The Benefits Of Reading In Different Languages

You will never master a language until you can pick up any book off a shelf and read it for fun. In this post, we will look at the benefits of reading in different languages.

You can learn to speak another language without ever reading a book.

Everyone does this with their first language.

But, you will never master a language until you can pick up any book off a shelf and read it for fun.

This is true of second language learners and of people who don’t read in their native language. People who read never have trouble expressing themselves because they simply know more words and have thought deeply on more topics than people who don’t read.

And, so, this is why I have started reading as much as I can in foreign languages.

I have made a lot of progress in learning a third language – Japanese. It’s much harder than my second language Afrikaans, a type of Dutch, because reading it is a real chore.

Japanese uses the 8^th Century Chinese character set and two additional syllabaries to write. This means you need to learn 3500 characters in total to read a book at an adult level.

But, that just means that can understand the individual characters. They are of course put together in different combinations to make words.

The Benefits Of Reading In Different Languages

The only way to learn how to read these words is to read lots of books.

So, I am doing that.

And, well, in English I can read 150 pages an hour. But, I can only read 4-5 in Japanese.

1. The Fun Of Being A Child Again

So, I feel like a child again. Which is kind of fun.

I decided to run with that and see if any of the books I have read as a child have been translated into Japanese and then read those.

At first I felt frustrated because there are many Japanese books I want to read as well. But, knowing the context of the story you are reading helps you figure out the meaning of words without having to constantly look things up in a dictionary.

I am currently reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (I like to read multiple books at the same time) in Japanese. Also some other Japanese books, but this article is not about them.

The Hobbit is written for kids and is somewhat easier to read than The Lord of The Rings, but it is slow going for me.

I think I was about 14 when I read The Hobbit. At that time I read not just because I enjoyed it but also because it allowed me to learn new words at the fastest possible rate. And my mother would give me $10 per book I read. It must have been expensive for her.

In particular Discworld was great for this and it also provided a sound philosophical education at the same time – sadly not many have been translated into Japanese.

But, now I feel like I am 14 again and learning all the names for adventure related items. Which is novel and fun. To quote Bilbo: ‘I’m going on an adventure!’

2. Cute Things I Have Noticed

Certain languages have speech patterns for characters. English does not. The closest thing we have is accents. Which are actually more like dialects where people just pronounce things differently or use alterative words like ‘boot’ instead of ‘trunk’.

But otherwise, in English there is not much difference between the way that Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader speak.

Maybe Vader uses some old fashioned words or sounds meaner but essentially the language is the same.

But, Japanese has set patterns for speaking. So Luke speaks sort of informally but politely and Darth Vader sounds like an Old Man Samurai.

Which, while entertaining, does not work for me. I think it comes off as silly and not as deeply threatening as James Earl Jones’s voice. The Japanese version sound like a farmer speaking in a bucket trying to sound like King Arthur.

But, it’s kind of wonderful in a book like The Hobbit where Tolkien was using stereotypes to build his characters.

We have the shy and foolish Bilbo, the grumpy old Gandalf, and the ceremonious prideful long-winded Thorin.

Let me tell you nobody does stiff ceremoniousness quite like the Japanese.

They make the English look as welcoming as a Canadian Farmer who just won a hundred dollars on a scratch ticket and is going to treat the boys down at the pub.

I like Gandalf in particular. In English he is of course gruff and rude, but also jolly.

But, because Japanese has a mode of speak old people use to talk down to younger people, he just comes off as super condescending in a funny old man way.

Some troubles

Now it doesn’t always work out so well. Japanese is as comparably old and complex as English. So basically there are just tens of thousands of words that don’t make an appearance in Japanese to English dictionaries.

This happens to me because I like reading SF and Fantasy. In these genres many words are cultural dependent.

English is a great exporter of words from Science Fiction so it’s easier to figure out that a phaser is a ‘Feiza’. But, every language has its own fantasy words.

Think of all the old English words that Tolkien uses. Like ‘Barrow’, ‘Thrain’, or ‘Farthings’. You don’t quite get the same feeling when Thrain becomes lord or farthing becomes district.

And, then there are words that you can’t even find in Japanese to Japanese dictionaries. Hopefully you will be able to figure them out from context.

But, I had to ask a translator friend of mine for some words.

He says it’s even worse translating words from English because English words are very precise.

To give an example, it’s hard to translate foot into East Asian languages because they tend not have a word for that part of the leg. Instead they would say ‘the root of the leg’ ‘the bottom of the leg’.

So as a consequence in Japanese ‘Footsteps’ are different words depending on if you mean. They could be the ‘tracks left by legs’ or ‘the sounds that a footfall leaves behind’.

3. Feels Like I’m Making Progress

I read on a kindle nowadays. That allows me to track my progress.

It tells you how much time you are likely to spend in each chapter as the rate you are going. This was at first hours.

Now it is in the tens of minutes. It’s still very long when you think that perhaps it would take about 5-10 minutes to read a chapter of a book in English but progress is progress.

I have set some goals for myself in learning. I wanted to be able to understand TV and I wanted to be able to read anything in a bookshop.

So, for the most part I can understand the everyday level of conversation that TV shows use, unless it is a legal drama or something technical.

This mean I have stopped feeling like I am making progress when watching those sorts of shows.

Reading is the final frontier so to speak. It is challenging and satisfying in the ways only something you have to work hard for can be.

4. Good For The Brain

As we age we learn less and less because we encounter things we already know, more and more often.

This leads to gradual mental decay from boredom.

I am not saying that people who keep learning new things and challenging their minds won’t get brain diseases. However, it does seem that linguists like Steve Kaufman, in his 70s who speaks 10-20 languages depending on how strict you are about fluency, is sharper than people who have idled their brains for decades.

At the very least, he’s interesting to listen to because he can talk about a huge variety of topics in several languages.

I’m not saying go crazy like me and spend five years intensely learning Chinese or Japanese.

Why not pick up some French or German though?

Take an hour out of your TV time and read The Colour of Magic in Spanish. Aim for a page a day at first. Then five, then ten, and why not a chapter after that?

The Final Word

Reading in a foreign language is fun. It’s like discovering all my favourite things for a second time. Haven’t you ever wished you could read a book again for the first time?

This is as close to that as you will ever get.

And, I have also been able to read books that have no translations in English. Or even just read them before they are translated.

Sometimes it can take years for an English version of a book to come to market or it might never. So if you are desperate to find out what happens next in a particular story this might be a good way to make that happen.

By Christopher Luke Dean (I bet you want to know what ‘Fly you fools!’ is in Japanese now? You’ll just have to find out yourself.)

Christopher Luke Dean writes and facilitates for Writers Write. Follow him on Twitter: @ChrisLukeDean

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6. Building A New Blog From Scratch: Part 2 – WordPress
7. Building A New Blog From Scratch: Part 1
8. The Greatest Fictional World Builders: Akira Toriyama
9. Creative Things I Learned During The Pandemic
10. The Writing War Machine

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