A Complete Reading Method, Step by Step

This is the whole method in one place: what to do with a story, what to do with the words you take out of it, and how to arrange the two into something you can keep doing after the enthusiasm wears off. It assumes half an hour a day and a text at roughly the right level. If you are not sure yours is, test a page first — none of what follows survives a book that is too hard.

The unit is a story, not a session

Plan in stories rather than in minutes. A short story of two or three thousand words is small enough to hold in your head from beginning to end, which is what makes rereading it cheap, and long enough to repeat its own vocabulary, which is what makes the words stick. A novel does neither for a learner: by chapter nine the language of chapter two is gone.

One story a week is the rhythm the rest of this is built on. Some weeks it will be two. It is never half.

The five passes

1. Read it through, fast

No dictionary. Footnotes if the book has them on the page, nothing else. Read at whatever speed lets you follow what is happening, and when you meet a word you do not know, finish the sentence and ask whether you still know what is going on — if you do, keep going. Mark unknown words with a pencil dot as you pass them; do not stop to look anything up.

This pass is the one that does most of the work, and it is the one learners shorten first. Protect it. Twenty minutes of continuous reading is worth more than an hour spent on the first three pages, and the discipline of not stopping is itself the skill being trained.

2. Check what you got

Read the summary — the bilingual summary in these volumes, a plot synopsis anywhere else — and compare it with what you thought happened. Two or three minutes.

The point is calibration. If the summary holds no surprises, the text is at the right level and you can trust your reading. If it describes a story you did not read, the text is above the level where guessing works, and you should change book rather than try harder. This check is what stops a month of confident misunderstanding.

3. Take one page apart

Go back to a single page: the one that resisted you most, or the one carrying the turn of the plot. Now use the dictionary properly. Work out the clause you could not resolve, notice which tense the writer chose and why, look at the words you dotted and see which ones the context had in fact told you.

One page. The temptation to do this to the whole story is what turns reading into study, and study does not produce fluency — the two modes do different jobs, in something like a four-to-one ratio.

4. Reread the story

A day or two later, read the whole thing again, fast. This is the cheapest pass in the method and the one most people skip.

The plot is known, so nothing competes for attention with the language. Sentences you understood approximately resolve exactly; the page you studied is transparent; words met once on the first pass are met again in a context you now hold complete, and that second encounter is worth several first ones. Rereading is also the only way most learners will ever read a text at anything like a natural speed, which is a skill that only develops on material that is easy.

5. Listen

Listen to the recording while following the text, then once with the book closed. Words you acquired silently get a sound attached, sentences you had been parsing wrongly announce themselves, and the pace is set by the reader rather than by your hesitation. If you have no audio, read a page aloud yourself; it is less useful but not useless.

What to do with the words

Most words should be left alone. They were met in context, they will be met again, and that is the mechanism working as intended. Deliberate review is for the minority the context will not teach you.

Take about ten words per story. Not fifty. The words worth taking are the ones that appeared more than once, the ones that carried the plot, and the ones whose meaning stayed vague after the second pass — usually abstract nouns and the small connecting words that context never illuminates.

Save the sentence, not the word. A card with a bare word and its translation teaches you an equivalence you cannot use. A card with the sentence you met it in keeps the grammar, the collocation and the register attached. The Anki decks for these volumes are built that way for that reason, and importing one is a reasonable substitute for making your own.

Keep the review short. Five to ten minutes a day. Spaced repetition is a tool for retaining what reading has already introduced; the moment it grows to half an hour it is eating the reading time it exists to serve, and the trade is a bad one in every direction.

A thirty-day programme

Thirty minutes a day, six days a week, four stories. The seventh day is off, and taking it is part of the design rather than a lapse.

Week 1 — one story, all five passes

• Day 1. Story 1, first pass. Read it straight through, dots in the margin, nothing else. If you do not finish, stop at thirty minutes and finish tomorrow.
• Day 2. Finish the first pass if it is still open, then the summary check. Choose your one page.
• Day 3. The close page. Pull out ten words with their sentences and put them into your review deck.
• Day 4. Reread story 1, fast, in one sitting. Note how long it takes; you will want the number later.
• Day 5. Listen while reading, then listen alone. Review your cards.
• Day 6. Free reading: anything at or below your level, for pleasure, no notes. A second story from the same book is ideal.
• Day 7. Off.

Week 2 — the same, one notch faster

• Day 8. Story 2, first pass. Aim to finish it in the session; the second story by the same author is always easier than the first.
• Day 9. Summary check, then the close page.
• Day 10. Ten cards. Reread the close page only.
• Day 11. Reread story 2, fast.
• Day 12. Listen, twice as described. Review.
• Day 13. Free reading. Reread story 1 if you have nothing else — a story you read a fortnight ago is a different experience.
• Day 14. Off.

Week 3 — add production

• Day 15. Story 3, first pass.
• Day 16. Summary check, close page.
• Day 17. Ten cards, then write five sentences about the story in the language — not a literary summary, just five sentences about what happened. This is the point at which you find out which grammar you only recognise.
• Day 18. Reread story 3, fast.
• Day 19. Listen. Review. Do the book’s exercises if it has them, and check the key.
• Day 20. Free reading.
• Day 21. Off.

Week 4 — consolidate and measure

• Day 22. Story 4, first pass.
• Day 23. Summary check, close page.
• Day 24. Ten cards. Five sentences.
• Day 25. Reread story 4, fast.
• Day 26. Listen to stories 3 and 4 without the text. Review.
• Day 27. Reread story 1 and time it. Compare with day 4.
• Day 28. Free reading.
• Day 29. The test: open the next story and read a page with the book’s footnotes only. Count the words you did not know.
• Day 30. Off, and decide. Fewer than five unknown words on that page and you are ready for a harder volume; more, and another book at this level is exactly what you need next.

When it goes wrong

You are stopping constantly. The text is too hard. This is a choice-of-book problem and no amount of effort fixes it; drop a level and lose nothing.

You are bored. The text is too easy, or it is not a story you care about. Both are fatal to the habit and both are solved by a different book. There is no obligation to finish anything.

You missed four days. Resume at the day you stopped rather than starting again. The programme is a shape, not a streak, and treating a gap as a failure is how people abandon something that was working.

You have fifteen minutes, not thirty. Keep the first pass and the reread; drop the close page and halve the cards. The extensive passes are the ones that carry the acquisition — input is the thing that has to be protected.

Repeat it with the next story, and the one after. The volumes in this series are built to be used exactly this way — ten stories, a summary, a glossary, exercises with a key, a deck and the full audio — in Russian, French, Spanish and Italian.