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

[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?

I find that in French, I am a better speaker than I am a reader (because when I speak, I can just use words I know) and I want to cross that intermediate barrier into full fluency. I am good with general vocab---on a typical page, I might look up two or three words for actual translation, and I can often get through several pages without looking up anything. But I still panic a little at all the fancy verb tenses. I recognize that something is a form of a certain verb which I know, and even might recognize that it is a past tense form, but I get hung up on what exactly the actual translation to English is (I went, I would have gone, I did go etc.) and so get slowed down.

I am assuming that with enough experience, I'll get better at this and might eventually become truly bilingual. On average, how long does that typically take? It's not that I am waiting to complete a certain number of books for any kind of validation or prize, it's more that I want to know how much time I am going to have to budget for this. 1,000 books? 5,000? More?

[susan_cassidy]

I don't think that it is quantifiable. Different people have differing levels of language skills, and learning is not linear, either. No one can say "after 6 months, you will be fluent", or anything like that. If you can think and speak and read in the language without hesitation, in all situations, you are fluent.

[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.

[DiapDealer]

3877 books.

[Laridae]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

3877 books.

Very good!

As DD so succinctly puts it, there is no exact number.
Obviously it's a continuum - the more you read, the more fluent you'll be.
But, as was mentioned earlier, you should also practice writing and speaking, as well. You don't say where you live but perhaps you could find some French speakers in your area and practice with them to sharpen your verbal fluency.
Or, if you want to get Really serious, spend some time in France. That will really help bring you up to speed and help your accent as well.

Bon chance!

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by Laridae

Or, if you want to get Really serious, spend some time in France. That will really help bring you up to speed and help your accent as well.

Two weeks as a tourist in Spain improved my Spanish more than many years of infrequent reading of Spanish language books.

[frostschutz]

Just one. As long as you understand it and it covers your topics of interests.

For me, it was Harry Potter...

Originally Posted by ficbot

but I get hung up on what exactly the actual translation to English is (I went, I would have gone, I did go etc.) and so get slowed down.

I read, write and listen to English every day but I have no clue how to translate accurately or how English tenses correlate to German ones. In school I failed in every single exam that expected me to know grammar e.g. "put this in past perfect progressive" - unsolvable problem if you don't know what past perfect progressive is supposed to be. But most native speakers don't know either so I'm not overly concerned.

For any language, I study vocabulary, and read/write/listen. I don't speak much, unfortunately (I'd have to travel more, or get used to Skype). I never translate, and never make an effort for grammar. I prefer to pick it up along the way. This way I can just use whatever form "feels right". I just can't deal with having a list of hundred tenses in my head and hundred more rules when to use which, especially not when those rules turn out to be unreliable. If I make mistakes because of that, so be it.

But my personal experience is that people who try to translate everything exactly, and try to understand each and every grammatical construct and why exactly it's used there, they usually fail because they cling to their own native language way too much, and lots of times there just isn't an explanation, it just is.

[HansTWN]

I speak several languages. In my personal experience practicing speaking and listening with a number of different native speakers (to learn to understand people with different accents and to make sure that different people can all understand you) is the most important. This will make you actually think in the foreign language. Watching TV and listening to the radio also helps greatly.

Reading comes into play only once you have reached a certain level of proficiency and want to "upgrade" your skills. Reading will help you to perfect your sentence structure and expand your vocabulary.

I agree with Frostschutz that learning grammar through studying is a pain-in-the-you-know-what and it is much easier to acquire a feeling for what sounds right or wrong through listening and reading rather than by learning the rules.

[charlesatan]

In depends on the language, culture, syntax, etc.

Chinese writing is based on ideograms for example, and thus will have a different dynamic compared to Romanic languages.

The "read a lot" works for English because English is actually quite inconsistent, and a lot of proper usage is based on context/previous experience as opposed to hard and fast rules.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by charlesatan

In depends on the language, culture, syntax, etc.

Chinese writing is based on ideograms for example, and thus will have a different dynamic compared to Romanic languages.

The "read a lot" works for English because English is actually quite inconsistent, and a lot of proper usage is based on context/previous experience as opposed to hard and fast rules.

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.

[Xanthe]

Originally Posted by frostschutz

In school I failed in every single exam that expected me to know grammar e.g. "put this in past perfect progressive" - unsolvable problem if you don't know what past perfect progressive is supposed to be.

Ah, thank you for that! That's been my problem, too, with the grammar of other languages; I simply don't know what all those tense names refer to and apparently I have a mental block regarding learning them. My brain sort of stops after past, present and future.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Xanthe

Ah, thank you for that! That's been my problem, too, with the grammar of other languages; I simply don't know what all those tense names refer to and apparently I have a mental block regarding learning them. My brain sort of stops after past, present and future.

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.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

I speak several languages. In my personal experience practicing speaking and listening with a number of different native speakers (to learn to understand people with different accents and to make sure that different people can all understand you) is the most important. This will make you actually think in the foreign language. Watching TV and listening to the radio also helps greatly.

Reading comes into play only once you have reached a certain level of proficiency and want to "upgrade" your skills. Reading will help you to perfect your sentence structure and expand your vocabulary.

I agree with Frostschutz that learning grammar through studying is a pain-in-the-you-know-what and it is much easier to acquire a feeling for what sounds right or wrong through listening and reading rather than by learning the rules.

I also speak several languages and agree with most of this. The most important thing you can do is spend as much time as possible with native speakers. But once you have a basic knowledge, reading can be a good way of expanding what you know. But I don't really think that reading leads to fluency very directly. But indirectly it helps a lot, as it can massively increase your vocabulary and give you examples of grammatical sentences. But reading is a passive skill; the hard part about fluency is the active part where you produce the sentences yourself.

Re: grammar - for most languages, you have to learn grammar; there's no way around it. If you want to say "I have eaten" in French, you need to know that "ai" is the form of "avoir" that goes with "Je," and that "mangé" is the form of "manger" that means eaten when used with "J'ai."

But you don't necessarily need to know that "je" is a first person singular pronoun, that "mangé" is a past participle, or that the sentence is written in the present perfect tense and is in the indicative mood and the active voice.

(Eventually knowing this will be useful, especially if you learn additional languages. But early on, you need a few rules and a lot of examples and practice).

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Re: grammar - for most languages, you have to learn grammar; there's no way around it. If you want to say "I have eaten" in French, you need to know that "ai" is the form of "avoir" that goes with "Je," and that "mangé" is the form of "manger" that means eaten when used with "J'ai."

But you don't necessarily need to know that "je" is a first person singular pronoun, that "mangé" is a past participle, or that the sentence is written in the present perfect tense and is in the indicative mood and the active voice.

(Eventually knowing this will be useful, especially if you learn additional languages. But early on, you need a few rules and a lot of examples and practice).

What I meant is that you can "assimilate" grammar more easily by always learning whole sentences rather than just single words. When you see or hear them often enough, correct sentence structures become second nature, just like they do for a child learning its first language.

[Billi]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

But reading is a passive skill; the hard part about fluency is the active part where you produce the sentences yourself.

Why "but"? In my opinion this is one possible way of learning languages, to have the passive part - listening and reading - first and only later the active part - speaking. At least this resembles the way we learn our own mother tongue.