How to choose your reading level in a new language

Most language learners choose books that are too hard. It’s an understandable mistake. A book you can barely read feels like serious study, and a book you read easily feels like cheating. You want to read real books, and the sooner the better.

The research on learning from reading points the other way. People learn most from text they can follow without constant effort, and they read far more of it. This article explains how to find that level, how to test a book in a few minutes, and why reading a little below your level is one of the most underrated habits in language learning.

Why “too hard” is the usual mistake

Three things push learners toward difficult books.

Struggle feels like progress. Puzzling over a sentence for a minute feels productive. Often it isn’t: by the time you’ve worked it out, you’ve forgotten the sentence before it.

Knowing words isn’t the same as reading. You might recognize every word in a sentence and still not follow it, because of word order, an idiom or a tense you haven’t met yet.

The cost of lookups is hidden. Suppose a page has 15 words you don’t know, and each lookup takes 20 seconds. That’s five minutes of looking things up on a single page, before you’ve actually read it. At that rate, a 200-page book becomes a project, not a pleasure.

What the right level feels like

At the right level for everyday reading:

• you follow the story without stopping often;
• the few unknown words are either guessable or unimportant;
• you could tell someone what happened on the page you just read;
• you want to turn the page.

At the right level, reading in your new language is still slower than in your own. It shouldn’t be much harder work.

Three quick tests

You can check a book in a few minutes. Ideally, use all three.

1. The page test

Choose a page from the middle of the book, not the first page, since openings introduce everything at once. Read it and mark each word you don’t know. Count a repeated word once, and don’t count names.

On a page of about 250 words:

Unknown words	Words you know	What it means
0–5	about 98% or more	Comfortable. Ideal for reading a lot.
6–12	about 95–98%	Workable with help, such as glosses or a dictionary. Good for shorter study sessions.
13 or more	below 95%	Too hard for now. Come back later.

These bands come from research on known-word coverage. Hu and Nation (2000, “Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension”) estimated that most learners need to know about 98% of the words in a fiction text to understand it adequately without help. Laufer’s earlier work pointed to 95% as a minimum. The 98% rule explains the studies and their limits.

2. The retelling test

After reading a page, close the book and tell yourself what happened in two or three sentences, in any language. If you can’t, the level is too hard, even if you knew most of the words. Comprehension is the goal, and this test checks it directly.

3. The listening test

If the book has narration, play a page without looking at the text. If you can follow the gist, the level is very comfortable. If you can follow it with the text in front of you, it’s a good level for reading along. If you’re lost even with the text, it’s too hard.

The case for reading below your level

Richard Day and Julian Bamford, two of the best-known writers on extensive reading, put easy material first. In “Top ten principles for teaching extensive reading” (Day & Bamford 2002), principle one is simply that the reading material is easy, well within the learner’s “reading comfort zone.” They suggest that for beginners, more than one or two unknown words per page may make a text too hard, and that intermediate learners might allow themselves up to about five.

There are good reasons to take this seriously.

Speed and fluency. Reading quickly and without effort is a skill of its own, and it’s built on text that contains little or nothing new. Paul Nation, who has written widely on vocabulary and reading, describes fluency development as one of four strands of a balanced language program, alongside learning from input, learning from speaking and writing, and deliberate study (Nation 2007, “The four strands”). The fluency strand uses easy, familiar material. In one study, Beglar, Hunt and Kite (2012, “The effect of pleasure reading on Japanese university EFL learners’ reading rates”) followed Japanese university students for an academic year. Students who read for pleasure gained more reading speed than a group that did intensive reading, the students who read the most gained the most, and reading simplified texts produced larger gains than reading unsimplified ones.

More encounters with each word. A word is rarely learned from one meeting. Easy reading lets you cover many more pages per hour, so you meet half-known words again and again, in new sentences, until they’re truly yours.

Depth, not just breadth. Knowing a word means more than knowing its translation. You also need its common partners, its grammar and its tone. Easy text shows you familiar words doing many different jobs.

Finishing books. A finished book is a reason to start the next one. A half-finished book that you dread is a reason to stop.

None of this means you should never read anything hard. Short, focused sessions with a demanding text, and plenty of help, have their place. But they work best alongside a larger amount of easy reading, not instead of it.

One story, three levels

Here’s what the difference between levels looks like in practice. Jules Verne opened Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) with this sentence:

En l’année 1872, la maison portant le numéro 7 de Saville-row, Burlington Gardens — maison dans laquelle Sheridan mourut en 1814 —, était habitée par Phileas Fogg, esq., l’un des membres les plus singuliers et les plus remarqués du Reform-Club de Londres, bien qu’il semblât prendre à tâche de ne rien faire qui pût attirer l’attention.

It’s one sentence of over fifty words, with an aside about a playwright, a literary past tense and two verbs in the imperfect subjunctive. Here’s the same opening at three levels, in versions we wrote for this article:

A2: En 1872, Phileas Fogg habite à Londres, dans une grande maison. C’est un homme très calme et très précis. Tout le monde le regarde, mais lui ne regarde personne. (In 1872, Phileas Fogg lives in London, in a big house. He is a very calm and very precise man. Everyone looks at him, but he looks at no one.)

B1: En 1872, un gentleman anglais, Phileas Fogg, habitait au numéro 7 de Saville Row, à Londres. Il était membre du Reform Club, et tout le monde le remarquait, même s’il faisait tout pour ne pas attirer l’attention. (In 1872, an English gentleman, Phileas Fogg, lived at number 7 Saville Row, in London. He was a member of the Reform Club, and everyone noticed him, even though he did everything he could not to attract attention.)

B2: En 1872, la maison du numéro 7 de Saville Row, où le dramaturge Sheridan était mort en 1814, était habitée par Phileas Fogg, l’un des membres les plus étranges et les plus remarqués du Reform Club de Londres, même s’il semblait tout faire pour passer inaperçu.

Look at what changes. A2 uses the present tense and short sentences, and keeps only what a reader needs: who, where, what kind of man. B1 moves into the past, adds the address and the club, and joins ideas with et and même si. B2 brings back the house, the playwright and the long, balanced sentence, but replaces the literary tenses with everyday ones. The original adds the rest.

If you can read the B1 version comfortably and the B2 version with some effort, B1 is your level for reading a lot, and B2 is your level for stretching. (If French is your language, there’s more in learning French by reading.)

A quick guide to the levels

For full descriptions, see the CEFR levels explained or Lexo’s guide to levels. In short:

Level	You can comfortably read…
A2	Short, simple texts about familiar things, mostly in the present and simple past.
B1	Straightforward stories and articles on familiar topics, with some longer sentences.
B2	Most texts written for general readers, with some effort on idioms and rarer words.
C1	Long, complex texts, including literature, rereading the hardest passages.
C2	Virtually anything, including unabridged classic novels.

When to move up, and when to move down

Move up when the page test gives you only one or two unknown words, you rarely need help, and you find yourself reading faster than the narration. A gentle way to step up is to reread a book you’ve enjoyed at the next level: you know the story, so the new language has room to land.

Move down when you dread opening the book, when you’re looking up words in every paragraph, or when you finish a chapter and can’t say what happened in it. Moving down isn’t failure. It’s a correction that lets you read more.

Many learners settle on a mix: one easy book for daily reading and fluency, and one harder book for shorter, slower sessions.

How Lexo helps

Lexo lets you choose the level for each book. Every title in its catalog of about 100 classic novels is available at five CEFR levels: A2 (elementary), B1 (intermediate), B2 (upper intermediate), C1 (advanced, close to the original and lightly condensed) and C2 (proficient, the complete novel).

If a book turns out to be too easy or too hard, you can add another level of a book you already own, for $1.99 at planned launch pricing. Reading the same story at two levels is also a gentle way to move up.

At any level, tap a word to see what it means in that sentence and hear it pronounced, switch to sentence-by-sentence mode for a difficult passage, or play the narration and follow the highlighted words. Lexo is in beta and launching on the App Store soon. Get notified at launch.