I’m trying a new experiment: I’m reading a German novel and I’m not looking up a single word. When learning a foreign language, you need to stuff your mind with “input” in the language you’re trying to learn. There are many ways to do this: immersion in a country where the language is spoken, watching TV and movies, talking and writing with native speakers, reading. Usually when I read something and don’t understand it fully, I’ll look up any words I don’t know on Langalot and save them so I can study them on the site. I still do this daily with other stuff that I read or hear, but with this book, I’m not going to look up anything.

I’m reading, aptly enough, Der Vorleser (The Reader). My German vocabulary is pretty small: around 1,100 words saved on Langalot. My German grammar level is probably intermediate. There’s rarely a sentence that I read that doesn’t have a word or phrase that I don’t understand. But, somewhat surprisingly, I do have a general idea of what is going on. Just like when I watch a German movie without subtitles, I can tell who is sleeping with who, who is mad at someone, and the basic gist of the story. And it’s getting easier as I get further into the book.

My plan is to watch the movie after I finish it (I’ve never seen it). Then I’ll read the book again and translate any interesting sentences and look up any intriguing words, of course saving them all to my langalot account. After knowing the story, I believe that doing these queries on the second pass will be an effective way to choose valuable, interesting sentences and words to learn instead of looking up everything.

This has been a great experiment so far and I recommend others try it. Just pick a good book, perhaps one where you already know the story. And don’t get frustrated when you don’t know a word or don’t understand a sentence, just keep reading.