"How to increase your pleasure in reading"--from Sunday China Post

I stocked quite a few copies of Sunday China Post like this. For the sake of de-cluttering, I've got to throw all of them away except one or two copies. Thanks to the digital camera, I can still keep some good articles in them.  Among them is the "Ask Alexander" column, which deals mostly with English learning. I guess it was the main reason why I kept the papers. The following is an example:



To make reading easier, I'd like to type it up as follows:



How to increase your pleasure in reading

Ask Alexander

By L. G. Alexander

Produced by Longman Asia Limited Co-Sponsored by The China Post

Question: The more I read, the more unknown words I will find. I have almost lost patience to look them up in a dictionary one by one. But I want to understand the articles correctly. What should I do?

Answer: I agree the sheer volume of new words that you will encounter in any piece of writing is very great indeed. I also fully understand how tedious it is to have to look up so many words. It just takes the fun out of reading. One thing you should ask yourself is whether you are trying to read English which is beyond your level. You may not actually be "ready" for completely unsimplified English.  But if you think you are and want ot continue reading general articles in the press, etc, I suggest you train yourself in the following:

Scan (=quickly look through) the whole text before you begin reading it so that you get a general idea what it is about. Look particularly at the general title of an article and its section headings if it has any. Make sure you understand these by looking them up in a dictionary if necessary.

Scan each paragraph before you begin reading it to get the general meaning.

Read the paragraph, sentence by sentence trying to understand new words from context. Make intelligent guesses at the meanings of words and look up only those words which interfere with your understanding. You can't, for example, read a text about pigeons if you don't understand the word pigeon because it's essential to the understanding of the text as a whole.

This procedure will greatly reduce the number of times you consult the dictionary and will increase your pleasure in reading. However, it may be that your difficulty in understanding a text is not the result ov vocabulary, but of syntax (=the way words are joined together to make sentences). If this is the case, you need practice in analyzing and de-coding sentences. A practice book like my own Longman Advanced Grammar is designed to train you in this skill.