Why Read

Why Read

Written on December 20, 2010 by aarongmyers in Knowledge

I came across a study in the Krashen book I am currently reviewing about reading. The study compared a number of different contexts and the frequency of the 1000 most common words in English in those contexts. It also compared the number of rare words (words outside of the 1000 most common list) used per 1000 words used in the context.

So for example in the study the context of adults talking to children was looked at and it was found that 95.6% of the words came from within the 1000 most common words in English. In every 1000 spoken words, 9.9 rare words were used. The point of the study was to show the importance of reading.

Here were the findings:

So, reading opens up a far wider variety of words to us as learners. And in reading we get to take in the input at our own rate and on our own time. I suspect that most every language is similar to English.

I think it is time to get reading.

Buy Stepehn Krashen’s Explorations in Language Acquisition [affiliate link]

Ready to get serious about learning another language?

Enter your email to get resources and updates from The Everyday Language Learner.

"Aaron consistenly pumps out top quality language learning advice and motivational posts,
and is probably one of the best sources of encouragement you'll come across."
-Donovan Nagel, The Mezzofanti Guild

Your privacy will never be comprimised.

Steal My Blog

I have a problem.

My blog is an exclusive club where members only are allowed in. The secret password is the English language. If you don't have it, you don't get in. This is a problem because I believe that information about independent language learning should be available to those who need it most.

There are people all over the world who are desperate to learn English.

Desperate because mastering the English language will open up new doors of opportunity for them, for their families. But they don't know enough English yet to access my blog and learn how to be independent language learners. So they are stuck. Stuck in the systemic ineptitude of outdated and broken national education systems. Thy are held hostage by expensive language school that have stepped into fill the void. They stand looking down two roads: one an ineffective system; the other an expensive system. But there is a third way. They can harness the power of the Internet and an increasingly shrinking world. They can do this if they know how. Independence from the system is possible, but a revolution in language education needs to take place.

Will you join me?

Will you join the revolution?

Step 1: Steal my blog. Create your own blog. Take the ideas from this blog, translate them into your language and share them with your people. Begin to preach the good news of the third way - the independent way. Begin to empower and teach and give tools to those who desire to learn language. Step 2: Steal The Ten Week Journey. This is an email series that I create to walk beginning language learners into the life of an independent, self-directed language learner. I'll walk you into how to set this up with a free email subscription company. It's pretty easy. Step 3: Steal my books. They aren't the greatest books ever written but they were created to break down the old paradigms of teacher directed learning and introduce and explain self-directed learning. I'll give you the books if you can gather a group of friends around you who will work to translate them and then spread them like a wild fire through Facebook and Twitter and Myspace and email and whatever the people of your nation are using to communicate. Use them to direct people back to your blog. Use them to introduce the people of your nation to these ideas. Use them to break the chains of a broken system and set language learner's free to learn on their own. Interested? Send me an email and let's talk. aarongmyers @ gmail.com

Credit and Payment

I'm not asking for either credit or payment. While I think it would be great if you would let people know that what you are sharing with them was originally written by me, I'm not going to tell you that you have to. I also don't want any payment from you. Now, if you want to add an affiliate link on your site to my books (English versions) that I do sell, you can sure do that and then you would get 50% of the profit as well. So in that sense, I'll be paying you. I am mostly concerned with a world that continues to use a broken and outdated system that is effectively locking millions of people out of the advantages of learning another language.

Why Am I Doing This

I want to do something big with my life. I want to make a ruckus and be a part of tearing down broken systems. I don't wear a cape though and I have no super powers. So I need to assemble an army of other like minded people to wage the battle with me. I'm not the first to give away my content. Leo Babauta has been doing it for a while and he has one of the most widely read blogs in the world. I think we can start a grass roots movement of free information that a new system for language building can be built upon. But the important word here is WE. We can do it together. Let's get started.

The Everyday Language Learner » Blog Archive » 4 Considerations for Choosing a Great Book for Language Learning

May 26, 2011 | 2:15 pm

[...] that you can read for enjoyment. Books that are fun but that still give you everything you need to learn more of the language and reinforce what you already know. Books that provide lots of [...]

A Day in the Life | The Everyday Language Learner

May 30, 2012 | 1:25 pm

[...] lunch, I try to read whatever book I am reading at the moment. I just finished the first Harry Potter and have started [...]