Hello, everybody!

Today’s post was written by our very own Sean Young, from Texas, and it is about improving your reading skills. Check it out!

When learning a language, reading skills are best sharpened through actual reading practice. Also, you need to be a willing and active reader for it to do any good. And when reading, do not just go over the words as if trying out your pronunciation. Ask yourself, “Do I understand what I’m reading? What or who is this article about? What are the main points in it?”. Some languages have hundreds of words borrowed from English, or English has borrowed words from other languages that can be understood immediately.

Read as much as possible

A great way to build up you vocabulary is to have a go at reading books, magazines, newspapers or comics written in your new language. Ideally look for reading material covering topics you find interesting. Even if you don’t know all the letters or symbols, you will be able to make out some of the words and to guess some of the others. Look out for the names of people and places and for loan-words from your own language as these tend to be relatively easy to spot and decipher. Try to guess the meanings of any words you don’t know by paying attention to the context of the story or article you’re reading. If you’re still stuck, check them in a dictionary to see if your guesses were correct. You don’t have to look up every unfamiliar word as long as you can get the gist of the text.

Comic books and children’s stories

Reading comic books, like Asterix and Tintin, is an effective and fun way to improve your reading comprehension and vocabulary. The pictures help you to follow the story when you can’t understand all of the dialogue. The dialogues in the Tintin books tend to be longer and more serious than those in the Asterix books, which are full of puns and jokes. At first you’ll probably find that you have to sound out letters individually before you can decipher the words. Eventually you’ll be able to recognize words by their shapes and will only need to sound out the letters of unfamiliar words. You probably went through the same process when learning to read your native language.

Label things around your home or office in the new alphabet with translations in your own language. This will increase your exposure to the new alphabet and help you to recognize key words and phrases. Try reading aloud whatever material you get hold of. There are links to online newspapers and magazines in many different languages on relevant pages of this site. If you know a native speaker who is willing to help, ask him or her to read things aloud. Then you try to do the same and ask your friend to correct your mistakes.

Want more free resources to learn Spanish? Check out the other goodies we offer to help make your language learning efforts a daily habit.