I was lying on a sun lounger next to the swimming pool in the baking heat, with only the sound of the crickets in the August air.

I started munching on the figs I’d just plucked from the branches of the fig tree next to the pool.

I felt I’d earned them.

I’d just finished reading my first novel in Spanish and felt both proud of myself, and slightly disappointed.

The book was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho.

Since reading it and speaking to others about it and asking their opinion, I’ve found that people finish the book with one of two emotions: extremely satisfied, or slightly disappointed.

For me, it was the latter.

But I did feel great that I’d read a whole book in Spanish.

I also felt great because I’d learned a lot of new language.

It was only while reading that I realised what I really needed to learn in Spanish to truly make progress.

When you read, you actually see the language, and take notice of small details that would otherwise pass you by.

One of the first things I noticed when reading it was a tense in Spanish called the pretérito imperfecto de subjuntivo.

It sounds worse than it is…

This tense doesn’t exist in English, so my brain probably didn’t hear it when people said it, as I wasn’t listening for it.

And this is the problem sometimes with only relying on speaking to improve.

Speaking is great, and most English learners definitely need more of it. But you don’t often actually learn much new language when in a conversation.

You’re too busy listening or speaking. You don’t have time to really absorb anything new, process it, think about it, and learn it.

In a conversation, there’s so much language that simply goes in one ear, and straight out of the other.

Why?

Well in a conversation, your brain is really only listening to the minimum it needs to understand the overall context of what the speaker is saying.

As a result, we miss lots of things in a conversation.

I’d probably heard this tense hundreds, if not thousands of times in the year before I read my first book, but my brain only heard the verb, and not the verb tense.

So I never noticed it.

I never even knew it existed!

The first time I saw this verb tense, I remember thinking, “What the hell is that?!”.

I understood the sentence so I ignored it and just carried on reading. But in the following sentence it was there again.

And again.

And again.

There was no avoiding it. So I looked it up online.

And that was when I saw this new tense for the first time, and then realised that as a result, I’d been saying the second conditional in Spanish for a whole year incorrectly!

So I learnt how to use it.

Reading in your target language is great for practising verb tenses and grammar in general, but where reading really comes into its own is for learning vocabulary.

It is, as I call it, the KING of all vocabulary exercises.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

Let me show you why and how the process works in the brain.

When you read a novel, your brain processes around 100,000 words.

That’s a lot of words.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to learn all those words. You’ll already know most of them.

In a novel, a good writer will try to paint a picture for you so you will feel like you are inside the book.

To do this, they use a lot of adjectives, adverbs, idioms, and expressions as these things are what we use to describe things in more detail.

These are the words that paint the picture for the reader.

And these are the words that will really expand your vocabulary.

So you’ll be reading a book and you’ll see a word that you haven’t seen before. The chances are you’ll ignore it (like me) and carry on reading if you understand the overall context.

However, each writer has a particular style and it’s most likely that they will use that word again.

Each time you see this new word, it will sound more and more familiar.

Likewise, each time you see this word in a new sentence and new context in the book, your brain will decipher its meaning and this will help you both understand it, and solidify it in your memory.

If you just look for a word in a dictionary, you may get the meaning of that word, but you most probably won’t remember it or use it because you don’t know how to. You haven’t seen it in a sentence.

Only the sentence in the example they give you in the dictionary, and that’s not enough.

The brain is very good at understanding things on its own, given the right environment.

Reading is the perfect environment to fill your brain with new language and vocabulary without the need to actually study it.

You’ll learn things without even realising it.

Novels are by far the best way to get the most relevant language as they contain dialogue (spoken English), a wide range of vocabulary, and are more enjoyable than reading your company memo or financial reports.

And it all comes down to something I always tell people who are wanting to improve their English: the easiest way to practise English is to find something you enjoy doing and do on a regular basis, then do it in English.

You enjoy watching TV series? Then watch them in English.

You enjoy socialising? Then socialise in English.

You enjoy reading? Then read in English.

It requires no extra effort as you already do these things. You’ll enjoy doing them because you already enjoy doing them. And of course, you’ll learn lots.

Done.

If you’re a B2 or above, you can take on just about any novel you want.

If you’re a B1, you’ll want to go for something a little easier to digest.

Remember, you must enjoy the process, and if you only understand half the words in a sentence, you won’t enjoy it.

My recommendation for B1 learners is to choose something written for teenagers.

Thankfully, literature for young readers has massively improved over the last ten or twenty years as authors and publishers have started to fill this profitable niche.

The books that were around when I was a teenager were pretty awful, but nowadays you can get hold of books that can be read by teenagers and adults alike, but with easier language.

Ideal for English learners.

So go out and buy that one book you’ve been saying you’ll read for ages, and read it.

In English.

Of course, you don’t have to read in English, but in the words of Oscar Wilde, “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”.

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