Starting Extensive Reading in English: The First Books I Read
Contents
This post was automatically translated by AI from the Japanese original.
Learn Something New by Reading English
Read English as a matter of course
and learn something new
I was drawn to this catchphrase from an Instagram ad.
Reading in English, learning new things, being moved by a story. I wanted to have that kind of experience too.
I can breeze through books in Japanese, but if possible, I’d love to enjoy them in the original language.
That longing is what made me start extensive reading in English.
In this post, I’ll introduce some books that are good for your first English book.
The Little Prince
The first book I read was The Little Prince.
Yes, the super famous one.
What got me started was that it was available on Kindle Unlimited.
It’s 16,000 words, which might be a bit long for a first read? Since I didn’t know the story, I kept reading while wondering, “Is this the plot?”
The Little Prince: 16,000 words
Life on the Refrigerator Door
This was my second book.
It’s a story told through simple exchanges between a mother and her teenage daughter.
At 13,000 words it’s short and easy to follow. But the ending made me tear up 🥺
This is the book where I learned allowance (the word for pocket money).
Life on the Refrigerator Door: 13,000 words
Magic Tree House Books
This is a children’s series about the siblings Jack and Annie, who find a magic tree house and go on adventures to places like the age of the dinosaurs and ancient Egypt.
I started The Secret Garden as my third book, but it turned out to be longer than I expected, so I read these as a break.
Each book is short, around 5,000 words, so the story is easy to follow.
You can finish one in about 30 minutes.
I bought books 1 to 4 as a set and read them all 👌
This is where I learned You’re nuts 😆
Jack says it to his sister Annie all the time.
It apparently means “You’re crazy!”
Magic Tree House: 5,000 × 4 = 20,000 words
The Secret Garden
My third book was this one.
It has a lot more words than the earlier ones, and I almost gave up partway through.
It also has Yorkshire dialect (I think?), which made it harder to read.
So I’d recommend it when you’re tired of short books and want to try something bigger.
The story: Mary loses her parents and is sent to live with her uncle. His house is huge and has a big garden. His wife died ten years ago, and the garden she loved is locked and closed off. Mary looks for the secret garden and decides to bring it back to life.
Once I got to Chapter 10, the characters were all in place, I understood the background, and the story got moving. That’s when it started to feel really fun!
You can picture the scenes from the writing, and it’s a heartwarming story.
The Secret Garden: 80,000 words
How to Choose Your First Book
The first hurdle is finding a book that suits you and actually finishing it.
I recommend choosing a book you like, or a story you already know!
A short story you can finish quickly
I recommend starting with a short story of under 10,000 words.
Even The Little Prince felt long to me. That’s how unused I was to reading English text continuously.
I measured my reading speed, and it’s about 150 words per minute.
150 × 30 minutes = 4,500 words, so a book of about 5,000 words takes just under 30 minutes. A book of about 10,000 words takes just under an hour.
Thirty minutes feels doable, even with a little break in the middle, right?
Try measuring your own reading speed once, and start with books you can finish within an hour.
A story whose plot you know
Stories you’ve already read in Japanese are also a good choice.
If you lose track of what’s going on as you read, reading becomes painful.
But if you know the plot, you can keep following it even when you don’t understand some sentences.
So I think it’s a good idea to re-read in English a children’s book you read as a kid, or even a business book you’ve read in Japanese!
At first, I found it hard to follow people’s movements (trembling, shrugging, leaning on a cane, and so on), because I didn’t know those words. It was a children’s book, but I still tripped over a lot of unfamiliar words.
While your brain is busy processing English, understanding a story’s setup from scratch is hard.
Prior knowledge makes reading easier, so it might be a good idea to read up on the plot or the opening in Japanese before you start!
Over 100,000 words, It Suddenly Gets Easier
- The Little Prince: 16,000 words
- Life on the Refrigerator Door: 13,000 words
- Magic Tree House: 5,000 × 4 = 20,000 words
- The Secret Garden: 80,000 words
By this point I had read seven books. In terms of word count, I felt that once I passed 100,000 words, I had built the basic ability to read in English.
From about the second half of The Secret Garden, I could really feel my concentration lasting as I kept reading pages.
Finishing a book that was long for me also gave me confidence ^^
I’m still doing extensive reading now. (If I’m being greedy, I’d love to say I’ve read 100 books or a million words! Haha.)
I’ll keep sharing the books I read.
Update
I reached one million words:
I Read One Million Words in English: My Book List and Tips for Reading Every Day
