How to learn English by reading

Most people learning English already meet it every day: in songs, films, games and online. What many of them lack is long, connected English, the kind you get from a story you read for hours. That’s often the difference between understanding a series with subtitles and closing a novel after three pages. Reading at your level closes that gap.

English also has more to read than almost any other language. A large share of the world’s best-known novels were written in it, from Robinson Crusoe and Pride and Prejudice to Sherlock Holmes and The Great Gatsby, and most of the hundred or so classics in Lexo’s catalog were written in English to begin with.

What makes English hard to read

• Spelling that doesn’t match the sound. Though, through, tough, cough and thought share their letters and sound completely different. Silent letters are everywhere: knight, island, doubt, Wednesday. English spelling settled while pronunciation was still changing, and the language kept the spellings of words it borrowed. The cure is to hear each word as you read it.
• Stress. It can fall on almost any syllable, and it moves: PHOtograph, phoTOgraphy, photoGRAPHic. Sometimes it changes the word: a REcord is a thing, but to reCORD is an action.
• Phrasal verbs. Give up means stop trying, put off means delay, run into means meet by chance, and take off can mean remove your coat or leave the ground. The meaning rarely comes from the parts, and the parts can separate: She put the meeting off. Novels are full of them.
• Articles. A, an, the or nothing at all. Cats like milk is about cats in general; the cats in the garden are particular cats. Articles are hard if your language has none, as in Russian, Chinese or Japanese, and hard in a different way if your language uses them differently, as French and Spanish do.
• Tense and aspect. I read, I’m reading, I’ve read, I had read, I’d been reading. The present perfect links the past to now: I’ve lost my key means it’s still lost. Stories move between these forms constantly.
• Idioms. Break the ice, under the weather, the last straw. Fiction uses them freely, and context is the best teacher.
• A vocabulary in layers. English has a Germanic core and a large layer of French and Latin, so it often has two or three words for one idea: ask, question, interrogate; kingly, royal, regal. The short everyday word is usually the Germanic one, the formal word often French or Latin.

The size of that vocabulary is the real challenge. Paul Nation (2006, “How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening?”) estimated that reading an unsimplified English novel, knowing about 98 percent of the words, takes a vocabulary of around 8,000 to 9,000 word families, with names counted separately. Why 98 percent? Because Hu and Nation (2000, “Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension”), working with adult learners of English, estimated that most readers need that much coverage to understand fiction adequately without help. See how many words you need to read a novel and the 98% rule.

English reading at each level

The same moment from Treasure Island, an old sailor arriving at the inn where young Jim Hawkins lives, written for this page at four levels. For the scale itself, see the levels page and CEFR levels explained.

A2, elementary. Short sentences, the past simple, everyday words.

One morning, an old sailor came to our inn. He was tall and strong, and he had a white scar on his face. He had a big sea chest.

B1, intermediate. Longer sentences, joined ideas, reported speech, and tenses like the past perfect.

One morning an old sailor arrived at the Admiral Benbow with a heavy sea chest. He looked around at the quiet bay and told my father that our inn was just the place he had been looking for.

B2, upper intermediate. Varied sentence structure, descriptive vocabulary and the odd idiom.

He was a tall, weather-beaten man with a greasy pigtail and a pale scar across one cheek, and he kept a constant watch on the road, as if he expected trouble to come walking up it at any moment.

C1, advanced. Close to the original, lightly condensed, with literary rhythm and vocabulary.

By day he haunted the cliffs with a brass telescope; by night he sat in the corner of the parlor, nursing his rum and his silence, and those who ventured to question him soon learned to leave him be.

Look at what each step adds. B1 brings reported speech (told my father that…) and the past perfect continuous (had been looking for). B2 adds compound adjectives (weather-beaten) and an idiomatic image (trouble to come walking up it). C1 uses a semicolon to balance two halves of a sentence, a figurative verb (haunted), one verb with two very different objects (nursing his rum and his silence) and a fixed phrase, leave him be. At C2 you read the complete novel.

A plan with listening

Twenty to forty minutes a day is enough, if it’s every day.

1. Listen while you read. Play a chapter with the text highlighted as it’s read. In English, the spelling hides the sound, so hearing it first saves you from learning words wrongly.
2. Reread at your own pace. Go back over the same pages without audio, and tap only the words that stop you understanding the sentence.
3. Listen again without the text. On a walk or on the way to work, play the chapter once more. You’ll be surprised how much you follow.
4. Keep three phrases a day. Not twenty: three. A phrasal verb, a collocation such as make a decision, or a sentence you like.
5. Move up when it feels easy. When you finish chapters without tapping much, try the next level. Comfort is the signal, not boredom.

There’s research behind both halves of this. Stephen Krashen argued that we acquire language by understanding messages slightly beyond our level (Krashen 1982, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition), and Webb and Chang (2015, “Second language vocabulary learning through extensive reading with audio support”) found that learners of English in Taiwan who read and listened to graded readers learned a substantial share of the words they hadn’t known, and kept much of that months later. Read more about comprehensible input, extensive reading and reading while listening.

Which classics to start with

• Treasure Island is the perfect first book: pirates, a map and a one-legged cook, with a plot that pulls you forward at A2 and B1.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of short stories, each complete in a few sittings. Ideal at B1 and B2.
• A Christmas Carol is short and famous, and its ghosts make almost every chapter an event.
• The Call of the Wild is told in Jack London’s plain, powerful American English, a good B1 or B2 read.
• Pride and Prejudice is a goal worth having. Start with an adapted edition at B2; Austen’s own long, ironic sentences are for C1 and beyond.
• The Great Gatsby is short but dense with style. Read it at B2 first, and come back later for Fitzgerald’s prose at full strength.

The full catalog of about a hundred classics is on the books page.

How Lexo helps you read English

Lexo explains English in your own language. Tap any word and a card shows what it means in that sentence, not a list of dictionary senses, along with its base form and part of speech. If the word belongs to a phrasal verb or an idiom, the card explains the whole phrase, so put off or the last straw make sense at once. The whole sentence is translated into your language, and the app’s interface appears in your language too. Words you want to keep go into your Words list.

English spelling is the reason the audio matters. Every word can be played on its own, and the whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted word by word as it’s read. Sentence-by-sentence mode shows one sentence at a time with its audio and translation, for the passages you want to take slowly.

Most of the hundred or so classics in the catalog were written in English, and each can be read at five levels, from A2 up to the complete novel at C2; you choose the level book by book. When you’re the first reader of an edition, you watch it being written: the opening lines of chapter 1 appear within minutes, the rest follows as you read, and the edition carries your dated “First edition” mark. Everything downloads for offline reading on iPhone and iPad, with no account to create.

Learning another language too? Our language guides cover more than thirty others, from Spanish and Japanese to Swahili.

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