Reading—the Most Important Way to Learn English

Before you can start speaking and writing in English, your brain must get enough correct English sentences. You can't speak English if you have never seen an English sentence in your life. This is obvious. And you can't speak English well if you have not seen a large number of English sentences.

There are two ways to get correct English sentences: listening and reading. Both are good, but reading is usually much easier than listening. With the help of a good dictionary, you will be able to understand English texts much more easily than, for example, English television or movies.

If you read just one book in English, you will see that your English has become much better. You will start using lots of new vocabulary and grammar in your school compositions and e-mail messages. You will be surprised, but English phrases will just come to you when you are writing or speaking! Things like the past simple tense and how to use the word "since" will become part of you. You will use them automatically, without thinking. Correct phrases will just appear in your head.

It will be easy to use English, because your brain will only be repeating the things that it has seen many times. By reading a book in English, you have given your brain thousands of English sentences. They are part of you now. How can you make a mistake and say "I feeled bad", if you have seen the correct phrase (" I felt bad") 250 times in the last book you've read? You simply cannot make that mistake anymore.

This is true for hundreds of words and grammar structures. If you read in English, you can forget about grammar rules. Throw away your grammar book! You don't need to know the rules for the present perfect tense. You don't even have to know the name "present perfect". Instead, read a few books in English, and soon you will feel that "I have seen Paul yesterday" is wrong, and "I saw Paul yesterday" is correct. How? Simple. Your brain has seen the second kind of sentence 192 times, and the first kind 0 times. This is what we call grammar intuition. This is how native speakers know what is correct. It's no magic. You can do it, too. The only difference between you and native speakers is that they have heard and read more English sentences than you have. Many learners have improved their English grammar and vocabulary in an amazing way because of intensive reading.

How to Read

These great results come especially quickly if you do three things when reading.

Pay attention to interesting things: new words, phrases, and grammar structures.

Use your dictionary to learn about these interesting things. The more you use your dictionary, the faster your progress. If you don't like to stop reading (to look up a word in your dictionary), you can write down all the interesting sentences, or you can underline them in the book with a pencil.

You can learn the words and grammar in these sentences later.

Add these interesting things to a memo or notebook. This will give you everyday contact with correct English sentences. With such a memo, you will not forget useful words and grammar. Because of this, you can build your knowledge very quickly.

What to Read

You should always read English texts which are at the "right level". What does it mean? There should be some words that you don't know, because you want to learn something. However, there shouldn't be too many difficult words, because you don't want to use your dictionary 10 times in one sentence.

Here are the kinds of texts that you can read in English:

Literature. If normal books are too difficult for you, we recommend graded readers. These are usually famous books, written in simple language. There are many levels of difficulty—from "easy starts" (which use only 200 basic English words) to "advanced" (3000 words).

Science books. If you are interested in science, you can get great science books written in English. There are many famous English-speaking authors in many subjects, such as psychology, biology, physics, or economics.

Textbooks. If you're studying at a college and you use textbooks written by English-speaking authors, you can get the original English versions. If you are learning a new computer language, you can use a book in English. You will learn your subject and English at the same time.

The Web. On the World Wide Web you are completely free. You can read about every subject in the world—whatever interests you. Because you will often spend many hours surfing the Web, you can also learn a lot of English.

There are also some small things to do. For example, you can start using English versions of your computer operating system, and other applications. You can also find people who will write e-mail in English to you. You should simply read in English as much as possible.