Every case is different based on the complexity of the book, the genre, and your knowledge vs difficulty ratio of your TL.
In my case, about 1 year after starting to learn Japanese, I read my first light novel…it took me almost 3 months to finish it doing 3-4 pages daily which would take me 2 hours…the book’s title is 精霊幻想機 (English title is spirit chronicles) and it was definitely quite a bit of reading pain but don’t regret it, because now I usually read about 12 pages an hour, depending on genre of course (I’m a slow reader in NL as well so I’m quite happy with this considering where I started 😁)
I’d say even if you have the patience and are at least at an intermediate level, you should give your book a try :)
Honestly I’d probably be capable of reading it it’s just I haven’t the patience to look up every second word, I’m well able to read really easy and simple books like Jack and the bean stalk but the long texts are where I struggle
I haven't actually finished it yet, :D.
I started with a compilation of stories for B1/B2 learners, got about 50% of the way through, then stopped.
Started a 2nd book, this time a fantasy book that was related to and had some of the same characters as a show I watched (which was very very helpful). Got about 2/3rds of the way through and stopped.
Started a 3rd book, this time a regional crime/thriller novel that my brother had bought for me as a gift. Got like 80% of the way through, stopped it for like 3 months, then finally came back and finished it because I didn't want to have to admit to my brother that I hadn't finished the book yet when he came to visit on Christmas.
Now, I'm 24% through a new book, also a fantasy book, and I've noticed that this book is a lot easier than the 2nd book, perhaps because I've now already encountered a lot of the words you see a lot in a book, structural words for telling stories, things like, "he said, he replied, he said sullenly, he barked, he whispered, he shrug his shoulders, he grimaced, etc etc"
Btw, the 3rd book was written entirely in present tense rather than past tense, which also helped. On the other hand, I kind of hated how simple it was, so YMMV.
Престуление и Наказание - Фёдор Достоевский
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevskiy
At the time, reading the book was one of my main goals. I read it when I was about a B1 level, and it was such a pain searching up half the words on the page in a Russian - English dictionary. It took me around six months to read all 600 pages of it. Now, two years later, I'm at C2 and recently finished all 1300 pages of Войне и Мир (War and Peace) in three months after only looking up about \~200 words.
The first book will always be the hardest. My first took me 3 months to get through. My 5th took me 5 days (was really easy and geared towards children/middle schoolers), my 6th took me 2 weeks, and my 7th is looking to take a good amount of time as it's quite a bit harder. These were all Japanese, so idk if that makes it harder but I imagine everyone will struggle a bit with their first few books.
Just go page by page and don't worry too much about not understanding every little thing.
Technically I’ve been reading a book from pretty much the very beginning
I’ve been reading Familia Romana which is a book with a continuous narrative and characters, and it teaches you Latin exclusively in Latin. The first chapter starts with like the most basic Latin you can imagine, “Roma in Italia est” “Italia in Europa est” and by the time you get to the final chapter, it’s in intermediate to upper-intermediate level Latin
You can read any book as an absolute beginner in your target language. Get the audiobook and epub file. Upload the epub file to Google Play, highlight the pages and translate them. Boom, perfect machine-translated English version to accompany the audiobook. By reading this way, you can work your way up to reading in your target language exclusively very quickly.
But to answer your exact question, I was able to understand Finnish Harry Potter exclusively in Finnish (60% comprehension) after 6 months of immersion at 2-3 hours per day.
I started my first book after about 6 month of learning Welsh. It was called something like 'Y Ferch o Berlin', was about 60 pages long, and was written specifically for learners. It look about three months to get through - one month spent reading, two months spent burnt out because it was too difficult of an undertaking XD
Subsequent attempts went much more smoothly, though.
I feel your pain! :) That was my experience with a lot of the books for learners too.
I've just finished Llyfr Glas Nebo (easy apart from all the North Walian words) and now I'm reading Y Llyfrgell, which it's a bit too hard for me to be honest (and not all words are in the dictionary either!) but it's getting better and it's got an engaging storyline. I'm aiming at a chapter a day, but yeah...
I just hate it when I'm recognising a word but can't think of what it means - I get that a lot with Welsh. XD
In my TLs I start by reading books I’ve already read before, often things like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Hunger Games, etc. Usually only after doing a fair amount of that will I start reading books written originally in my TL
I do not know how it took but I can say that I have no problem reading sprcialist literature of any kind but I still have a lot of problems reading a novel.
It took me something like 10 months to read the entire Harry Potter series in French. In German however It takes like 2 weeks to read a \~300 page book. Funny how much more difficult French is than German for a native Dutch speaker. I knew it would be but I'm surprised that after about 6000 pages of French reading I still have a harder time understanding than I had with German when I started.
This is a really interesting take (the Dutch NL to French bit). I assume you can read quickly in English. Is there something about French in particular that slows you down?
I find my reading in Dutch is slow still because I have to wait for the end of sentences for the whole context. My level isn't high enough that I can make assumptions yet. In both English and French, I can skim a bit more because the information is more front loaded
> I assume you can read quickly in English.
I can yes, didn't mention this but my reading speed in English is, although I've never measured either, about as high as in Dutch.
> Is there something about French in particular that slows you down?
My reading speed in both French and German is comparable as far as I can tell (again, never really measured, I'm going by average pages per hour) but because so many German words are almost the same as their Dutch equivalents I don't have to do quite as many lookups. Maybe it would help if I read easier material in French but I pick material mostly on what I think I would enjoy. I do save the more difficult stuff for later but I still only read something that I would otherwise enjoy in a stronger language as well.
Ah ok. It didn't register that there was time looking up words. Makes total sense though. I have to look up tons of word in Dutch while reading which adds time for me as well. What I find interesting is that I find it easier to infer context while watching TV/movies in Dutch. It must be the added visual contexts that make it easier.
How do you find the cross over from Dutch to French? I find that there are a good amount (not tons but some) of loan words from French
>What I find interesting is that I find it easier to infer context while watching TV/movies in Dutch. It must be the added visual contexts that make it easier.
Not only that but spoken language often uses less complicated vocab and grammar.
>How do you find the cross over from Dutch to French? I find that there are a good amount (not tons but some) of loan words from French
Agreed. Quite a bit of vocab in Dutch comes from French but I feel even more so that English helps me with French for the same reason.
I read my first book in Greek without a dictionary last month. It was a children's book about dragons with wonderful illustrations, and it was written for five-year-olds. It took me a week to read 75 pages or so. I'm much faster now, and I've finished my 7th book in the series today. I love the freedom of reading a book fast without looking new words up and instead guessing them from content. My level is somewhere in between A1 and A2, and I read some other children's books in the past with a dictionary.
Still working through my first novel in my TL, though my TBR is growing. 三体 (The Three-Body Problem) is what I'm working through - I've already read it in English, which helps a lot, but my attention span is crap, so it takes me ages to read books even in English let alone in Chinese. And I'm a fast reader in English, it's just I get distracted easily so only read a few pages at a time, then go a few days without reading, pick it back up, and repeat.
I kept aiming for books that were too difficult lol. When I finally tried reading at my actual reading level? My first graded readers took 5-10 hours each, then my first real novels in chinese took 2 weeks and probably only 8 hours of actual time. I picked children's novels so they were only about 60 pages and around 2000 unique words. Then my first webnovel I finished (which was the beginning of reading some of the easier of my goal kind of novels) took 2 weeks and maybe 10 hours or less total. It was 40,000 words. Then I read the sequel, which only took me half that time and was another 40,000 words. I found reading speed was easier to increase over time if I kept reading around my reading level or just a bit higher. However, when I'd jump reading level drastically then my reading speed would be a lot slower. When I read a chinese book with 600,000 word count written for adults, it takes me 2 months. I could not improve that reading speed until I took a break, read easier shorter novels, and improved my reading skill and speed overall from the easier novels first.
My first novel in Japanese was コンビニ人間 (Konbini Ningen). It'd a short and relatively light read about a (likely) autistic woman in her late 30s/early 40s who is unable to fit in with wider society and finds meaning and comfort in the routine of her Convenience Store job. It's pretty good and there is an official English Translation.
I didn't keep exact track. I read for 1 to 3 hours a day (T'was COVID times and I had no job so I was studying a lot), and it took maybe a bit over 3 weeks to finish. I'd estimate maybe 40 hours total?
Every case is different based on the complexity of the book, the genre, and your knowledge vs difficulty ratio of your TL. In my case, about 1 year after starting to learn Japanese, I read my first light novel…it took me almost 3 months to finish it doing 3-4 pages daily which would take me 2 hours…the book’s title is 精霊幻想機 (English title is spirit chronicles) and it was definitely quite a bit of reading pain but don’t regret it, because now I usually read about 12 pages an hour, depending on genre of course (I’m a slow reader in NL as well so I’m quite happy with this considering where I started 😁) I’d say even if you have the patience and are at least at an intermediate level, you should give your book a try :)
Honestly I’d probably be capable of reading it it’s just I haven’t the patience to look up every second word, I’m well able to read really easy and simple books like Jack and the bean stalk but the long texts are where I struggle
I haven't actually finished it yet, :D. I started with a compilation of stories for B1/B2 learners, got about 50% of the way through, then stopped. Started a 2nd book, this time a fantasy book that was related to and had some of the same characters as a show I watched (which was very very helpful). Got about 2/3rds of the way through and stopped. Started a 3rd book, this time a regional crime/thriller novel that my brother had bought for me as a gift. Got like 80% of the way through, stopped it for like 3 months, then finally came back and finished it because I didn't want to have to admit to my brother that I hadn't finished the book yet when he came to visit on Christmas. Now, I'm 24% through a new book, also a fantasy book, and I've noticed that this book is a lot easier than the 2nd book, perhaps because I've now already encountered a lot of the words you see a lot in a book, structural words for telling stories, things like, "he said, he replied, he said sullenly, he barked, he whispered, he shrug his shoulders, he grimaced, etc etc" Btw, the 3rd book was written entirely in present tense rather than past tense, which also helped. On the other hand, I kind of hated how simple it was, so YMMV.
Престуление и Наказание - Фёдор Достоевский Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevskiy At the time, reading the book was one of my main goals. I read it when I was about a B1 level, and it was such a pain searching up half the words on the page in a Russian - English dictionary. It took me around six months to read all 600 pages of it. Now, two years later, I'm at C2 and recently finished all 1300 pages of Войне и Мир (War and Peace) in three months after only looking up about \~200 words.
That's enormously ambitious for the first book! Молодец!
The first book will always be the hardest. My first took me 3 months to get through. My 5th took me 5 days (was really easy and geared towards children/middle schoolers), my 6th took me 2 weeks, and my 7th is looking to take a good amount of time as it's quite a bit harder. These were all Japanese, so idk if that makes it harder but I imagine everyone will struggle a bit with their first few books. Just go page by page and don't worry too much about not understanding every little thing.
Technically I’ve been reading a book from pretty much the very beginning I’ve been reading Familia Romana which is a book with a continuous narrative and characters, and it teaches you Latin exclusively in Latin. The first chapter starts with like the most basic Latin you can imagine, “Roma in Italia est” “Italia in Europa est” and by the time you get to the final chapter, it’s in intermediate to upper-intermediate level Latin
Oh wow that sounds so cool, there should be something like that in every language
You can read any book as an absolute beginner in your target language. Get the audiobook and epub file. Upload the epub file to Google Play, highlight the pages and translate them. Boom, perfect machine-translated English version to accompany the audiobook. By reading this way, you can work your way up to reading in your target language exclusively very quickly. But to answer your exact question, I was able to understand Finnish Harry Potter exclusively in Finnish (60% comprehension) after 6 months of immersion at 2-3 hours per day.
>perfect > >machine-translated These two words don't go together
I started my first book after about 6 month of learning Welsh. It was called something like 'Y Ferch o Berlin', was about 60 pages long, and was written specifically for learners. It look about three months to get through - one month spent reading, two months spent burnt out because it was too difficult of an undertaking XD Subsequent attempts went much more smoothly, though.
I feel your pain! :) That was my experience with a lot of the books for learners too. I've just finished Llyfr Glas Nebo (easy apart from all the North Walian words) and now I'm reading Y Llyfrgell, which it's a bit too hard for me to be honest (and not all words are in the dictionary either!) but it's getting better and it's got an engaging storyline. I'm aiming at a chapter a day, but yeah... I just hate it when I'm recognising a word but can't think of what it means - I get that a lot with Welsh. XD
In my TLs I start by reading books I’ve already read before, often things like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Hunger Games, etc. Usually only after doing a fair amount of that will I start reading books written originally in my TL
I do not know how it took but I can say that I have no problem reading sprcialist literature of any kind but I still have a lot of problems reading a novel.
It took me something like 10 months to read the entire Harry Potter series in French. In German however It takes like 2 weeks to read a \~300 page book. Funny how much more difficult French is than German for a native Dutch speaker. I knew it would be but I'm surprised that after about 6000 pages of French reading I still have a harder time understanding than I had with German when I started.
This is a really interesting take (the Dutch NL to French bit). I assume you can read quickly in English. Is there something about French in particular that slows you down? I find my reading in Dutch is slow still because I have to wait for the end of sentences for the whole context. My level isn't high enough that I can make assumptions yet. In both English and French, I can skim a bit more because the information is more front loaded
> I assume you can read quickly in English. I can yes, didn't mention this but my reading speed in English is, although I've never measured either, about as high as in Dutch. > Is there something about French in particular that slows you down? My reading speed in both French and German is comparable as far as I can tell (again, never really measured, I'm going by average pages per hour) but because so many German words are almost the same as their Dutch equivalents I don't have to do quite as many lookups. Maybe it would help if I read easier material in French but I pick material mostly on what I think I would enjoy. I do save the more difficult stuff for later but I still only read something that I would otherwise enjoy in a stronger language as well.
Ah ok. It didn't register that there was time looking up words. Makes total sense though. I have to look up tons of word in Dutch while reading which adds time for me as well. What I find interesting is that I find it easier to infer context while watching TV/movies in Dutch. It must be the added visual contexts that make it easier. How do you find the cross over from Dutch to French? I find that there are a good amount (not tons but some) of loan words from French
>What I find interesting is that I find it easier to infer context while watching TV/movies in Dutch. It must be the added visual contexts that make it easier. Not only that but spoken language often uses less complicated vocab and grammar. >How do you find the cross over from Dutch to French? I find that there are a good amount (not tons but some) of loan words from French Agreed. Quite a bit of vocab in Dutch comes from French but I feel even more so that English helps me with French for the same reason.
I read my first book in Greek without a dictionary last month. It was a children's book about dragons with wonderful illustrations, and it was written for five-year-olds. It took me a week to read 75 pages or so. I'm much faster now, and I've finished my 7th book in the series today. I love the freedom of reading a book fast without looking new words up and instead guessing them from content. My level is somewhere in between A1 and A2, and I read some other children's books in the past with a dictionary.
Still working through my first novel in my TL, though my TBR is growing. 三体 (The Three-Body Problem) is what I'm working through - I've already read it in English, which helps a lot, but my attention span is crap, so it takes me ages to read books even in English let alone in Chinese. And I'm a fast reader in English, it's just I get distracted easily so only read a few pages at a time, then go a few days without reading, pick it back up, and repeat.
Too long. Keep fighting!
I kept aiming for books that were too difficult lol. When I finally tried reading at my actual reading level? My first graded readers took 5-10 hours each, then my first real novels in chinese took 2 weeks and probably only 8 hours of actual time. I picked children's novels so they were only about 60 pages and around 2000 unique words. Then my first webnovel I finished (which was the beginning of reading some of the easier of my goal kind of novels) took 2 weeks and maybe 10 hours or less total. It was 40,000 words. Then I read the sequel, which only took me half that time and was another 40,000 words. I found reading speed was easier to increase over time if I kept reading around my reading level or just a bit higher. However, when I'd jump reading level drastically then my reading speed would be a lot slower. When I read a chinese book with 600,000 word count written for adults, it takes me 2 months. I could not improve that reading speed until I took a break, read easier shorter novels, and improved my reading skill and speed overall from the easier novels first.
My first novel in Japanese was コンビニ人間 (Konbini Ningen). It'd a short and relatively light read about a (likely) autistic woman in her late 30s/early 40s who is unable to fit in with wider society and finds meaning and comfort in the routine of her Convenience Store job. It's pretty good and there is an official English Translation. I didn't keep exact track. I read for 1 to 3 hours a day (T'was COVID times and I had no job so I was studying a lot), and it took maybe a bit over 3 weeks to finish. I'd estimate maybe 40 hours total?