Reading
Ocne uopn a tmie trhee lived in a cietarn vlagile a lttile cnortuy
gril, the prettseit crteuare who was eevr seen. Her mhteor was
ecsisxevely fnod of her; and her ghrodmentar doted on her slitl
mroe. Tihs good waomn had a ltilte red riidng hood.
If you are a native English speaker, you will have recognised
the initial sentences of Little Red Hood. If you are not,
understanding the previous paragraph is more challenging,
because your deciphering skill depends on the number of years
you have been reading English.
The original version: ‘Once upon a time there lived in a certain
village a little country girl, the prettiest creature who was ever
seen. Her mother was excessively fond of her; and her
grandmother doted on her still more. This good woman had a
little red riding hood.’ The words have been modified only
slightly, with the first and the last letter still in place and the
others shuffled at random.
How can you read such heavily distorted prose? The answer is
‘image matching’. Over decades of reading practise, your word
brain has accumulated mental word-images of tens of thousands
of words. When you read a text, you don’t spell the words, you
see them. Each word is a pictogram like a toilet sign in airports,
and slight variations of the pictogram are irrelevant for
comprehension. That is why our ‘cnortuy gril’ immediately
evokes the correct image – and why proof-reading is so subtle.
Reading a book is like seeing a movie. Word-images pass across
our brain screen at a speed of 5 and more words per second and
create mental images of things and events. We were too young –
4 to 8 years old – when we acquired this skill, and our memory of
this seminal event has faded away. So please sit back for a few
seconds, close your eyes and realise what an extraordinary
ability reading is: recognising and endowing with meaning,
effortlessly and within a fraction of a second, any single subset of
50,000 (or more!) words that inhabit your word brain. This is not
a mean feat. You possess this ability because you are the owner
of the most complex structure in the universe, the result of
hundreds of millions of years of evolution: the human brain.
Being the heir to the universe’s top luxury product is not the
entire story, though. Unconscious reading, with your eyes flying
over a text at speeds of almost a line per second, cannot be
acquired in a few months. Instead, it takes decades of training to
tune up your brain to high-speed reading. At present, you read
faster than you did at the age of 20; at 20, you read faster than at
15; at 15 faster than at 10; at 10 faster than at 8, and so on.
Reading only one hour every day exposes your brain to some
20,000 words, or 7 million words per year. In people with a
higher education, reading is the most trained single skill,
whatever their profession.
What does that mean for language learning? Well, if reading
were like watching a movie, you would certainly have to absorb a
huge number of new word-images – and as with listening, some
segmentation is needed. Take the word parachlorophenylalanine.
For scientists with a basic knowledge in chemistry, the meaning
and pronunciation of the word is as evident as the meaning and
pronunciation of love and peace. Meanwhile, non-scientists will
return to first-grade spelling techniques and ask themselves where the syllables start and where they end. Every language has
thousands of these complicated words. Remember the examples
from the Words chapter (abracadabrantesque et al.) or take a look
at words such as leszรกllรณpรกlya, megfรฉlemlรญtรต, megfigyelรตkรฉpessรฉg,
รบjjรกรฉpรญtett terรผlet. They are from Hungarian, one of the granitic
European languages, and unequivocally signal ‘I don’t want you
to learn me’. Do these considerations translate into another
1,500 hours of training for your eyes? Relax, you are not in for
another brain-breaking Via Dolorosa. Reading is different from
listening because training your reading skills comes as a bonus
of the obligatory learning of the 5,000 to 15,000 words. In order
to digest such a huge amount of words, you must read them –
again and again – and check them – again and again. These
lengthy repetitions are sufficient to create all the word images
you need for super-fast reading.
Please note that even with Hungarian or Finnish or Basque, you
are still on home ground. Decades of reading the Latin alphabet
have conditioned your brain for high-speed deciphering of
words from any language that uses this alphabet, even
roadblocks such as leszรกllรณpรกlya and megfigyelรตkรฉpessรฉg. Exactly
how familiar and how tremendously important the Latin
alphabet is becomes evident if you complicate things a step
further and select a language with equally unfamiliar words + a
different alphabet + the irritating habit of skipping half of the
vowels. The result: Arabic. In Arabic you will discover, much to
your dismay, that you need to know the function of a word
within a sentence – is it a noun? is it a verb? is it the active or
passive voice of a verb? – before you can infer the correct
pronunciation. As a consequence, reading, which is supposed to
support you during the learning process, is frequently of no help
at all, because you actually need to know what you are learning
before you can read it. The previous sentence sounds
complicated, doesn’t it? Well, that’s exactly how complicated
reading and learning a language is when 50 percent of the vowels are left to the beginners’ guesswork. Anticipate one to
three years of extra study time.
The challenge of different writing systems is indeed immense.
(Chinese is another example, but not Russian, as this modifies
only some characters.) Imagine painting the faรงade of a building
while standing on a solid scaffold – the Latin alphabet is exactly
this solid scaffold. Now imagine painting the same building
without a scaffold, just attached to a rope fixed to the chimney.
The second procedure is clearly more exhausting and
agonisingly time-consuming. Just to make sure that you are not
left with any false delusions, add the following facts: a) written
Arabic is spoken nowhere except on TV and at meetings or
presentations; b) in order to speak everyday Arabic you have to
learn additional country dialects which in practise amounts to
learning another language (like learning Italian once you have
learned Spanish); c) in Arabic-speaking countries, there is less
opportunity to visit provinces and cities with the fascination and
vibrations that inspire dreams of fabulous 6-month fullimmersion
experiences typical in Tuscany, Dordogne, Seville,
Berlin, Edinburgh, Freiburg, Orgosolo, Amsterdam, Stockholm,
or Lisbon – and you swiftly realise that you need to have pretty
good reasons to start learning Arabic. In any case, don’t wait
until you are 50.
Let’s get back to your reading abilities and define the learning
material you will use. I recommend that you start studying
classical language manuals. Among the dozens of existing
manuals, only a few are outstanding, and selecting good manuals
is like crossing a minefield. Ask your teacher for help. In
particular, make sure that the manual has word lists and comes
with audio files on a CD-ROM or on the internet. Personally, I
prefer books without pictures and drawings because words are
all you need (check www.TheWordBrain.com/BookRecommendations. Neither the
Bible nor the Torah nor the Koran comes with pictures.
As with audio files, be prepared for repetitive learning cycles.
Read the chapters of your manual 5, 10, or 15 times, until you
feel comfortable with every sentence and every word. You will
soon find out that reading is easier than listening, because it
does not require high-speed processing of several words per
second; instead, while deciphering a text, you can take all the
time you need until you understand everything – lingering on
single words, going back and forth through a sentence, leaping
between paragraphs. Remember that in educated people, most
words enter the brain via the eyes; they are not the result of
babbling, chattering, gossiping, or palavering, but of intense
reading at school, at university or during professional
occupation.
After the first manual, you may consider studying a second one,
but then you should change strategy. An appropriate strategy for
adults is to read what they usually read in their native language.
If you are a philosopher, read books about philosophy, if you are
a scientist, read books about science. Stick to what motivates you
most. Later, you will discover that words can be divided into
three great areas: 1) Language of science, documentaries, and
media; 2) Language of prose; 3) Colloquial language (comic strips,
etc.). These areas certainly overlap, but only to a certain degree.
So even if you understand 99 percent of the words presented in a
collection of newspaper articles, this percentage will
substantially drop when you start reading novels or sources that
contain colloquial language. Diversify your text sources.
Whatever source you start with – science, novels, or comic
strips – you will need a good dictionary to look up new words. A
good dictionary is a heavy book that weighs at least one
kilogram and has a minimum of 1000 pages. Over the years, you
will see that it is the single most important book of your
language project. Buy it soon and mark the pages that correspond to the individual letters (see Figure 3.1). This simple
manipulation will save you precious time; after just days of
training, you will find single words in less than 10 seconds.
Now take a text of your choice, underline the new words,
search for them in your dictionary, write them down in a neat,
hand-written list or in a computer document, and learn them.
Don’t forget to mark the words you have looked up (Figure 3.2).
Even if you are not going to learn a whole dictionary by heart,
you may decide one day to repeat the words that you are
“supposed” to know.
An alternative to traditional dictionaries are bi-lingual web
dictionaries. Ask your teachers for the best one. The best one
should allow you to build your personal word lists and to print or
recall them at any time. Now read, read, and read some more. But... don’t neglect the
daily listening training prescribed in the previous chapter! Be
careful: over several years, steady reading practise can lead to a
strange syndrome that is highly prevalent among academics.
These people are fluent at reading the scientific literature about
medicine, philosophy, music, or philology, but don’t understand
a person talking about the very same topics and using the very
same words. Their eyes work, but their ears don’t.
The diagnosis? Eye-ear dissociation. The cause? Inappropriate
training of the auditory brain cortex (see the previous Listening
chapter). People can be perfect readers, but at the same time,
poor listeners. (The contrary – the ears understand, but the eyes
cannot read – exists too: illiteracy.) To neuroscientists, this is not
surprising; eyes and ears are different entry ports for distinct
elaboration and storage sites in the brain. Training the visual
brain areas at the back of the head (see Figure 3.3) has little influence on the performance of the auditory brain areas.
Surprise: what seemed to be a single task – learning a new
language – turns out to be a multi-task project for your word
brain. In the Speaking chapter below, you will find yet another
construction site.
Figure 3.3: Reading words: High activity in the visual brain cortex.
Used with permission (see Figure 2.2).
Let’s summarise:
1. After decades of exercise, you have developed amazing
reading skills. At full speed, reading compares 5 and more
words per second with a huge library of word-images stored
in our brain.
2. These skills are of no use for languages with different
writing systems such as Arabic or Chinese.
3. After finishing your first language manuals, start reading
articles or books that you would normally read in your
native language.
4. Over the years, your dictionary will become your single most
important language book.
5. Beware of eye-ear dissociation.
The last three chapters – Words, Listening, Reading – may
suggest that language learning can be done without teachers. As a matter of fact, for the most time-intensive tasks, such as word
learning and speech recognition, teachers are of little help.
However, words alone don’t make up human language. You need
rules to arrange them in sentences, and, in the process, some
words will be modified. Grammar is the collection of these rules.
Fortunately, the number of grammar rules is limited, and if you
have some experience with grammar, you could also decide to go
on your own. If you haven’t, you need good language teachers.
Finding good teachers can be a nightmare.
TheWordBrain2015
Ocne uopn a tmie trhee lived in a cietarn vlagile a lttile cnortuy
gril, the prettseit crteuare who was eevr seen. Her mhteor was
ecsisxevely fnod of her; and her ghrodmentar doted on her slitl
mroe. Tihs good waomn had a ltilte red riidng hood.
If you are a native English speaker, you will have recognised
the initial sentences of Little Red Hood. If you are not,
understanding the previous paragraph is more challenging,
because your deciphering skill depends on the number of years
you have been reading English.
The original version: ‘Once upon a time there lived in a certain
village a little country girl, the prettiest creature who was ever
seen. Her mother was excessively fond of her; and her
grandmother doted on her still more. This good woman had a
little red riding hood.’ The words have been modified only
slightly, with the first and the last letter still in place and the
others shuffled at random.
How can you read such heavily distorted prose? The answer is
‘image matching’. Over decades of reading practise, your word
brain has accumulated mental word-images of tens of thousands
of words. When you read a text, you don’t spell the words, you
see them. Each word is a pictogram like a toilet sign in airports,
and slight variations of the pictogram are irrelevant for
comprehension. That is why our ‘cnortuy gril’ immediately
evokes the correct image – and why proof-reading is so subtle.
Reading a book is like seeing a movie. Word-images pass across
our brain screen at a speed of 5 and more words per second and
create mental images of things and events. We were too young –
4 to 8 years old – when we acquired this skill, and our memory of
this seminal event has faded away. So please sit back for a few
seconds, close your eyes and realise what an extraordinary
ability reading is: recognising and endowing with meaning,
effortlessly and within a fraction of a second, any single subset of
50,000 (or more!) words that inhabit your word brain. This is not
a mean feat. You possess this ability because you are the owner
of the most complex structure in the universe, the result of
hundreds of millions of years of evolution: the human brain.
Being the heir to the universe’s top luxury product is not the
entire story, though. Unconscious reading, with your eyes flying
over a text at speeds of almost a line per second, cannot be
acquired in a few months. Instead, it takes decades of training to
tune up your brain to high-speed reading. At present, you read
faster than you did at the age of 20; at 20, you read faster than at
15; at 15 faster than at 10; at 10 faster than at 8, and so on.
Reading only one hour every day exposes your brain to some
20,000 words, or 7 million words per year. In people with a
higher education, reading is the most trained single skill,
whatever their profession.
What does that mean for language learning? Well, if reading
were like watching a movie, you would certainly have to absorb a
huge number of new word-images – and as with listening, some
segmentation is needed. Take the word parachlorophenylalanine.
For scientists with a basic knowledge in chemistry, the meaning
and pronunciation of the word is as evident as the meaning and
pronunciation of love and peace. Meanwhile, non-scientists will
return to first-grade spelling techniques and ask themselves where the syllables start and where they end. Every language has
thousands of these complicated words. Remember the examples
from the Words chapter (abracadabrantesque et al.) or take a look
at words such as leszรกllรณpรกlya, megfรฉlemlรญtรต, megfigyelรตkรฉpessรฉg,
รบjjรกรฉpรญtett terรผlet. They are from Hungarian, one of the granitic
European languages, and unequivocally signal ‘I don’t want you
to learn me’. Do these considerations translate into another
1,500 hours of training for your eyes? Relax, you are not in for
another brain-breaking Via Dolorosa. Reading is different from
listening because training your reading skills comes as a bonus
of the obligatory learning of the 5,000 to 15,000 words. In order
to digest such a huge amount of words, you must read them –
again and again – and check them – again and again. These
lengthy repetitions are sufficient to create all the word images
you need for super-fast reading.
Please note that even with Hungarian or Finnish or Basque, you
are still on home ground. Decades of reading the Latin alphabet
have conditioned your brain for high-speed deciphering of
words from any language that uses this alphabet, even
roadblocks such as leszรกllรณpรกlya and megfigyelรตkรฉpessรฉg. Exactly
how familiar and how tremendously important the Latin
alphabet is becomes evident if you complicate things a step
further and select a language with equally unfamiliar words + a
different alphabet + the irritating habit of skipping half of the
vowels. The result: Arabic. In Arabic you will discover, much to
your dismay, that you need to know the function of a word
within a sentence – is it a noun? is it a verb? is it the active or
passive voice of a verb? – before you can infer the correct
pronunciation. As a consequence, reading, which is supposed to
support you during the learning process, is frequently of no help
at all, because you actually need to know what you are learning
before you can read it. The previous sentence sounds
complicated, doesn’t it? Well, that’s exactly how complicated
reading and learning a language is when 50 percent of the vowels are left to the beginners’ guesswork. Anticipate one to
three years of extra study time.
The challenge of different writing systems is indeed immense.
(Chinese is another example, but not Russian, as this modifies
only some characters.) Imagine painting the faรงade of a building
while standing on a solid scaffold – the Latin alphabet is exactly
this solid scaffold. Now imagine painting the same building
without a scaffold, just attached to a rope fixed to the chimney.
The second procedure is clearly more exhausting and
agonisingly time-consuming. Just to make sure that you are not
left with any false delusions, add the following facts: a) written
Arabic is spoken nowhere except on TV and at meetings or
presentations; b) in order to speak everyday Arabic you have to
learn additional country dialects which in practise amounts to
learning another language (like learning Italian once you have
learned Spanish); c) in Arabic-speaking countries, there is less
opportunity to visit provinces and cities with the fascination and
vibrations that inspire dreams of fabulous 6-month fullimmersion
experiences typical in Tuscany, Dordogne, Seville,
Berlin, Edinburgh, Freiburg, Orgosolo, Amsterdam, Stockholm,
or Lisbon – and you swiftly realise that you need to have pretty
good reasons to start learning Arabic. In any case, don’t wait
until you are 50.
Let’s get back to your reading abilities and define the learning
material you will use. I recommend that you start studying
classical language manuals. Among the dozens of existing
manuals, only a few are outstanding, and selecting good manuals
is like crossing a minefield. Ask your teacher for help. In
particular, make sure that the manual has word lists and comes
with audio files on a CD-ROM or on the internet. Personally, I
prefer books without pictures and drawings because words are
all you need (check www.TheWordBrain.com/BookRecommendations. Neither the
Bible nor the Torah nor the Koran comes with pictures.
As with audio files, be prepared for repetitive learning cycles.
Read the chapters of your manual 5, 10, or 15 times, until you
feel comfortable with every sentence and every word. You will
soon find out that reading is easier than listening, because it
does not require high-speed processing of several words per
second; instead, while deciphering a text, you can take all the
time you need until you understand everything – lingering on
single words, going back and forth through a sentence, leaping
between paragraphs. Remember that in educated people, most
words enter the brain via the eyes; they are not the result of
babbling, chattering, gossiping, or palavering, but of intense
reading at school, at university or during professional
occupation.
After the first manual, you may consider studying a second one,
but then you should change strategy. An appropriate strategy for
adults is to read what they usually read in their native language.
If you are a philosopher, read books about philosophy, if you are
a scientist, read books about science. Stick to what motivates you
most. Later, you will discover that words can be divided into
three great areas: 1) Language of science, documentaries, and
media; 2) Language of prose; 3) Colloquial language (comic strips,
etc.). These areas certainly overlap, but only to a certain degree.
So even if you understand 99 percent of the words presented in a
collection of newspaper articles, this percentage will
substantially drop when you start reading novels or sources that
contain colloquial language. Diversify your text sources.
Whatever source you start with – science, novels, or comic
strips – you will need a good dictionary to look up new words. A
good dictionary is a heavy book that weighs at least one
kilogram and has a minimum of 1000 pages. Over the years, you
will see that it is the single most important book of your
language project. Buy it soon and mark the pages that correspond to the individual letters (see Figure 3.1). This simple
manipulation will save you precious time; after just days of
training, you will find single words in less than 10 seconds.
Now take a text of your choice, underline the new words,
search for them in your dictionary, write them down in a neat,
hand-written list or in a computer document, and learn them.
Don’t forget to mark the words you have looked up (Figure 3.2).
Even if you are not going to learn a whole dictionary by heart,
you may decide one day to repeat the words that you are
“supposed” to know.
An alternative to traditional dictionaries are bi-lingual web
dictionaries. Ask your teachers for the best one. The best one
should allow you to build your personal word lists and to print or
recall them at any time. Now read, read, and read some more. But... don’t neglect the
daily listening training prescribed in the previous chapter! Be
careful: over several years, steady reading practise can lead to a
strange syndrome that is highly prevalent among academics.
These people are fluent at reading the scientific literature about
medicine, philosophy, music, or philology, but don’t understand
a person talking about the very same topics and using the very
same words. Their eyes work, but their ears don’t.
The diagnosis? Eye-ear dissociation. The cause? Inappropriate
training of the auditory brain cortex (see the previous Listening
chapter). People can be perfect readers, but at the same time,
poor listeners. (The contrary – the ears understand, but the eyes
cannot read – exists too: illiteracy.) To neuroscientists, this is not
surprising; eyes and ears are different entry ports for distinct
elaboration and storage sites in the brain. Training the visual
brain areas at the back of the head (see Figure 3.3) has little influence on the performance of the auditory brain areas.
Surprise: what seemed to be a single task – learning a new
language – turns out to be a multi-task project for your word
brain. In the Speaking chapter below, you will find yet another
construction site.
Figure 3.3: Reading words: High activity in the visual brain cortex.
Used with permission (see Figure 2.2).
Let’s summarise:
1. After decades of exercise, you have developed amazing
reading skills. At full speed, reading compares 5 and more
words per second with a huge library of word-images stored
in our brain.
2. These skills are of no use for languages with different
writing systems such as Arabic or Chinese.
3. After finishing your first language manuals, start reading
articles or books that you would normally read in your
native language.
4. Over the years, your dictionary will become your single most
important language book.
5. Beware of eye-ear dissociation.
The last three chapters – Words, Listening, Reading – may
suggest that language learning can be done without teachers. As a matter of fact, for the most time-intensive tasks, such as word
learning and speech recognition, teachers are of little help.
However, words alone don’t make up human language. You need
rules to arrange them in sentences, and, in the process, some
words will be modified. Grammar is the collection of these rules.
Fortunately, the number of grammar rules is limited, and if you
have some experience with grammar, you could also decide to go
on your own. If you haven’t, you need good language teachers.
Finding good teachers can be a nightmare.
TheWordBrain2015
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