How to Read 1 Million Words a Year in Your Target Language

How do you get to reading more than a million words a year in

the language you're learning?

Is that even possible?

Reading is key to so many things in life.

In our own language,

people who read well have more socioeconomic success.

The statistics prove this.

We have the case of Elon Musk, who apparently read two books a day.

I think the average book has 70-, 80-, 90,000 words in it.

250, 300 pages or so.

Apparently Warren Buffet reads 500 pages a day.

So those two gentlemen read 30 plus million words a year.

The average person, according to statistics, reads—in the US or in

typical European country—14, 15 books a year, a little more than one a month.

This works out to a little over a million words a year.

Just in terms of books. But, of course, we read all kinds of other stuff.

We read newspaper articles online.

We read Twitter, Facebook, and so forth.

So we easily read more than a million words a year in our own language.

But how does this relate to language learning?

I think reading is tremendously powerful in language learning.

I always feel that when I get to where I can read a book away from

the computer without the help of LingQ, or, you know, online dictionaries.

That's a major milestone in my learning activity.

So what about the strategy of reading a million words in a

language that we're learning?

Obviously it's much more difficult to read in the language we're learning.

The more different the language is, and especially if the writing system is

different, it's a lot more difficult.

So if we say that the average person reads, say, a book a month, and some

people read a book a week, if I get to where I, you know, this milestone

of reading a book in the language that I'm learning, I'm not reading a

book a week or even a book a month.

In that language, at least not for a long, long time.

So I would say, first of all, we have to make a distinction between

someone like me who is a bit of a dilettante, and I'm working on Persian and

Arabic, and I throw in some Polish, versus someone who's learning English.

I think for those of you out there who are learning English, who are working

on improving your English, you want to be as good as possible in English.

Maybe you need it for school or you need it for work.

Then I think the objective is trying to read at least one book in English a month.

It's realistic and it would be very beneficial to your language skills.

And the same is true for someone who is dedicated to one language,

French, Spanish, German, Chinese.

If you can get yourself to where you can read a book a month in

your target language, it'll have tremendous benefits. Because reading is

connected to listening and speaking.

We have to remember that for most of history

humans didn't—and whatever animals preceded us on the evolutionary

scale—obviously didn't read.

It's not something natural to human beings.

And for most of that period of history, when we had writing,

most people didn't read.

So the fact that we are able to read is a tremendous achievement. And

all kinds of research shows that

it's connected with sound. That when we develop our ability to read,

we first have to develop this— what they call "phonemic awareness"

The connection between the written word and the sound.

And this takes time to develop.

Struggling readers don't hear the sounds very well, so in dealing

with dyslexic people, or people who struggle to read in their own language,

increasingly educators are using teaching methods that connect the sound

to the written word. It's extremely important.

So as a language learner, we are in the situation of a struggling reader.

We're not struggling to read in our own language with all of the consequences

that has for socioeconomic success.

And it's a major problem in societies.

You know, weak readers have difficulty. They're overrepresented

in prisons, and so on and so forth.

Not always, like I know people who don't read well, who are very successful

at what they do. But largely speaking, reading is considered a shortcut

to greater socioeconomic success.

If we can improve the performance of poor readers, it'll have a major

impact for those individuals and also for society as a whole.

But getting back to language learning. We want to use the same approach in order

to improve our language learning skills.

So connect audio with

text as much as possible.

That's why at LingQ, for every item that we have in our libraries,

there is audio and text.

That's why we now, we enable people to grab an MP3 file

somewhere or from a YouTube video, or whatever, for their own use.

Of course, there's a limit to what they can share.

Bring it in.

There's an automatic transcription created, which

then you can study as a lesson.

The idea is that if you're focused on one language, you want to get to a

level where you can read a book a month.

That will really propel your language skills forward because whenever

you read, you are subvocalizing.

We know, science tells us, you know, MRIs of the brain tell us that the

same portion of our brain is activated

when we read as when we speak or listen. And this is true whether the

writing system is a pictographic system like Chinese characters or a syllabary

like the Japanese writing system or a pure alphabet like Hangul in Korean

or the Latin alphabet or the Arabic script. The brain performs the same way.

Text connects to audio.

Certainly if we're fairly good in the language we can follow along at LingQ.

I very much encourage people to import content of interest to

LingQ where they also have the audio.

Remember that one key to reading success is that

the content be of interest.

So just as I say at LingQ, we want people to learn the language

from content of interest.

If you want to increase your reading, go find things that are of interest to you.

And I know that kids, there are books that they like for

whatever reason they like them, like books by Roald Dahl that are

very popular with kids. And now they're fussing about the wording in those books,

which is so silly because really all you want is to encourage kids to read.

Nothing that is offensive to any particular group in any particular book is

gonna have a lasting impact on the reader.

The most important thing is to get the reader reading, and the

same is true in language learning.

Read things that you enjoy and you will improve your skills at reading.

You will improve your skills if you listen to the same content.

You will improve your listening skills. But there are steps, and if you look at

my statistics at LingQ, you'll see, first of all, that it's much easier for me to

read in Polish than to read in Persian or Arabic, even though I have spent far

more time on Persian than on Polish.

So it's not difficult for me to get up to 50-, 60,000 words a day of reading in

Polish when I'm really on it, whereas it's much more difficult to do that

in Persian.

In fact, in Polish, I can simply read through the text, listen to

it while reading if I want, or listen to it when I'm away from the

computer, come back and read it again to pick up the words that I missed.

But when I'm in Persian, I prefer to go through

the lesson in "sentence mode" where the audio is timestamped to the sentence.

I can closely connect the words to the audio because I don't yet have that

phonemic awareness in Persian because the writing system is more obtuse to

me. I'm not so used to it as I am

to the Latin alphabet. And I should add that in Polish—

and I haven't spent much time in Polish, but I was over in Poland

and so I imported this ebook into LingQ and I also was given a copy.

In fact, I was first given a copy of the book in sort of book

form, traditional book form.

Then I found the ebook and I imported it.

So now I can go through reading it on LingQ, looking up words, and then I can

sit down and enjoy the book in a traditional book format.

And I think this is something well worth doing, even if you read the

same thing in different formats.

It all contributes.

It's all part of reading.

Can I get in polish to where I read a million words a year?

In other words, a book a month or a little more than a book a month?

If I lived in Poland,

if Polish were the only language I was learning, I think I could

get there. And I think I would make it an objective to get there.

Now, if we step back to Persian, it's so much more difficult for me.

If I lived in Iran and if I had to get to that level, I think I would set myself

the goal of trying to read a book in Persian, you know, as a goal, one a month.

I think I could get there.

Part of it is, when reading away from the computer, as I did with this

other book on the, the History of Krakow, ignore the words you don't know.

In other words, get yourself to a level using, you know,

reading online, looking at words.

Get yourself to a level where you can still more or less follow

the gist of what you're reading without having to look up words.

Because looking up words very much slows you down and it's much faster to do that

reading online where you have, you know, a quick reference to an online dictionary

and the other functionality that's available in an application like LingQ,

to acquire vocabulary.

But the goal, if you are dedicated to one language and you genuinely

want to become fluent in that language, the goal of reading a

million words a year is attainable.

And I should add, because not everything you read is gonna be a book.

So if you read a book a week, You don't have to get to the level of Elon Musk or

Warren Buffet, and I might add in there Bill Gates, who claims, I think, that he

reads 50 books a year, which isn't in the 30 million words a year, but it's

in more than 3 million words a year.

You don't even have to get to that level.

If you read a book a week in your target language, you will definitely surpass

a million words a year because you do reading of articles, of

newspaper articles, social media.

But if you are committed to becoming, call it "C1" in your target language, then

you should be able to read a book a week.

And if you can combine it with listening, so combination ebook-audiobook,

if you can combine the two,

Because reading is so intimately—in our brains—connected with listening,

then you are going to dramatically improve your ability to read,

your familiarity with the language.

All of those things in your brain are gonna be activated.

So I think that's a laudable goal and an achievable goal.

Although I admit that with me in Persian, it's still a long way away.

And because I'm not dedicated to one language, I probably won't achieve it.

But for those of you who are, you know, determined to really kind of

ratchet up your skill level in a language, a million words a year is not

a difficult goal for you to achieve.

And there will be many, many benefits across your language skills.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.