Reading in English
How I got through a lot of pages without burning out on dictionary lookups.
⏱ About 3 min read
Reading is the cheapest way to grow your vocabulary. But read the wrong way and it is exhausting — I abandoned a lot of books for exactly that reason.
Two modes of reading
My biggest mistake was mixing these two together.
Extensive reading — read a lot, look up very little, favour volume. This is about 80% of my reading time now.
Intensive reading — take one short passage, look up every unknown word, make Anki cards from it. This is where my card material comes from.
Decide before each session
Wanting to read fast and stopping for every word is a guaranteed recipe for giving up.
Before I open the book, I say it out loud: today is extensive, or today is intensive.
How I pick books
- Start with a genre you have read a lot of in your own language. You already know the tropes, so your brain only has to handle the language.
- Favour long series. By book two the author reuses the same vocabulary. You get free review without doing anything.
- Avoid the classics at first. I tried and quit after two chapters. Archaic words and long sentences do nothing for everyday English.
Some easy ways in: young-adult fiction, long-running web serials, non-fiction about a field you already know well.
Lookups have to be fast
I installed Ddict so I can look a word up by double-clicking it, right on the page I am reading.
It sounds trivial, but the difference between "1 second to look up" and "15 seconds to look up" decides whether I read 5 pages that day or 50.
How I measure progress
Not by feel — feel always tells you that you are getting nowhere. I measure three numbers:
- Pages read per week.
- Lookups per page — this one should fall month over month.
- Can I keep reading without translating in my head?
The third is the most important, and the last one to arrive.