Reading
Practical advice based on some YouTube videos and ChatGPT
1. Choose something you can actually enjoy and understand.
For comfortable extensive reading, ~95–98% lexical coverage (known vocabulary) is a better target. At 80%, one word in five is unknown—that is usually no longer comfortable extensive reading.
2. Read primarily for the story, not for vocabulary collection.
The video's advice not to stop at every unfamiliar word is one of its strongest recommendations. Try context first and accept some ambiguity. This is precisely what distinguishes extensive reading from intensive study.
3. Do a tiny recall after reading.
Close the book and mentally or orally reconstruct what happened: Who did what? Why? What happens next?
For nonfiction: Ask yourself what the author means, how ideas connect, what you already know, and what you think about the argument.
It is recommended that you make notes and paraphrase rather than merely copying the author's wording.
Keep it short—perhaps 30–60 seconds, rather than turning every chapter into an exercise.
4. Use the dictionary strategically.
Don't look up everything. Look a word, idiom, expression, etc. up when it blocks your understanding, keeps recurring, or genuinely interests you.
5. Consistency matters
Main advice:
Read → tolerate most unknown language → look up only important/interesting items → 30–60-second recall → continue next time.
And I would certainly not switch automatically to graded readers just because a native novel contains unfamiliar vocabulary. If you can comfortably follow the story, remain interested, and read at a reasonable pace, a real novel can be excellent extensive-reading material at your level.
Read a lot of comprehensible, interesting English without constantly interrupting yourself to study it.
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1. The core method
The video proposes roughly this cycle:
Consume → engage → extract → paraphrase → react → use
While reading/watching/listening:
- Engage lightly during the first pass. Mark interesting passages, questions, arguments, surprising ideas, useful language, etc. Don't interrupt yourself constantly; the creator deliberately recommends doing this quickly.
- Return to the important parts later. She recommends copying an important passage, then expressing its meaning in your own words, and optionally writing your reaction to it.
- Do something with the information. Her four possibilities are teaching it, trying it in real life, creating something from it, or putting the information somewhere you'll actually use it.
- For videos and podcasts, write down a timestamp + short note, then return to the relevant section later.
- Finally, consume less but more deeply, rather than constantly moving on to new material.
That basic framework is sensible.
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What I would keep
✅ 1. Paraphrase instead of merely collecting information
This is probably the most valuable part of the video.
Instead of:
Interesting sentence → highlight it → move on
do:
Interesting sentence → understand it → explain it yourself
For you, I would use this cycle:
- Paraphrase from memory in your own English. Don't check whether it's perfect.
- Send your version to me for correction.
- I correct grammar, word choice, and naturalness — but keep your original structure whenever it works, rather than completely rewriting everything.
- Compare your version with the corrected one. Notice just 1–2 important differences.
- Later, try to say the idea again without looking.
For example, suppose you read:
Regular exercise can significantly reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.
You might write:
Doing exercises regularly can seriously decrease the possibility to have heart diseases.
That's understandable but not fully natural. I might correct it to:
Regular exercise can significantly reduce the risk of heart disease.
or, preserving more of your own wording:
Exercising regularly can significantly reduce your risk of heart disease.
Producing the imperfect paraphrase is the exercise; correction is the feedback stage.
There's also an important distinction between correction and rewriting. For this particular activity, I think you should usually ask me not to rewrite your paragraph into elegant C1 English immediately, because then you may lose sight of what was wrong with your English. Better would be:
Correct my paraphrase, but preserve my wording and sentence structure wherever they are natural. Explain the important changes. Then give me a more natural C1 version separately.
That would be an excellent B2→C1 exercise for you.
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