No Stupid Questions

Here we go again with the bot asking and answering its own questions.

Pretty sure the same operator is behind these as well

• SilentStriker@piefed.social
• ltdan@lemmy.zip

I can only speak to Spanish, as I have Spanish at a B1 level. It would be a challenge for me to get through a full spanish novel. I could do it with a lot of patience, and taking my time to read and understand each sentence, but it would be a mentally draining experience.

However, reading a page or two a day as a method of gaining exposure would probably be quite manageable.

German is no problem but fuck french.

At B1 Level you can understand a lot of texts, if you're willing to put in the work. You'll have to look up a lot of words and re-read passages a few times occasionally. It'll be a bit of a slog, but it's also the most effective way to improve your reading comprehension. It's also a lot easier these days when you can just look up stuff online. Back in my day, I'd have a dictionary sitting next to me and if a word wasn't in there, I'd have to go to the library to look it up in the Biiig Dictionary (OED ftw).

The bulk of any text is comprised of the most common 500-1000 words, making up roughly 80% of the text. Words such as "the", "do", "that", "live", "she", etc. You need to learn these and understand them without thinking to be able to read a book. Cognates don't really help you here too much, German and especially French share little core vocabulary with English. Usually you won't reach this level before B2.

That being said, I did manage to slowly read quite a dense book about futurism back when I was between B1 and B2 level of German (with a dictionary in the other hand). Also, reading a book but not understanding everything is completely fine and a good way to learn a language.

Some types of books are easier. Comics might be your best bet, children's books are easy too but I wouldn't be too motivated to read them.

They say that both French and German are "closest" to English but still different languages

Who are they? Because they are wrong. The closest step cousin to English is Frisian. Dutch is closer to English than French, I'd argue.

Novel ≠ novel. It would have to be contemporary and not written in overly complicated language. Novels are mostly not written for learners to read. Even people who are fluent will miss stuff because culture doesn't come in a dictionary. So can they understand everything at that level? Nope. Can they understand enough? Probably. Arguably more so in German because it doesn't fuck with a version of the past tense that only shows up in literature.

i recommend trying to read books made for children or adult learners as soon as possible, because it's a great way to pick up vocabulary. that can absolutely be started at A2 level, although you'll need to look up words for context fairly regularly.

B1 level is generally when learners can start reading YA-level novels without stopping too often to look things up, because their vocabularies will be good enough that they can start to infer things from context.

B2 would be about the level for a lee child / agatha christie novel, although specific terminology, less common grammatical structures, or dialectical speech will still likely throw you for a loop until you encounter them more often.

i believe C1 is when learners are getting closer to that native-like fluency with reading comprehension etc, but i'll let you know when i get there! :P

I have French A1, Spanish B1/B2 and English C1 levels, while being a German native speaker. It will be hard for me to really comprehend Spanish written books that are not written specifically for teaching language. In English I can read more difficult non-fiction, but I need to look up some terms every few pages. Hell, even me being a native German speaker does not mean I understand every German book.

with understanding not only the contents written but infer on the novels concepts and relay reading comprehension akin to a native speaker

C1/C2, leaning more towards C2.

A2 is pretty basic. The difference between A2 an "learnt a key sentence list by heart" is that you actually know what the sentence means, how they are built, and what if it goes a bit ou of the scenario. It's not enough to read a book. I would say anything under a solid B2/C1 is too low

My wife has read all of the Harry Potter books (pirated, of course) in Spanish ... she only just squeezed through the B1 exam and it's her third language.

Meanwhile, I work in Spanish, it's only my second language, and there's no way I could manage it.

In summary ... maybe you can?

A2 - B1 means you have just started to learn a language.

You can read books only if they are in a specially easy language, or if you simply accept missing some parts.

Not 100% an answer to your question, but I was able to start reading reading Japanese fantasy novels around mid-B2 while using a dictionary and likely could've started earlier at the cost of more pain (and it was already plenty painful). Neither other languages I speak are even remotely close to Japanese, so you can put lower B2 as an upper bound. With that in mind I could see upper B1 if the languages are close like in your example and the subject matter is on the simpler side, but A2 ain't happening. At that point you'll struggle too much to understand the grammatical expressions in the text to comprehend the subject matter.