Tips for Learning to Read a Foreign Language

Let's suppose you've studied the basics of a foreign language and now wish to become more fluent in reading it. What do you do?

As I've studied several foreign languages over the years, I've discovered some strategies that help.

1) Sound out the language as you are reading it.

When learning to read a foreign language we should remember that every real tongue (as opposed to a constructed language, like Esperanto) is first and foremost a spoken form of communication. Every foreign language was spoken for many years before it was written down. There's good reason to believe that the spoken word comes more easily to us than the written page. When a person reads a foreign language out loud, it slows the pace
down, and makes the reader pay more attention to each word. It helps us distinguish very similar words, and prevents us from skipping over those little words that are sometimes easy to miss when learning to read a foreign language.

2) Make sure the text is big enough.

This may sound pretty basic, but I discovered as I was learning to read a foreign language that text sizes that are easy to read in English are harder to read in, say, Greek or Spanish. Of course, if you are having an extreme problem, the first thing you might want to do is have your eyes checked. But if that is not the problem, while you are learning to read in a foreign language you may wish to select books with slightly larger text or to use reading glasses, even if you do not usually use them.

3) Look up words, but not every word.

Of course if you are learning to read in a foreign language you want to have a good dictionary of the foreign language you are trying to learn. But contrary to popular belief, when learning a foreign language, it's not always necessary to look up every word you don't know. For example, if you are only unfamiliar with one word in a phrase you are reading, but the meaning is clear from the context, it may not be necessary to reach for the dictionary. Let the context be your guide. Most of us, when we are learning to read our native tongues, do not look up every word, and the same applies as we are learning a foreign language.