Reading and languages

     When I was young, I devoured books. Put a book in front of me, and as long as I could get into the author's style of writing, the rest of the world would vanish until I finished the book. Stopping for things like eating or sleeping was just such a hassle, and I'm sure I got into trouble numerous times for staying up too late with a book under the covers. At the time, I could not understand people who didn't get into reading- I was sure something must have been direly wrong with them in order to pass up such a great experience and a chance to explore both the real world and new ones.

     Fast forward a number of years, and I start to understand those people. The first revelation that lessened my desire to read was that there are only so many ways to tell a story. I look for patterns in everything, and eventually I realized that most books can be ultimately broken down into:

• character development,
• conflict,
• solution,
• happy ending.

Let's just say that realizing that dramatically lessened the motivation to get into yet another story with the same inevitable conclusion. Yes, as a friend pointed out, it is interesting to see how the author presents said components, but it does dull the shine a bit.

     The second insight that made me more sympathetic to those who don't like reading was coming to the conclusion that not everyone reads the same way. Again, I know it's a fairly obvious things one you step back and look at it, but keep in mind that I chronically assume that if I can do something, everyone else can, too. So, here's how I read: 

1. Really, really fast. The action in a story has to happen in real-time, so if I'm reading too slowly, things in my imagination can't happen as fast as they would in real life, and the story gets jerky and disconnected. 
2. I read shapes instead of words. There are a whole lot of variations of this study, claiming that we can read scrambled words as long as the first and last letters are in place, and I believe to some extent it is true. Every so often, I realize that I've been saying a word completely incorrectly for years, because I never bothered to read each letter, just saw the shape and made an assumption. (Example: The gnome king in the Oz books is named Ruggedo, but for 7 years I read it as Rodrigo, since that is a far more common name, and most of the letters are the same).

     Keeping that in mind, here's the real kicker that made me really relate to non-readers. When I was studying French, it was a little annoying to read stories, because I didn't know all the vocabulary, so there were holes in the real-time action in my head. However, for the most part, I was able to read the words as I always had- as shapes, and very quickly- because the letters were the same, they just took slightly different sounds. Once I started learning Russian, though, the real frustration came out. 

     As I've mentioned before, the Russian alphabet is wildly different from the Latin alphabet used by most of the Americas and Eastern Europe. What's more is that, in typed Russian, the letters are all very similar, blocky, of an even height, and hard to pick out from one another. So, for example, words like "нищий" (nee-shee: beggar) are very difficult to distinguish between the letters; it's a bunch of vertical lines with very tiny connectors. Moreover, in a manner similar to German, Russian uses a lot of very long words in regular discourse, such as "здравствуйте" (zdrav-stvoo-each-yeh: hello), and, as you can see, they tend to throw a lot more consonants into a single cluster. 

     At first, reading in Russian was interesting. We only had short, two or three sentence long dialogues to read, and it was with words we mostly knew or were learning at that time. As things progressed, however, we were given more and longer dialogues and stories to read, with more words that we were expected to infer or look up. That's when I truly gained appreciation for people who don't read quickly. Having to stop and figure out the meanings of words, or actually spell out a word because I can't get the sense of it at a glance is incredibly frustrating, and makes it very hard to get into the real sequence of events or ideas presented. After a while, you start seeing the book or paper as an enemy that you have to fight with to wring comprehension from, and it becomes such a chore that it just isn't worth it. 

All this, just to read a one-page story...

     So to those of you who don't read quickly, you have my utmost sympathy. And for those of you studying a foreign language- hang in there, it will get better, and it's so worth it. Here's a hint: other languages and cultures don't always use the same story formats. It literally is a whole new world out there. Cheers!