Daily Dose of English 16
Reading
Daily Dose of English 16
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about reading. Because reading is a bit of an interesting word and, I guess, idea and concept. Because the way that we use the word colloquially, so that's when we're just talking to each other, right, as people, we typically mean reading books, literature, if you will. But reading is a lot more common than that because the primary way that we interact with phones and computers, currently, is by reading. There's still not amazing text-to-speech, right, so your phone doesn't really sound that good to listen to because it's kind of awkward and it's slower. And on computers, it's a much faster way. Email is still a huge thing. Text messaging is massive because reading is quick and easy and fast. The harder part is the writing, but that's a whole different episode. But for reading, we do a lot of it every single day, but not in that way that I mentioned before, where it's specifically reading books. Because I do think there's a pretty big difference between reading something, technically you're reading a thing by looking at the words, versus the act of sitting down to read, choosing to read something specific that somebody worked hard on. There's a huge difference between a text message that was written in five seconds versus a sentence that somebody worked on for a couple, maybe even an hour, right? Some books definitely have sentences and passages that took a long time to write, and I think that's a lot more of an interesting topic because almost everybody knows that reading is good for you. If you ask somebody if they think that reading is a good thing, they'll almost always say yes. But then if you ask them, do you read a lot? Do you read enough? Not very many people say yes. Yes, I think it's still most people, right? I think at least 50% of people with free time read. But it's much, much less common than it used to be when there wasn't really anything else. If your news came from a newspaper and your reports or I guess new stories came from books, that was the primary way to get new information from all over the world was to read. But nowadays that we have YouTube and video and podcasts and movies, it's a lot less common. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? I'm not going to say that movies and TV shows are ruining everybody. But I think it's something that it's important to think about, at least. I personally, when I was growing up, read a lot. Reading was a huge part of my life and my, I guess, language development in a lot of ways. I listened to a lot of audiobooks as well. We already talked about that. But then I also read many books. I remember whole summers when I would sit by the fire reading. Sitting by the fire in the summer isn't necessarily a normal thing to do, but that's what I did because it was warm, okay? Don't judge me. But I would read all different kinds of books, typically young adults fiction was my favorite, but all different genres within that fantasy, sci-fi, whatever. And I really liked it. And I remember reading just really a lot of books. But then at a certain point, I think when I started high school-ish, maybe a little earlier, I almost completely stopped reading unless it was absolutely required. I didn't really read very much at all. I probably read less than 10 books in the last five-ish years that I was going to school, especially for fun. I'm not necessarily counting textbooks or books that I had to read. But if it was like a book that I chose to read, it's got to be like two or three, not very many, which I think is a bit of a sad thing because I would read so much before that. And so what changed? And part of it was my mindset and what I was interested in shifted to be more on computers and online. But then also, there wasn't really anything that was as interesting to me. Nothing grabbed my attention that I wanted to read because when I was growing up, there was a bunch of book series and stories that I wanted to experience, I guess, to read, to hear the stories. And the way to do that was by reading the book. And so I just didn't have that anymore. But then a couple of years ago, probably at this point, like five or six, I realized that I wanted to read more. It was something that I wanted to do more of and I wanted to experience stories and literature that people wrote and built, I guess. Writers in a way are building a story and they're taking their ideas and turning them into something real on the page. Is that real? I don't know. That's a whole philosophical question. But I wanted to read more, but I didn't. I had trouble doing it. I couldn't really figure it out. I couldn't sit down and read a book. And it took me a little while to understand how. I actually did some research and I watched, ironically, I watched some videos and I tried to find out some tips on how to read more. And a couple of things, I think a couple of interesting lessons that I learned that I can share now is to, one, read what is interesting to you. Don't try to read the thing that everybody's reading or that you should read if you don't really care. If you don't like biographies, don't read biographies. I started reading pretty much only fantasy literature and that really, really helped because that's what I wanted to read. I was interested in reading fantasy books. Another thing is to, if you don't like reading a book, drop it. You don't owe the book anything. I think before I felt this need to finish a book because I had started it. It was something that I started and I should finish it because I'm already halfway through. But if you don't like it, just drop the book. Who cares? You're doing this for fun and for you and so you should enjoy it. And so reading what you want to, dropping things that you end up not liking, and having a couple of different books at one time so that you can jump between things is also really helpful. Right now, I don't do that as much, but that was very helpful when I was starting to read again. And then my last tip that I discovered on my own that I think is really, really valuable is to start reading in a new language. I have pretty much only been reading in Spanish for the past, let's see, three years now. Maybe a little more. Yeah, like three years. I've pretty much only been reading in Spanish, partly because Spanish interests me and it's something that I want to get better at, but also because that skill of relearning how to read was very powerful for motivating me to keep reading. As I got better at reading again, it's essentially like learning to read again. I wanted to read more. My brain was going, oh, okay, you're getting better at this. Keep going. And that sort of internal motivation of reading in a new language was very, very powerful. Plus, reading is just a fantastic way to learn a new language, especially if you're beyond the beginner stages because you already have a bit of a foundation in the language, so it's not just completely brand new. And it exposes you to tons of new words in an interesting way. And that's the big thing. If you're enjoying the stories that you're reading, you're much, much more likely to remember things and understand them. I remember reading a paper, a study, that was done on some Korean students who were learning English. And they were in university and their English course was actually just reading books and talking about them. They did no vocab study. They were only told to read the book and then talk about it with their class. That was the entire thing. There was no vocab study. There was nothing extra about learning the language necessarily. But they took a vocab test at the beginning and the end of the class and they found that the students learned a lot of words without even trying. It's almost the lazy way of learning new words because you're just exposed to them in a context where it makes sense. And the really cool part is that even after the course had finished, I think a couple of months later, they tested the students again to see if they remembered the words. And the words that had come up several times in the books were much, much, much more likely to be remembered because they were in that context that they connected to. So I definitely recommend that you find books to read in English to improve your abilities in the language. Do be careful though because with English specifically, the spelling can make it really complicated to hear the words in your head. And so if you need, read along with audio books. That's a very, very useful way to read and to hear the language at the same time. I think that's all the tips that I have for now. Oh, one last one. Start with easier books, typically meant for teenagers or young adults. There's a lot of great books for that age group that are a little bit easier and simpler and they deal with more, not normal topics, but they're more guessable, right? It's not as hard to understand because they're made for younger people in mind. And so I definitely recommend some of those books. You can always look on a website like Goodreads has tons of options or just ask other English speaking friends if they have any recommendations. But that's everything I have for today's episode on reading. I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe learned a thing here and there. But that's enough from me. I hope that you had a good time. Make sure you're subscribed and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye bye.
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