How to learn a language by reading books

Most people who say they learned a language from books mean something specific. They took a course long enough to get the basics, then spent months reading things they actually wanted to read. The course gave them the basics, and the books did the rest.

This guide is about that second stage: how to learn a language by reading real books, with examples from classics you can read for free in Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and English.

Why reading works

Linguists have a name for language you understand with a little effort: comprehensible input. Stephen Krashen made the term famous in the 1980s, and his later book The Power of Reading argues that free, voluntary reading does more for vocabulary and grammar than most classroom drills. Researchers still argue about how far that goes, but almost nobody disputes the core point: you learn words by meeting them in context, many times.

A book is the cheapest way to get thousands of those meetings. A 60,000-word novel shows you the same common verbs hundreds of times, in different tenses and situations. Studies of how learners pick up words from reading, Waring and Takaki's 2003 study of graded readers among them, find that one meeting rarely makes a word stick. Ten or twenty meetings across a book often do.

Reading also gives you grammar you'd never memorize from a table. After a few chapters of Lazarillo de Tormes you stop noticing the past tense; you just read it.

When to start reading books

Earlier than you think, but not on day one. A good sign you're ready:

• You know the present and at least one past tense of common verbs.
• You can read a short news item or a children's story and follow what happens, even if you miss words.
• You've finished a beginner course or app path, roughly A2 on the CEFR scale.

If that's not you yet, start with short graded readers or fairy tales and come back in a month or two. Our guide to graded readers vs classics explains when to switch.

Pick the right book (this matters most)

The single biggest reason people quit reading in a new language is a book that's too hard. If you need the dictionary on every line, reading turns into decoding, and decoding is exhausting.

Research on vocabulary coverage gives a useful target. Hu and Nation (2000) found that readers needed to know about 98% of the words in a fiction text to understand it comfortably without help. That's one unknown word in fifty, roughly one or two per paragraph. At 95% it's one in twenty, which is still workable with a tool that explains sentences for you. Below that, most people give up.

A quick test: open the book at a random page and read one paragraph. If you can tell what's happening and there are only one or two words you'd need to check, it's a good fit. Our guide on how to choose a book at your level goes deeper.

Interest matters as much as difficulty. Pick a story you'd enjoy in your own language: a mystery if you like mysteries, an adventure if you like adventure. You'll forgive a hard page in a book you want to finish.

Good first books by language

These public-domain classics are marked beginner in Passage and work well as a first real book:

• Spanish: Cuentos de la selva by Horacio Quiroga (1918), animal stories with short, clear sentences; Marianela by Benito Pérez Galdós (1878), a short novel. More in classics for Spanish learners.
• French: Poil de Carotte by Jules Renard (1894), short scenes from a boy's childhood; Sans famille by Hector Malot (1878). More in classics for French learners.
• Italian: Le avventure di Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi and Cuore by Edmondo De Amicis (1886). More in classics for Italian learners.
• Dutch: the Dik Trom books by C. Joh. Kieviet, which Dutch children have read for over a century.
• English: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911) or Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie.

How to read a page

Here's a routine that works for most learners:

1. Read a paragraph straight through without stopping. Get the gist.
2. Reread it. Underline (or tap) the sentences that still don't make sense.
3. Look up only what blocks the meaning. If you can guess a word from context, guess and move on. If a whole sentence loses you, look it up as a sentence.
4. Save a few words. Pick the ones that come up again or that you'd want to use yourself. Five to ten per session is plenty.
5. Keep going. The next page will often explain what this one didn't.

Why look at whole sentences? Because a dictionary gives you the word, and the problem is usually the structure. Take the line that opens the first chapter of Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554:

Every word is in a dictionary. What trips learners up is sepa (a subjunctive used as a polite command) and a mí llaman (“me they call”, Spanish word order). A sentence-level explanation clears both up in seconds.

Keep the words you meet

Reading gives you the first meeting with a word. Review makes it stay. A few minutes of spaced review between chapters (seeing a word again just before you'd forget it) does more than an hour of rereading lists.

Two things make review stick better:

• Review the word inside its sentence. Seeing “fortune” inside “a single man in possession of a good fortune” brings back the book, the scene and the joke along with the word.
• Mix the direction. Recognize the word, then produce it from your own language, then hear it.

Passage builds its eight practice games from the words you save, including Context Recall, which blanks the word out of the original line from the book.

Build a habit you can keep

A little every day beats a lot once a week. Some ways to make it stick:

• Attach it to something you already do: the commute, coffee, the ten minutes before bed.
• Set a time goal. Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes whether the page is easy or hard.
• Finish books. A finished short novel does more for your confidence than three abandoned long ones. Start short.
• Listen while you read sometimes. Hearing a sentence fixes the pronunciation of words you've only seen.

Common mistakes

• Starting with the most famous book. Don Quijote, Les Misérables and Dante are wonderful and hard. Read them in year two.
• Looking up every word. You'll read two pages an hour and hate it. Guess, then check only what blocks you.
• Reading the translation instead of the original. Use translations sentence by sentence, as a check, then go back.
• Never reviewing. Without review, most new words are gone within a week.
• Only reading. Reading won't fix your accent. Add listening and some speaking.

Where to go from here

If you're ready to start, choose your first book with the level guide, or browse the Passage library by language: Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and English. If you're still weighing apps, see the reading apps compared.

Questions