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Bridging the Beginner-Intermediate Gap in Language Learning
Learning a foreign language by reading is one of my favorite methods to learn foreign languages. It improves vocabulary, speaking fluency, and helps ease language processing to that subconscious space in my head, allowing for more natural production of the language.
Recently, I’ve been using elementary readers to learn some Mandarin Chinese. An experience that I talk about more in depth in this article.
Upon completion of my second elementary reader, my brain was buzzing with Chinese. My character recognition had improved. I no longer worried or thought about producing individual tones. My vocabulary blossomed and I felt more confident in my ability to produce organic phrases rather than relying on memorized fluency.
But one thing was missing.
I hadn’t really understood everything that I read. This thought puzzled me for awhile as I thought about how I had improved in the language, but could not understand everything within the context of what I read. I wanted to come up with a name for this phenomena to better understand what it is and more importantly how to think about it in the larger picture of my overall language acquisition effort.
