reading books you don't understand is good for you
For the past year or so, I've been learning Korean as a hobby. Initially, my learning was mostly led by textbook, but as life has gotten busier and it's been harder and harder to sit down and study, I've been immersion learning with YouTube. Thankfully, there is no shortage of Korean content on YouTube, from variety shows to vlogs to reviews, I found myself occupied for months with videos to strengthen my language learning. I even started getting external ads on YouTube in Korean, which I hadn't even realized was happening until I started at the subtitles for too long and remembered I couldn't read them.
I can read Korean to an extent, which is to say I can sound out words painstakingly and for far too long to know what they mean before the subtitle changes and I have to try all over again. This reading skill has improved slightly with immersion learning, as I can recognize a good deal of words within any given sentence, and can rely on those few words to piece together the context, but I found myself unsatisfied with the rigor of this learning. It all felt too passive, so I started looking for Korean book reviews.
At the same time, I was getting into reading more books in Spanish, as I have found myself forgetting some Spanish since moving away and am determined to be able to talk to my grandmother on the phone with a level of grammatical competence above the fifth grade. I started Cadáver Exquisito by Agustina Bazterrica, and found it difficult but satisfying to start. I had been reading a book in English I was finding it hard to get through, but after returning to it for a break from slugging through every sentence in Cadáver Exquisito and congratulating myself for barely grasping the plot, it was easy. I breezed through the remaining pages and finished the English book that afternoon. I had become so used to not understanding any of the videos I watched in Korean, or Googling every other word in my book in Spanish, that everything that was difficult to comprehend in English became the simplest thing I encountered that day.
So, what's my point? I'm not suggesting you buy books in Korean or Spanish to improve your English or save your reading slump, but I am suggesting hard books for the sake of it. All readers, on some level, have an imagined ceiling of understanding they feel they can't penetrate. For me, classics written after a certain century become incomprehensible, and I've stayed away from them all my life for no reason other than my preconceived notion that I won't "get it". But did I even try? Did I realize that, in trying, everything else would become easier, even if it took some time to understand a difficult book?
Even if you're just scanning it, or reading quickly without letting every sentence sink in, reading books you don't understand is good for you. Letting information wash over me, no matter how little I felt I understood it, was beneficial for my comprehension and enjoyment of reading in general. Books I knew I'd enjoy but couldn't seem to pick up seem a breeze now that I have read books in languages and with concepts I once felt were impossible to comprehend.
Break through that ceiling of understanding! It's good for you!
ʚ ═══･୨ ꕤ ୧･═══ ɞ