Episode 73: How to Read in English Without Stopping to Translate

[00:00:00] Welcome to English, please, the podcast where we explore interesting topics in under 10 minutes in clear, intermediate English. I’m your host, Christopher. I live in New York City, and I’ve always been passionate about languages and how we learn them. Whether you’re listening on your way to work, or while cooking dinner at home, this show is designed to help you with your English listening and comprehension skills.

One quick thing before we dive in, two free guides are waiting for you at comullen.com/free. One covers 25 everyday idioms, and the other covers 60 common English phrases. Both are written specifically for intermediate learners, and neither will [00:01:00] cost you anything!

Here’s something a lot of English learners do without even realizing it. The moment you don’t recognize a word while reading, you stop and translate it before you’ve even finished the sentence.

If that sounds familiar, today’s episode is for you.

Let’s talk about how you go from translating every unfamiliar word to reading a full page in English without stopping once. 

The first stage is where most people start, and it’s completely normal. Your dictionary or translator is open the whole time, and when you see a word you don’t recognize, you stop and look it up. This works, but it’s slow, and it breaks your focus constantly. If you’re at this stage, that’s fine, but here is a small change worth trying. [00:02:00] Instead of stopping right away, finish the sentence first. Sometimes, the rest of the sentence already tells you what the word means, and you won’t need to look it up at all.

Here’s an example. Imagine you read this sentence: “She felt a wave of relief when she saw her lost dog waiting by the door.” Maybe you don’t know the word “relief.” If you stop right there, you lose the sentence. But if you keep reading, you already know she lost her dog, and now she’s found her dog. What kind of feeling would you have in that moment? Probably something close to relief. The sentence already gave you the answer, but you just had to finish it!

The second stage is where you close the dictionary, but you allow yourself to check a word [00:03:00] occasionally when it really matters. This is where a simple rule helps a lot. If you don’t recognize a word, keep going. Most of the time, that single word won’t stop you from understanding the sentence, the paragraph, or the page. But if the same word appears again three or four times and it keeps getting in your way, that’s when it’s actually worth looking it up, not the first time you see it.

This stage is also a good moment to notice whether what you’re reading is too difficult for you right now. If you’re stopping more than once or twice a sentence, the text itself might be the problem, not your English. Choosing something slightly easier for a while is not a step backward. It’s what gives this new habit time to [00:04:00] work.

The third stage is reading without looking up any words at all, at least not while you’re reading. Instead, you circle or underline unfamiliar words as you go, and you check them once you finish. By that point, you’ve already understood the overall story or the main idea. Often, when you go back to look up a word, the meaning is already obvious from everything around it, and you don’t even need the dictionary anymore.

One thing that helps at every stage: fiction and nonfiction give you clues in different ways. In a story, an unfamiliar word usually gets explained later through what happens next, not through a definition. Think back to that sentence about the lost dog. A novel would probably show you the same feeling again a few pages later in a different scene [00:05:00] until the word’s meaning is completely clear on its own.

In an article or an email, you don’t have to wait that long. The explanation is often close by, in the same sentence or in the one right after it. Either way, the answer is frequently right there if you just keep reading instead of stopping.

If reading English has felt slow and exhausting, that doesn’t mean your English is weak. It usually means you’re stopping more often than you need to. Trusting yourself to keep going is a skill, and like any skill, it gets easier with practice.

If you’d like structured practice with exactly this kind of skill, guessing before checking, that’s exactly what the English, please Accelerator is built around. You can find it at comullen.com/listen.

Again, I’m Christopher, and I want to invite you to [00:06:00] join me in future episodes of English, please to hear about a variety of topics, all focused on helping you with your English. Subscribe now wherever you listen, and let’s continue this adventure together in clear, understandable English.

Sincere thanks, as always, for listening.

See you soon!