Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[wangsx]

How to go through my english from novice to expert by reading?
Can some one of you list some books for this way?

[bud]

You could start with a book of fairy tales. They are meant for children, but the language probably is more simple. Another good choice might be a book of folk tales. Yet another possibility would be a dual language book, if there are any with both English and your language. These have the complete stories in both languages, so you can compare them.

If interested, do a search on "fairy tales," "folk tales" or "dual language."

Good luck.

[wangsx]

hi bud
Thanks for your kind advice. But could you list some
kind of these books with name?

[bud]

Here are two books of fairy tales that millions of English-speaking children have read:

Grimm's Fairy Tales - written by The Brothers Grimm
Fairy Tales and Stories - by Hans Christian Andersen


Here's a website that has fairy tales and folk tales online:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/efft/


Here's a book of folk tales from many countries translated into English. It also has several exercises for each story. It's a great book:

Tales From Many Lands: An Anthology of Multicultural Folk Literature - by Anita Stern


I couldn't find any dual language books by searching for "Chinese English."


There's a lot of free content on the web, too. Try searching on google.com if you are interested.

Good luck, Wang!

[wangsx]

Thanks a lot, bud

I will read the above books for enjoying the english reading.

[Corey]

I really like the Penguin Readers. I think Cambridge has some now too.

You can buy a book or novel that is good for your level. For example, there are mystery books with 25 pages written for beginners.

You can get the same book with 50 pages written at a more difficult level and then the same book at an advanced level with even more pages.

Good luck,

Corey
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[nemeh]

The Irvine Welsh's book "Trainspotting" is very recomendable

[river1974]

For me, I have never thought of reading a English novel to improve my English. In fact, I don't know what is the proper way to read a English novel. Since there are so many vacabularies in it, should I stop reading and look up in a dictionary after encountering a unknown word? Or should I just look up after a sentence, a paragraph, or a page is done? Frankly speaking, I very much enjoyed reading a novel, but still I am afraid of tring an English one. Maybe it's because that I am afraid of being deprived of the pure enjoyment from reading. In order to conquer my fear of reading an English novel, maybe I should start from the simple one- fairy tales.

[dduck]

[Forum]

Need more help on learning English?...?....
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[Charlie]

Try Harry Potter!

I've read them all in German (I'm English) and it really helped. The first one took longest because I had to keep stopping to look up new words, my copy of the philosopher's stone is covered in notes in the margins! But after a while, it starts to sink in and gets much easier.

And they are really good stories!

Before that, I tried the dual language books, which are also good, but the only English/German books I could find were full of really weird short stories - not much fun to read!

Good luck!

-Charlie

[jessica ji]

I am reading the novels "Pride and Prejudice" and "Gone With the Wind"now, and I found them interesting.
Although they are traditional, but they are turely perfect!

[illusion]

I believe that reading English novels is a very important part in improving your language skills, but it's a bit difficult to me, I just can't look up in the dictionary every unknown word (if I do this, that's not reading anymore for me:)). Of course, I can get the idea and the plot, but I'm not sure that my vocabulary really becomes wider...

[jessica ji]

Of course we can make dramatic progress through reading english novels of the proper level It is the same with learning Chinese, we all have the feeling that after reading a vast host of novels and stories,both the writing skill and comprehension have enjoyed an exciting improvement.