] books rewritten using very simple English specifically for people that are learning English and need some reading experience. A long time ago, if my memory serves me right, there was Longman Simplified Editions imprint that published such books. Longman doesn't seem to exist anymore and there is little trace on the Internet about this kind of books. Longman became Pearson imprint and they have Graded Reads. If you think about it, such books would be unknown to general public in UK or USA, because there is little need to provide such type of learning material. The general public in UK or USA already can speak (and read) English, don't they?

I do not know if such books exist in French. In previous posts (or was it in another thread? ;-) ) somebody mentioned that there is organization specifically for promoting French language, because the use of French (lingua franca ) as an international language for science, diplomacy, trade and postal services is declining. Try looking for them, they might have interesting materials for you to learn from. Try looking also in Canada. I heard that French speaking Canadians are very ... enthusiastic ... supporters of French language.

If you fail to get simplified editions, or after you are finished with them, it might be a good idea to have a look at older books - such as George Simeon. In English, some of older books - such as books by sir Arthur Conan Doyle - are considered better suited for beginners than some of the more contemporary stuff.

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by DMB

The easiest French books I have ever read were some of Simenon's Maigret whodunnits.

I indeed also read a couple of his books in French because they were relatively easy to read.

I also find Voltaire pretty easy and I enjoy his wit.

I tried Hugo -- limited is not word that seems to apply to his vocabulary -- however, mine....

One of the best things for me was my collection of Astérix le Gaulois. I love the drawings and the French is very simple.

They even get more interesting with somewhat of an understanding of French politics around the time they were written. Though, even before I was aware of that I enjoyed them.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

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...

Interesting facts about the cases. Finish/Hungarian/Estonian are not usually on most people's radar screen, but known to be difficult. Strange though, since these are languages of Asian origin. And the Asian languages I know or have read something about don't have any cases at all, Chinese and Vietnamese just use an add-on word that indicates possession (and Japanese seems to have picked that up as well, even though it is not related) -- and even that can be dropped in many cases as the word order already tells you everything you need to know (if you say "I mother" then it is clear that it means "my mother". The cases are among the most difficult things to comprehend for most Asians learning a Western language.

[Zetmolm]

There is no such thing as a 'difficult language'. Any language can be learned by 2 year olds!

I'm saying this to encourage all foreign language learners. You can do it! Although, of course, learning a langauge that is very different from your native language in structure and vocabulary is more of a challenge than learning a language that is quite similar to yours.

Here is a tip that may help you to read the more 'difficult' books in a foreign language. Recently I created a bilingual edition of a book that I expected to be somewhat over my head, as follows:
- In Calibre, convert both the original book and the translated book to rtf.
- In Word, create a document with a page size that is the same as your reader screen.
- Then in Word create a two-column table.
- Copy the original rtf to the left column, and the translated rtf to the right column.
- Spend some hours aligning the paragraphs. This is really the time-consuming part!
- Save the whole thing as PDF and copy to your reader.

This worked very well for me. It is not just that you don't need all those dictionary lookups while reading, but it also helped me to understand idiom and colloquial phrases etc. that you would never find in a dictionary. Read the left column, and if there is something you dont understand, look to the right. It's as simple as that.

BTW: aligning the paragraphs is the nasty bit. I tried to use a tool for that, LF Aligner, but the results were unusable for me. Still, for other language pairs this might work, so you could give it a try to save some time.

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

There is no such thing as a 'difficult language'. Any language can be learned by 2 year olds!

I'm saying this to encourage all foreign language learners. You can do it!

Research has shown that the process used by children learning a language works up until approximately the age of 12. After that structural comprehension is required in order to learn a language. There are some adult exceptions, but in terms of understanding they don't "learn" the language, they learn to mimic phrases applied to certain situations. They couldn't tell you the first thing about the language and how its grammar is structured, to give just one example.

[HansTWN]

Of course there are comparatively difficult languages. To give you an example: I know a lot of expats who have been to Indonesia for 6 months, and every single one of them speaks the language almost fluently. The same people now live in Vietnam and after 3-5 years just one (out of 10) has progressed beyond "Thank you", "a coffee with milk, please", etc. Only one of them can hold a very simple conversation.

The reason is that they can't get the pronunciation right to the point where they can be understood by native speakers. Apart from the 6 tones there are 3 different U's, a number of strange double vowels, and D's, T's, G's, Ng's, and other consonants of differing "hardness". So after a few months of enthusiastic learning, trying their skills in conversations with native speakers and being faced with "Huh??" every time they just gave up. Fortunately I am not easily embarrassed and I have the unfair advantage of speaking Mandarin (which is closely related) so I can hold a decent conversation even though I spend very little time there.

In some other languages it is extremely easy to be understood (take English, it is hard to imagine someone's pronunciation being so bad that you absolutely cannot understand a word he or she says), but very difficult to get the grammar right. But, of course, every language can be learned, you just need a lot more effort to learn the more difficult ones.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

They couldn't tell you the first thing about the language and how its grammar is structured, to give just one example.

Neither can most native speakers, in my experience .

They can tell you something is right or wrong, but why it is? I am Dutch, and was taught grammar in both primary and secondary school, but I remember very little of it. A wrong sentences grates, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what grammar rule it violates. It's just 'wrong'.

Same with English. I am C2 level certified (Cambridge Proficiency) and I can tell you whether a sentence is correct English or not. But don't ask me to explain why; I probably won't be able to tell you. It just 'feels' right or wrong.

[hidari]

Not going to chime in too much....but suffice to say I reckon most languages have difficulties at the Advanced to Proficiency level. Yes, People can learn Slavic languages....far from impossible just a pain depending on the one...in my case Russian...which is a minefield compared to Bulgarian which has dropped most of its cases like English and French have. French simple passe is easy IMH... cases are more complex than verb conjugations in my experience.

Have had natives say my Russian and Spanish were like natives...but seems more politeness...then reality...After you live in another country for a few years and realize the depth of culture, idiomatic phrases and so on and so forth you see how vast a language can be...

Best way to learn is keep reading in the language you want to learn...one book at a time.......

[ficbot]

I also remember learning in an intro linguistics class that babies are born capable of producing every sound, but that as they learn their native language, their vocal cords specialize and they lose the ability to make sounds which don't exist in their language. So yes, all languages are 'simple' enough that a baby can learn them, but there are also reasons why an adult might have trouble rolling their R or pronouncing the Hebrew 'ch' properly

I teach a Norwegian child whose baby sister has a name which sounds very different when they say it to each other compared to when they say it to us. It's like they have pretty much accepted that nobody in North America will say it properly (it sounds like a sort of trilling i sound when they do it) so there is a lot of 'her name is [bird chirp noise] but you may call her Angloversion.' I wonder if, should they decide to stay here, they'll be sorry they didn't choose a more English-friendly Norwegian baby name I know my stepbrother has expressed regret about one of his kid's names---it's very popular in the Jewish day school circuit, but nobody outside of that community can say it properly, and there are some lovely Hebrew names that are much easier...

[Sweetpea]

I think I'm rather fluent in English, when reading and writing. But when speaking it, I might stammer or pronounce badly.

For me, the only way to learn a language is by using it. I use English on a daily basis (as part of my profession) but on the written word. When I lived in the US, I was a lot more fluent speaking it as well, but lack of practice is slowly decreasing my fluency...

[Freeshadow]

@ ficbot: It's useful to find out if someone cares. If it's so that person 'll ask to be taught how to say ones name properly. IMO it's a matter of respect to do so.