The thinking behind ReadOriginal
Why reading popular books in the target language is such an effective way of learning
The human brain is a natural language-learning computer, but to leverage its full computing power, we need to use it naturally. Remember how we learned our native tongue? We listened a lot and read a lot. In other words, a vast amount of comprehensible language input passed through our brains.
The language was comprehensible — we understood what we read or heard, and our brains could guess the words we didn't know from the context.
The more comprehensible language input we get, the more new words we learn, and the more the neural connections in our brains reflect the connections between words and phrases in the language. Eventually, we develop mastery and a sense of language — phrases sound right or wrong depending on whether they align with our neural pathways.
Language students lack the vocabulary and skills of native speakers because of their limited exposure to the language. Plenty of activities help them retain the relatively few most frequently used words. However, they encounter less common words too rarely to remember them permanently or develop the relevant neural pathways. Progress slows to become an endless cycle of learning new words one day, only to forget them the next. That's when you should start reading books to provide your brain with the input it needs to further advance your language learning.
What's the problem with reading books in a foreign (English) language?
In short, the problem with books in foreign languages is too many unknown words!
An educated native speaker knows about 20,000 word families, which is the required number to understand practically every word in a typical novel. How many word families does an average learner know? 3,000–4,000.
It's no wonder that when learners try to read books, they're immediately overwhelmed by unfamiliar vocabulary.
Path to the solution
You don't need to know every word. The contents of a book should be just comprehensible enough for you to guess the meaning of unknown words from their context. Research shows that to reach this level of comprehensibility, a reader needs to know around 98% of all the words in the book (also remember how native-speaking children are advised to choose books with no more than 4–5 unknown words per page — about 2%!).
Test it for yourself. Here is a short story with 2% of the words replaced by nonsense (98% known), then the same story continuing with 5% replaced (95% known). Watch what happens to your reading:
You live and work in Tokyo. Tokyo is a big city. More than 13 million people live around you. You are never borgle, but you are always lonely. Every morning, you get up and take the train to work. Every night, you take the train again to go home. The train is always crowded. When people ask about your work, you tell them, "I move papers around." It's a joke, but it's also true. You don't like your work. Tonight you are returning home. It's late at night. No one is shnooling. Sometimes you don't see a shnool all day. You are tired. You are so tired…
In the morning, you start again. You shower, get dressed, and walk pocklent. You move slowly, half-awake. Then, suddenly, you stop. Something is different. The streets are fossit. Really fossit. There are no people. No cars. Nothing. "Where is dowargle?" you ask yourself. Suddenly, there is a loud quapen—a police car. It speeds by and almost hits you. It crashes into a store across the street! Then, another police car farfoofles. The police officer sees you. "Off the street!" he shouts. "Go home, lock your door!" "What? Why?" you shout back. But it's too late. He is gone.
Other research shows that to read most fiction books with 98% familiarity, you need to know around 9,000 of the most frequent word families in the language.
But nobody reads all the books at once. For any single book, 98% of the content is covered by 3,000–4,000 of the most frequent word families in this book.
As we said, an average learner knows around 3,000–4,000 of the most frequently used words in the language and needs to know the 3,000–4,000 most frequent words in the book. How big is the mismatch between these two sets? It depends on the book, but there are thousands of popular books where the mismatch is only 100–400 words and hundreds of books where the mismatch is around 30–40 words. That's just 30–40 words to learn to start reading real English books! Certainly doable in a week! Isn't that amazing? If only we knew exactly which books we could read and which words we needed to know… And that's where the ReadOriginal Book Finder comes to the rescue!
Can we do even better?
It's extremely beneficial to read books that are not only easy to understand but also exciting. That said, no matter how exciting the book is, it's no fun having to learn hundreds of new words for each one you want to read.
You can experience one of the most beneficial aspects of the ReadOriginal solution when reading books that make up a series. When writing a series, authors tend to use similar vocabulary from book to book. So the words you learn in the earlier volumes are highly likely to reappear in the ones that follow. As a result, subsequent books have fewer words to learn and get easier and easier to read.
As an illustration, imagine you're a learner with a vocabulary of the 3,500 most frequently used words. You are a huge Harry Potter fan and decide to read all seven books in J.K Rowling's series (and it's a very hard one) at a familiarity level of 98%. You would have to learn the following number of word families for each book in the sequence:
After the initial "investment" in the first two books, you'd be able to settle down and thoroughly enjoy reading the books you truly love while only having to learn 5–9 new words per 100 pages!
You can also achieve this effect (though less pronounced) by reading a random selection of books. When picking words for a current book, we just need to go for those also used in the books we're going to read later. And you can easily plan all this with ReadOriginal's awesome Reading Plan feature.
Why word families
A word family consists of words that have some common meaning. The words are created from a headword with the help of different affixes. For example, a word family for the headword predict includes the words prediction, predictable, unpredictable, predictably, etc.
There are two reasons for using word families instead of individual words:
- Word families are the most reliable way to say which words learners are already familiar or unfamiliar with. For example, once you've learned the word slow, it's not difficult to deduce the meaning of the word slowly. But if we were tracking individual words, slowly would be counted as unknown until the reader explicitly marked it otherwise.
- Learning the entire family rather than just one word requires very little additional effort. When you know the meaning of predict, for example, memorizing prediction and predictable are of no cost to you. What's more, learning the entire family together helps you understand the meaning more deeply.