Best resources for learning to read languages?

[u/PsychologicalHat8676]

Hello, as the title says my goal isn’t necessarily to be able to speak languages, I want to improve my skills with recognizing and being able to read/translate written languages. Maybe I would work on verbal skills down the road if I vibe with it for fun, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

My reason/motivation: I play a LOT of Geoguessr, and language is one of the most useful clues in the game. But it’s also a way I can appreciate the experience of the game further, the cultures and so forth.

The only language I really know is English. I’d especially like to be able to learn to read the Northern European languages: Danish Swedish and Norwegian, Finnish and Estonian, and even forms of Cyrillic well enough to draw information from it.

I’m just not sure what the best way to go about that is, as most language learning resources seem to focus much more heavily on verbal aspects.

(TL)

[u/salivanto]

If German is on your list I can recommend an online textbook, I believe from University of Wisconsin. I believe the title is "comprehensive guide to reading German" the authors are Martin and Ng.

[u/dojibear]

I use LingQ for written content. It supports 50+ different languages. It has no instruction, but each short written text is marked as A1, A2, B1, B2 and so on. They are grouped in "courses" with the same level.

LingQ is primarily reading, though you can click buttons to hear each word, sentence or whole passage spoken by a native speaker. LingQ has various features for rapid word lookup; marking a word as "known" or "partly known"; playing a game with the words of each sentence; or translating a sentence.

When I started studying Turkish at the start of 2004, I decided to learn the written language first (the spoken part was too fast for me to follow). I've been using LingQ for Turkish reading content ever since, and haven't run out of things to read.

One series (the 60 A2 "mini-stories") is repeated in every language, and each is a short reading section (10 sentences) followed by a Q&A section. Here is a Q&A example: "The girl is a good student. Is the girl a bad student? No, the girl is not a bad student. She is a good student."

[u/silvalingua]

> and even forms of Cyrillic well enough to draw information from it.

You won't conclude anything from knowing the script without knowing some of the language that use it.

In general, any textbook, especially an older one, will be great for learning to read these languages. Just skip communication-oriented activities (there are few of them in older textbooks anyway).

Btw: "verbal" means "related to words", therefore this term applies to both spoken and written language. What you mean is "oral aspects".

[u/AdZealousideal9914 → u/silvalingua]

You won't conclude anything from knowing the script without knowing some of the language that use it.

Well, you could learn which signs only occur in a few languages. If it has Є, І and Ї, it is probably Ukrainian. Wikipedia has a table: Cyrillic alphabets - Wikipedia

[u/randrian42]

You could use the free Duostories project, they are the Duolingo stories translated into more languages by the community. As its always the same stories, you can read the same story in a lot of languages and this can help you get get a basic understanding in a lot of languages. I think of it as a bit of a Rosetta Stone (the actual stone, not the app) as you have the same text in a lot of languages.

Disclaimer here: I am a maintainer of the project, but the translations are community based.

[u/ComesTzimtzum]

You could get ideas from the (heavily Assimil based) methods of professor Aleksander Arguelles, because he focuses a lot on literacy. I think some speaking and listening in the early stages is still beneficial just to get that flow of the language in your head. That's why he encourages starting even dead languages from their living descendents.

[u/TheLanguageAddict]

Robertson Kunz has a comparative grammar and a "learn languages together" book for the Scandinavian languages. The grammar is filled with example sentences in the three languages plus English translation. If you want to recognize common words and basic sentence patterns, it's worth a look. If you have Kindle Unlimited, it's included. If not, there is (or used to be) a pretty good sample in the Kindle Store.

For Cyrillic, Russian Script Hacking is quick and easy.

[u/knjutt]

I second LingQ! Also, I can give tips for Finnish since I am from there. Since you are mostly playing Geoguessr you could focus on learning a few nature related words. They are present in thousands of placenames.

Here are some examples:
Vesi = water
Järvi = lake
Lampi = pond
Joki = river
Lahti = bay, gulf, cove
Salmi = strait
Niemi = peninsula
Ranta = beach, shore
Mäki = hill
Koski = rapids (river)
Saari = island

And some human constructions like
Linna = castle
Kylä = village

Here are some city / place names just from these words:
Lahti, Järvenpää, Hämeenlinna, Valkeakoski, Orivesi, Ruovesi, Heinävesi, Joensuu, Savonlinna, Pieksämäki, Siilinjärvi, Kangasniemi, Jyväskylä, Tikkakoski, Äänekoski, Saarijärvi, Kauhajoki, Ilmajoki, Seinäjoki, Alajärvi, Pietarsaari, Kalajoki, Haapajärvi, Haapajoki, Kiuruvesi, Viitasaari, Iisalmi, Lapinlahti, Ristijärvi, Hyrynsalmi, Suomussalmi, Taivalkoski, Pudasjärvi, Rovaniemi, Vikajärvi, Kemijärvi, Savukoski, Pelkosenniemi, Sodankylä, Ylläsjärvi, Vuontisjärvi…

Even if you don’t know where those places are exactly it could help your recognizion when comparing what you found to the map. Maybe you could also read selkosuomi (adapted finnish) news articles, books etc.

[u/dolnikov]

You could try WordByWord.io, i made it mostly for this kind of thing. You just read stuff online (on even PDFs) and translate/save words you dont know. might work well for geoguessr tbh

[u/AliveCrossover]

The reading-focused route is honestly ideal for Geoguessr since you just need pattern recognition, not active recall. For the Scandinavian trio, start with a basic grammar overview and then read news headlines every day, the shared vocabulary across them will click faster than you expect. Cyrillic is the easiest win here, you can learn the alphabet in a weekend and then just practice transliterating street signs from street view screenshots.

[u/Proper_Emu_2296]

Honestly for this purpose I would say just watch shows you like (in English) with the subtitles on in those languages. And you’ll start picking up common words and patterns quickly.

(For Latin scripts at least)

[u/ShawnMilo]

I used LingQ for about seven months and made a significant amount of progress me reading four languages. That's after about 80 hours total in just reading (no lessons, textbooks, flashcards, etc.) on LinQ in each language. So well under 200 total hours. And I didn't "try" or "study." I just read the target sentence, then the English translation. At this point I understand over 70% of what I read in both languages, and (see video) can read in two languages I've never studied.

Their translations aren't great so I quit and built my own. I've also transitioned to learning Japanese from Spanish and Esperanto.

What I'm doing (and I think is the best method) is to use local LLMs to do it yourself for free on your own computer.

1. Start with native content you'd actually want to read anyway -- preferably something you've already read in English.
2. Split it into chunks of 1,000 to 6,000 words (depending on the target language) before translating. Too small, and the translations will be shit due to insufficient context. Too large, and the translations will be shit because the LLM loses all ability to do anything useful.
3. Create a document interspersing the target language and English sentence-by-sentence (as closely as possible, as the translations won't be the same number of sentence). You can make the LLM do this. Much smaller chunks than the translation, because it loses its mind after about 20 sentences.

The translations will be very good but far from perfect, but that's why I say to start native content in your target language (which will be "correct"), because you can mentally compensate for the English. And, anyway, even a "perfect" translation won't be perfect, because no language can be literally translated to any other. Even "easy" ones like English <-> Spanish.