By the time I went to university I had already been studying German at school for 7 years. However as it is very common in the Russian educational system I didn't speak the foreign language. Even after a year of studying at the faculty for foreign languages I wasn't quite sure whether I could speak German or not. But then something amazing happened.
We had such a part of our learning process as home reading. Every year we had to read and retell 500 pages of foreign original books.
I didn't have any German original books and there wasn't any Internet yet. That's why I asked my teacher to give me some books. I got two thick German books from her. I had only two weeks for reading them. So I had to read quite a few pages every day.
The first days were the most difficult. I came across a lot of new words, which I wrote down and tried to remember. On the first page I saw lots of them. On the second one I saw lots of them again.
But authors usually have not more than 10,000 words in their vocabulary. So beginning from the fifth or the sixth page I began to see all the same favorite words of the author and fewer and fewer words were unknown to me.
The miracle happened at the end of the book. The vocabulary of the author had already been depleted and he couldn't give me any new words. He had used them all. I felt that I had mastered the language. I liked that feeling of total understanding of the language.
It was difficult at the beginning of the book, but the feeling at the end of the book was worth it.
We had such a part of our learning process as home reading. Every year we had to read and retell 500 pages of foreign original books.
I didn't have any German original books and there wasn't any Internet yet. That's why I asked my teacher to give me some books. I got two thick German books from her. I had only two weeks for reading them. So I had to read quite a few pages every day.
The first days were the most difficult. I came across a lot of new words, which I wrote down and tried to remember. On the first page I saw lots of them. On the second one I saw lots of them again.
But authors usually have not more than 10,000 words in their vocabulary. So beginning from the fifth or the sixth page I began to see all the same favorite words of the author and fewer and fewer words were unknown to me.
The miracle happened at the end of the book. The vocabulary of the author had already been depleted and he couldn't give me any new words. He had used them all. I felt that I had mastered the language. I liked that feeling of total understanding of the language.
It was difficult at the beginning of the book, but the feeling at the end of the book was worth it.
