92 Books Later: How To Learn A Language By Reading
I’m going to list three things and ask you to guess what they all have in common:
El Extranjero
Padre Rico, Padre Pobre
El Código Da Vinci
Do they all seem like random Spanish titles to you? Well, you're right. But they have something else in common too. Can you guess what it is?
These are the books I read in Spanish in June. I love learning languages by reading and I especially love reading in other languages. Reading is not only interesting and effective but also a fun way to learn a language. And compared to taking Spanish courses from any university in the world, reading is a much cheaper option.
In fact, my year-long stock of Spanish literature cost me at least ten times less than a full-year Advanced Spanish course would have cost.
So, forget about language classes. Investing in books is always a better deal when it comes to language learning. Here's why:
We learn languages by reading
According to statistics, the vocabulary size of a typical college student is around 20,000 words. This vocabulary tends to expand at a rate of 1000 words per year, and most of these gains come from reading.
Reading is the primary and probably the fastest way to increase vocabulary, no matter what language you're learning. And if you don't remember memorizing a list of 20,000 most frequent English words as a child, that's because you didn't do that.
We don't have to know all the words in a sentence to understand its meaning. We can derive the meaning of unknown words from the context, even if it gives us only a vague idea of what the word may signify.
Over time, as we encounter the same words repeatedly, we add extra information to our mental dictionary until we construct a pretty good description of the word's meaning. This process is called incidental learning.
Could the same trick work with foreign languages? Absolutely!
Learning a foreign language through reading
For many people, especially those with a degree in education, the rules of the normal world seem to cease to apply when it comes to second language learning. Reading turns into a game of dictionary look-up, and suddenly, it becomes a highly challenging activity that's "for fluent speakers only."
It’s true that you do already have to know some vocabulary before you can read in another language.
According to Paul Nation, a leading vocabulary acquisition researcher from Victoria University of Wellington, a learner should know 98% of the vocabulary in a book in order to read it with ease and learn the remaining 2% incidentally.
No matter how insurmountable it sounds, incidental learning is still precisely what you want to count on when reading in a foreign language.
The very same mechanism that allowed you to learn 1000 English words per year would let you guess the meaning of an unknown word from the context, without consulting your little Larousse every two minutes. All you need to do is read at the right level.
The more you read, the more times you encounter your target words, and the more chances you have of finally learning them.
What is really crucial here is frequency, because repetition is essential for vocabulary acquisition. However, there is no set "optimal" number of repetitions necessary for learning a word. Recommendations vary from study to study, but Dr. Paul Nation assures that 12 repetitions would be a safe bet in most cases.
What is clear is that if you want to learn a language by reading, you have to read a lot. But how much is "a lot"?
How many books do you have to read to learn another language by reading?
I love reading research papers on language acquisition, but only a handful of them ultimately change my approach to learning.
This one was life-changing.
I refer to Paul Nation's 2014 corpus-based study, in which he calculated the amount of input necessary to learn the most frequent 9000 words. Here are his findings:
Let's imagine that you already know the first 2000 most frequent words. In this case, you would have to read just about 300,000 words (or 3 books) to pick up another thousand words at the 3000-level.
Here's a caveat, however: reading three novels won't guarantee 100% coverage for all target words at this level. Out of one thousand tokens, roughly 800 would be encountered 12 times and about 80 one or two times. There's nothing you can do about it other than read more. Due to the nature of Zipf’s law, some words always show up more often than others.
Covering the missing 1000-level
You might have noticed that the 1000-level is missing. There are two reasons for that.
There are two reasons for that. The first one is that Zipf's law would simply ruin the calculations. The 1000-level includes the 1000 most frequent words and covers most "outsiders" such as function words (the, of, me) and general concepts (people, to like, park). These tokens are so frequent that the first 135 words alone account for 50% of any text.
The second reason is that you can't read without knowing any words at all. For me, having a basic 1000-word vocabulary is a prerequisite for reading anything in another language. I know that without the basics, I can't access the material I really want to read, and the idea of reading children's short stories rarely excites me. So, I typically spend a month just learning these 1000 words with spaced repetition.
How much time should you devote to reading to learn another language from scratch?
Are you already making a list of 25 Italian books that would help you learn 9000 words?
"Don't Fall Into This Trap: How Long Does It Take to Learn a Language by Reading?" The table above is a build-up list, which means that if you don't know any words, you won't become a fluent speaker after reading 25 books. These 25 books will help you cover 9000-level words only if you already know the 8000 most frequent words by this point.
So, how long does it take to learn a language by reading from zero?
It depends on how you approach the task.
Method 1: Slow and Steady
In his article, Paul Nation suggests learning vocabulary at the rate of 1000 words per year, which is similar to the vocabulary acquisition rate for L1. In this case, you would need to finish just two books in the first year, three in the next, six in the third, and so on.
Reading three Italian books in a year, ten minutes a day, doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. But...this way, it would take you nine years to "learn" a language.
"Slow and steady wins the race?" Well, probably not in this case. Nine years is a huge period of time, and your goals may change 180 degrees – multiple times (sometimes to the point where you don't even feel like learning the language anymore).
It happened to me at least three times. And if I didn't manage to reach working proficiency before this change of course, the time was practically wasted.
Method 2: Fast and Furious
That's why I like to take everything to the extreme and reach a high proficiency level as fast as possible before changing my mind again.
Back to the table: if we add all the numbers from the second column, we get approximately 11,000,000. That's the number of tokens you have to process to learn the most frequent 9000 words from scratch.
This equals something like 92 books. With a reading speed of 200 words per minute (which is comfortable enough – I tend to read English at 295 wpm, and English is far from my native language), it would take you 150 minutes a day (2.5 hours) to process all this beauty in a year.
And as a person who aims to do just that, I can testify that this number is insane.
However, there are ways to make your life easier and still learn a language through reading in record time.
How to Learn Foreign Language Vocabulary in Record Time?
Language learning is an ongoing process. You'll never be "done," even after you hit this 9000-level milestone. However, more often than not, you can consider yourself fluent way before you learn all these words.
That's why there are a number of things you want to rethink about language learning, reading, fluency, and vocabulary size:
1. You don't have to get all the input from reading.
Reading in a foreign language is one way to get essential, comprehensible input., but it's not the only way.
Any activity you do in your target language will contribute to that cherished number of 11 million tokens you need to upload to your brain. You may listen to podcasts, watch movies and YouTube, talk to strangers, read magazines, play games... When it comes to vocabulary acquisition, anything goes, seriously.
Diversify your input, and you'll never feel bored. But keep in mind that spoken input is often way slower than written input. If you read a book for two hours, you will process approximately 24,000 words. Spend the same two hours watching a movie, and you will get just about 10,000 words, with a typical speech rate for movies of 83 words per minute.
2. You don't have to learn all 9,000 words in a single year.
If you never managed to finish 92 books in a year, don't expect to finish 92 foreign language books at the same time.
You would need to have a well-established reading habit (as well as a ton of free time and motivation flying high 365 days in a row) to read this much. So save this idea for your retirement.
Instead, aim to cover, say, 1,000-5,000 levels in the first year, 6,000-7,000 in the next, and gradually work your way through 8,000-9,000 levels during the following 18 months. This way, you'll consistently read 20-30 foreign language books a year, which is more than manageable.
3. You don't even have to know all 9,000 words.
Fluency is not measured by vocabulary size.
According to Paul Nation, you need to know 7,000 to 8,000 words to read unsimplified texts and 6,000 words to understand movies. But two Canadian linguists, Stuart Webb and Michael Rodgers, would argue that 3,000 words are more than enough for watching foreign language TV.
You may feel more than confident with a vocabulary of 3,000 words. To understand what I'm talking about, check out some words from the English 4,000 level: judicial, urged, and clearing. Now tell me, how often do you use them?
So aim to reach the 5,000-level through natural input in the first year. Then spend the next two years solidifying your knowledge.
The good news is that the more you read at the higher levels, the better you'll know the most frequent vocabulary. Thus, if you read a novel at the 6,000 level, you'll automatically refresh and consolidate your understanding of the 5,000 most frequent words.
What books to read to learn a language?
4-year-old kids don't start their reading adventures with War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy because it's too hard and kills motivation, right?
There is an assumption that beginner language learners shouldn't do anything similar either. Nobody thinks, however, about the motivation of adults dying of boredom while reading Little Red Riding Hood in Portuguese just because it was "their level."
Always prefer challenge to boredom. We linguists pray for comprehensible input, but it doesn't mean that you're doomed to read short stories until you gain a 5,000-word vocabulary size. Input can be made comprehensible with a dozen reading strategies or simple one-click dictionary lookups on devices like Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Aura.
The rule of thumb here is to read as much as possible. This way, book after book, you’ll expand your vocabulary, enhance your understanding of grammar, and increase your proficiency level. Try to learn a language through reading, and you’ll never want to do it any other way.
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