How To Get Faster At Reading In A New Language

Reading in a new language is always uncomfortable at first, which means that you will be slow.

This can be extremely frustrating and it can feel like you are not making much progress. Luckily this is not something you need to be stuck with forever. You can actually end up reading as fast in your new language as your native one.

I will go through some of the best ways you can practice, so that you can become faster. You will need to put the time and effort in, but you can make yourself faster.

Why Are You Reading Slowly In A New Language?

To find out how we can go faster, we first have to work out why we are going slowly.

The first issue is that we are just not used to the language. The words are not comfortable. We are not sure about what they mean, how they should sound and just generally everything about them makes us feel cautious.

We also may not be used to the alphabet if you are learning a language that uses a different script. You just can’t expect to be fast at reading if this is the case.

In both these instances, you will be slow. This is totally normal and totally expected. Luckily it is not a problem you have to live with forever. You can and will get faster with some time and effort, no matter what language you are reading.

(You can read more about – Why Is Reading In A New Language So Difficult?)

Practice Reading More

The easiest way to get faster at reading is to simple practice more. You are going to be slow for a long time, but if you just keep pushing, you will eventually get faster and end up reading as quickly as you can in your native language.

You are going to have to read a lot, but it is worth it. You will be acquiring the language at the same time, so you will notice your general ability to understand the language goes up, not just your speed.   

(You can read more about – How To Practice Your Reading Skills In A New Language)

Re-read Things, You Will Be Better The Second Time Round

Re-reading things is a very easy to speed up your reading. As boring as it may seem, it’s actually very beneficial for you.

Going over the same material is going to expose you to the same words over and over again.  This is just going to strengthen your knowledge of these words and generally speed up your processing power.

Of course you are going to notice you are able to read the same material faster the second time, as it is familiar to you, however, it’s not just this material that will be faster. When you go on to read something else, all the words you read multiple times will probably appear again at some point and when you see them in the new material, you will be comfortable with them and therefore faster.

Re-reading is just practice, it just happens to be focusing on a smaller group of words, so it’s extremely beneficial. You should really be making this part of your practice as the benefits are very powerful.  

Listen More To Speed Up Your Reading

You might think listening is not going to help your reading, but it will.

Listening and reading are closely linked and are of course both forms of input. You will find that the more you do of one the better you will be at the other.

Basically listening helps your internal reading voice as it allows you to hear exactly what the words should sound like.  Every word you hear will be stored in your brain and then when you actually read the word, you can recall the sound and match the two up a lot easier.

You are going to end up strengthening the links in your brain when you do this, and we need to remember all the different areas of language are all interlinked. Focusing one area will bring you gains in other areas.

(You can read more about – How To Improve Your Reading Skills In A New Language)

Thinking In The Language Will Make You Read Faster

One the biggest things that will slow your reading down is translating as you go. Going back and forth between your native language and what you are reading is extremely inefficient and if you can stop this you will see drastic improvements.

This means you need to start thinking in the language. This sounds very intense, but really it just means that if you see a word, you get what it means without having to think about it. This may not feel like thinking, but it is. You are now seeing the word as a something you understand and using it as language.

This will take time to develop, but every word you start to get comfortable with will be one less words you need to translate. Slowly over time you will be able to just think about the whole language in this way, which will make your reading much faster.

(You can read more about – How To Think In Another Language)

Increase Your Vocabulary

One of the main reasons for not really being able to think in a language, and therefore being slow at reading, is just not knowing enough words.

The more unknown words you read, the more you will struggle and be slow. It makes sense really, if you know all the words you will just be able to read them faster as you will understand them all.

Learn more words and you will get faster at processing what you are reading.

(You can read more about – Reading Resources For Language Learning)

Read and Listen Together

Reading and listening together is a very easy way to practice both your reading and listening and it will speed both up.

All you need to do is watch a video and read the subtitles at the same time. Just make sure that these both match up. If you are listening in one language and reading in other this will not work.  You are just going to be relying on your native language, so don’t do this.

So long as both the audio and text are in your target language it will help you become faster. You are going to be hearing and seeing the language at the same time and while this does make it easier, it actually makes things clearer in your mind.

When you go back to just reading you will be faster, you will have more experience with how the words you are reading should sound and you will be able to read faster a result.

Read Out Loud To Get Faster At Reading

Another very easy trick to help you read faster is to read out loud.

This slight change is going to make things more difficult for you and it will feel strange. However, you will start to get used to it and you will speed up.

When you go back to reading normally you will notice that you can now do this faster as well. You will only be focusing on reading, rather than reading and speaking now, so you will just be able to do this faster.

 (You can read more about – Frequently Asked Questions About – Reading In A Second Language)

Slowly Increase The Difficultly Level Of Your Reading

I think it is also important to remember that when you are learning a language it is exactly like everything else you learn. You need to crawl before you can walk and you need to walk before you can run.

Really what I am saying is that you need to slowly increase the difficulty so that you can get faster over time.

You should start with easy material and work your way up. You will find that as you develop, you will get faster. You can really see this works if you step back down to easier material, you will really notice that you are now a whole lot faster compared to when you originally read at this level.

You also need to remember that language learning is slow, so you may not even realise this has happened, so it can be good to take a step back every now and again to assess yourself, you might be shocked at how much progress you have actually made.

(You can read more about – Common Mistakes When Reading In A New Language)

Conclusion

As you can see it is very possible to increase your speed and while I have gone over some techniques that will help with that, really you just need to keep practicing.

With time and effort you will see improvements. You will become stronger in your language and more importantly you will see your reading speed increase. So long as you keep pushing yourself there is no reason why you cannot match the speed of your native language.

(You can read more about – Is Reading The Best Way To Learn A Language?)