Language skills
Reading
Intensive reading is more important at a beginner level, when you don’t have enough vocabulary to understand more than a couple of paragraphs.
As soon as you know a few hundred words you can start reading graded readers. These are books that gradually introduce more and more complex vocabulary.
With 3.000 words you can start reading original texts, not necessarily created for language learning.
When you are reading extensively do it the way that would allow you to look up words faster, should you need to. This often comes in the form of a digital reading application with a built-in translation dictionary.
Image from XKCD, by Randall Munroe. CC BY-NC 2.5
Listening
It is a common practice among learners to put the radio or the TV in the background while doing something else. This is not bad in order to get used to the sound and intonation of the language, but it will produce no learning, particularly for beginners.
Make space in your learning routine purely for listening practice. It takes many repetitions to differentiate the words that make a speech and improve listening comprehension.
When you think that you can understand a given speech fairly well, repeat it a few more times at a lower volume, with some other noise in the background, and at a slightly higher speed (around a 10% increase).
If possible, use materials that allow you to download audio files for reproduction in your favorite media player.1
Writing
Writing is the most overlooked kind of practice, yet very important for good learning. Writing exploits the noticing effect:
- First you notice gaps in your knowledge (things that you realize you actually know how to say).
- Then you try on your own to close those gaps.
- Then you ask for feedback from your teacher.
The best way to do it is with incremental writing. Start with a sentence that you know well how to write, and make it progressively more complicated, adding words, idioms, and grammatical constructions that you don’t know.
Feel free to use machine translation, dictionaries, and any kind of tool that helps you.
Another good exercise is to translate a text in your mother tongue for which you have the translation in L2 but have not read it already. First, write your own translation, then check the reference translation, then compare. It’s fine if they are not the same, but you will learn how things can be expressed differently or more concisely.
