How to read books in a foreign language
Choose a book in which you already know about 98 of every 100 words: research suggests that is roughly where most learners can follow a story without a dictionary. Then check how many hours the book will take at your speed, and decide before you start what you will do with the words you don’t know.
What a page feels like when you know
Mara found the old bicycle behind her grandmother’s house on the first warm day of spring. The tyres were flat, the chain was brown with rust, and a bird had built a nest in the basket. She carried it into the yard and cleaned it slowly with a wet cloth. Her grandmother watched from the kitchen window and laughed. “I rode that bicycle to school every morning for six years,” she said. “It was never fast, but it always brought me home.” By evening the chain was clean, the tyres were full of air, and Mara was ready to ride.
100 words
The highlighted words are invented, the way Hu and Nation built their test: a real word is replaced with a nonword so that nobody can know it in advance. On a page of 250 words, 98% means five unknown words and 90% means twenty-five.
Five steps to your first book
- Know your rough level. Language courses and exams use the six CEFR levels, from A1, the first, to C2, the highest. If you have never been tested, the Council of Europe’s self-assessment grid describes what a reader can do at each level. Then look at books one level below yours.
- Test a page, not the cover. Open the book in the middle, read one page and count the words you don’t know. Up to five on a 250-word page is about 98%, and for easy reading in quantity the advice is three or four at most. A dozen or more means you will need a dictionary often. The details are on Is this book right for my level?
- Check the length. Divide the number of words by your reading speed. A 50,000-word novel at 150 words per minute takes about 5.5 hours; at 100 words per minute, more than 8. For a first book, shorter is better: how to estimate reading time.
- Choose a graded reader or an original. Graded readers are written with a limited vocabulary for each level, which makes the 98% target reachable much earlier. Originals are what you are working towards: how to choose between them.
- Decide what to do with unknown words. Looking up every word kills the story; ignoring every word means you miss the ones that matter. A simple rule for which words to look up, and which tools make it quick, is on Reading with a dictionary.
Free books sorted by level
We keep a table of 117 public-domain books in five languages, each with its CEFR level, word count, number of different words and reading time, and a link to a free copy.
The numbers behind this advice
Every page on this site rests on a handful of numbers. Here they are with their sources and their limits.
| Question | Rule of thumb | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| How many words must I know to follow a story without help? | About 98%, one unknown word in 50 | An estimate from one study of 66 learners (Hu and Nation 2000) |
| How many to read with some support? | About 95%, one in 20 | A study of 745 students reading academic texts (Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski 2010) |
| How many unknown words per page for easy reading in quantity? | No more than 3 or 4 | Advice from extensive reading specialists (Nation and Waring 2013) |
| How many words does an English novel need? | 8,000–9,000 word families for 98% | Counts from word lists, not tests with readers (Nation 2006) |
| How fast do native speakers read? | About 260 words per minute for fiction | A review of 190 studies (Brysbaert 2019) |
| How fast do learners read easy books? | Roughly 60–140 words per minute | Studies of university students in Japan (see the table) |
| How often must I meet a word to learn it? | Around ten times, varying by word | Experiments and a review of 26 studies (Webb 2007; Uchihara et al. 2019) |
| Does reading a lot of easy books help? | Yes: small to medium gains in reading | Two meta-analyses of 34 and 49 studies (Nakanishi 2015; Jeon and Day 2016) |
Who writes this site and where the data comes from: About.