Why classic novels are great for learning a language

Ask a teacher what learners should read and you’ll hear the same answer: something easy and something interesting. Easy is a matter of level, and any good reading program can arrange it. Interesting is harder. It’s a common reason learners who start reading in a new language stop after a few weeks: the text was manageable, but there was no reason to turn the page.

Classic novels are one of the best answers to the second problem. In their original form they are usually too hard for learners. Retold at the right level, they are close to ideal. Here’s why, and how to choose your first one.

A plot that pulls you forward

Most of what you learn from reading comes from volume: thousands of sentences, the same words met again and again in new contexts. (See extensive reading for the research.) Volume needs a reason to keep going, and the strongest reason is wanting to know what happens next.

Classic plots have been tested by generations of readers. A boy finds a treasure map in a dead sailor’s sea chest. A gentleman bets his fortune that he can travel around the world in eighty days. A young sailor is arrested on his wedding day and thrown into an island prison. You want to know how these end, even if you’ve seen the film.

Many of these books were built for exactly this kind of reading. Treasure Island first appeared in installments in a children’s magazine, Young Folks. The Count of Monte Cristo was serialized in a Paris newspaper, the Journal des débats, and Around the World in Eighty Days in another, Le Temps. Pinocchio’s adventures ran in a children’s paper, the Giornale per i bambini. Sherlock Holmes’s short cases appeared month by month in The Strand Magazine. Stories written to bring readers back for the next installment are good at bringing a learner back for the next day’s session.

Great plots survive retelling

There’s a simple test of a story’s strength: can you tell it in five easy sentences and still make someone want to read it? Here is Treasure Island at roughly A2 level:

Jim Hawkins lives at an inn by the sea. An old sailor dies there, and in his sea chest Jim finds a map. It shows an island with buried treasure. Jim sails to the island with his friends, but the ship’s cook, Long John Silver, is a pirate. Who will find the gold first?

And the same in Spanish:

Jim Hawkins vive en una posada junto al mar. Allí muere un viejo marinero, y en su baúl Jim encuentra un mapa. El mapa muestra una isla con un tesoro enterrado. Jim viaja a la isla con sus amigos, pero el cocinero del barco, Long John Silver, es un pirata. ¿Quién va a encontrar el oro primero?

Every sentence is short, the grammar is basic, and the hook is intact. Not every book passes this test. A novel whose pleasure lies mainly in its style or its narrator’s inner life loses much more when simplified. That’s one reason adventure stories, mysteries and fairy tales are so common among graded readers. It’s also the test Lexo’s catalog was chosen by: stories strong enough to survive retelling.

You may already know the story

Knowing a story before you read it sounds like a disadvantage. For a language learner, it’s a gift.

Reading researchers have long studied the role of background knowledge. In a well-known study, Steffensen, Joag-Dev and Anderson (1979, “A cross-cultural perspective on reading comprehension”) asked readers from India and the United States to read two letters, one about an Indian wedding and one about an American wedding. Readers handled the letter about their own culture’s wedding more easily and remembered it better, and their mistakes with the other letter tended to bend it toward what they expected. Carrell and Eisterhold (1983, “Schema theory and ESL reading pedagogy”) drew out the lesson for second-language readers: comprehension depends not only on the words on the page but on what the reader brings to them.

Knowing the plot gives you a head start of exactly this kind. If you know that Scrooge is visited by three ghosts, you can spend your attention on how the sentences work rather than on who is who. Take the famous first line of A Christmas Carol:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

If you know the story, you know why it matters that Marley is dead, and you’ll probably recognize that sentence in whatever language you meet it. Familiar stories let you predict what comes next, and prediction makes reading faster and easier.

Classics are everywhere in the culture

Classic novels are also references. English speakers call a miser a Scrooge, a two-faced person a Jekyll and Hyde, and a hopelessly idealistic plan quixotic. Spanish has quijotesco too, and to luchar contra molinos de viento is to fight imaginary enemies, as Don Quixote charged the windmills. In French, a cheeky Paris street kid is a gavroche, after the boy in Les Misérables. German and English both describe nightmarish bureaucracy as kafkaesk or Kafkaesque.

Reading these books, even in a simplified edition, means you’ll catch these references in conversation, films and newspapers. It also gives you something to talk about with native speakers that isn’t the weather.

Reading a book from the language’s own literature

There’s a special pleasure in reading a book in the language it was written in, even at an easier level. If you’re learning:

• Spanish: Don Quixote.
• French: Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days), Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo), Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) or Gaston Leroux (The Phantom of the Opera).
• German: Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or the Grimms’ fairy tales.
• Italian: The Adventures of Pinocchio.
• Russian: Crime and Punishment.
• Danish: Andersen’s fairy tales.

It’s a lovely goal, but it isn’t a requirement. Treasure Island in Spanish teaches Spanish just as well as Don Quixote does, and at A2 it may be the more gripping read.

What changes when a classic is retold

Here is the opening of Don Quixote, published in 1605:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

John Ormsby’s 1885 translation gives it as: “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.” Even native Spanish speakers meet words here they rarely use: astillero (a rack for lances), adarga (a leather shield), rocín (a broken-down horse).

Here’s how the same opening might read at three levels. These versions are our own, written for this article:

A2: En un pueblo de la Mancha vive un señor de unos cincuenta años. Tiene un caballo flaco y un perro, y lee libros de caballeros todo el día. (In a village in La Mancha lives a man of about fifty. He has a thin horse and a dog, and he reads books about knights all day.)

B1: En un pueblo de la Mancha, cuyo nombre no quiero recordar, vivía hace poco un hidalgo pobre. Tenía una lanza vieja, un escudo antiguo, un caballo flaco y un perro rápido para cazar. (In a village in La Mancha, whose name I don’t want to remember, there lived not long ago a poor gentleman. He had an old lance, an ancient shield, a thin horse and a fast hunting dog.)

B2: En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, vivía no hace mucho un hidalgo de esos que guardan una lanza en el armero, un escudo antiguo, un caballo flaco y un galgo para cazar.

Notice what each level keeps. The A2 version keeps the setting, the man, the horse and the dog, and moves the books about knights to the front, because they drive the whole plot. The B1 version brings back the famous refusal to name the village, in simpler words. The B2 version restores Cervantes’s phrase de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme word for word, along with its rhythm. By C2 you’re reading the real thing.

Objections, answered

“The language is old-fashioned.” In the original, often. A good adaptation at A2 to B2 tells the story in modern, everyday language and keeps period words only where the story needs them: a sword, a carriage, a candle. At C1 and C2 you meet more of the original flavor, by choice.

“I’ll learn words I’ll never use.” You’ll meet a few, such as cutlass or doubloon. But the great majority of words in any story are the common ones, and the most frequent words of a language change very slowly. The rare words tend to repeat within the book that needs them, so you pick them up as you go.

“I’d rather read something modern.” Good. Classics are a way to get there. Modern novels in the original are written for native speakers, and adapted classics can carry you from A2 to the point where those books become readable.

How to choose your first classic

Five questions narrow it down quickly:

1. Do you already know the story? If so, that’s a point in its favor.
2. Is it short? Finishing your first book matters more than which book it is.
3. Is it episodic? Collections of short stories or fairy tales give you a complete story in every sitting.
4. Is it a genre you love? Mystery readers should start with a mystery.
5. Is it at your level? If you’re unsure, read how to choose your reading level.

Some starting points from Lexo’s catalog:

If you like…	Try
Adventure	Treasure Island, Around the World in Eighty Days
Mystery in short sittings	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
A whodunit	The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Short and famous	A Christmas Carol, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Wit and romance	Pride and Prejudice, Anne of Green Gables
Something eerie	Dracula, Frankenstein
An epic	The Count of Monte Cristo, The Odyssey
Stories you heard as a child	Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

How Lexo helps

Lexo is built around this idea. It’s an iPhone and iPad app with about 100 public-domain classics, from Treasure Island and Pride and Prejudice to The Count of Monte Cristo and Crime and Punishment, each available at CEFR levels A2 to C2 in the language you’re learning. A2, B1 and B2 are rewritten for learners, C1 stays close to the original, lightly condensed, and C2 is the complete novel. You choose the level for each book.

Every book is narrated, with different voices for different characters, and the text highlights word by word as it’s read. Tap any word to see what it means in that sentence, the phrase it belongs to, and a translation of the whole sentence into your own language.

Most editions don’t exist until someone asks for one. If you’re the first reader of, say, Don Quixote in Spanish at A2, Lexo writes it for you: chapter 1 is ready in a few minutes, the rest follows while you read, and you keep a dated “First edition” mark. The very first editions written were Treasure Island at B1 and Journey to the Center of the Earth at A2 and B1.

At planned launch pricing, a book is $4.99: one novel, in one language, at one level. Lexo is in beta and launching on the App Store soon. Get notified at launch, or browse the books.