A Khmer student wrote if you ask me on YouTube and asked me to create videos about how precisely to see English language newspapers. "I'd want to ask you to produce videos how to see newspaper and translate it from English to Khmer. I Khmer and I having a problem to comprehend English phrases." Wrote the student. Language learners often write telling me about some section of learning or section of their lives where they are experiencing difficulties of comprehension and ask me for a technique or helpful tips to help them learn.
As I have said in numerous other language learning articles, you can find no tricks and no hints. The more hours you invest, the better you'll get. And if your goal is to see at an indigenous speaker level, you then need to see things an indigenous speaker reads. If you should be a 22 year-old university graduate, you then need to be reading at that level in the foreign language. And you won't make it happen by reading textbooks ABOUT the language. You will get there by reading books, articles, and textbooks IN as opposed to ABOUT the language.
If we analyze this latest email, the student says he has trouble reading, and he specifically singled out newspapers. Obviously, reading is reading. On some level, reading a newspaper isn't any unique of reading a novel or reading a short story. If you should be reading novels and short stories, you ought to be able to see newspapers. If I asked this student, however, he's probably is not reading one novel each month in English. If he were, newspaper reading would just come.
Therefore, the problem is not the reading or the newspapers, per se. The problem is having less practice.
I never took a program called "Newspaper Reading" in English. I simply started reading newspapers. And initially, I'd to learn to manage the language, structure and organization of newspaper writing, but no body taught me, or you. It just came to us. Exactly the same was true for German or Spanish newspapers which I could read almost along with English. No-one taught me, or taught Gunther or Pablo, it just came through practice.
A point, that I have made often in articles, is that after you begin learning a foreign language, you're no idiot. You are not starting having an empty brain. One reason it requires babies three years to learn their native tongue is since they are also learning what a language is and how language works. You understand all of that, and much more. Babies don't know that there is such a thing as grammar. Each little bit of vocabulary has to be learned. An eight year old might not know what "population, economy, government, referendum, currency" in his native tongue. So, reading a foreign newspaper would be hard for him, because reading a newspaper in his mother tongue is hard for him. Newspapers
If you should be a grown-up, from the developed country, with at the least a senior high school or university degree of education, you need to already have the ability to read newspapers in your native tongue. When this occurs, reading a newspaper in a foreign tongue is simply a matter of vocabulary. True you can find different uses of language, and styles of writing. And newspapers do have style which differs from other forms of writing. But you only read, and read and figure them out. The problem with most learners, however, is they aren't reading novels and short stories. Most learners need certainly to just accept they need practice. They should read, and read, and stumble, and fall, and read again, until they get it.
I didn't create a taste for reading the newspaper in English until I was in my own late twenties. But, by that time I'd read countless books in English, and completed 16 years of education. I only began reading newspapers because I'd to see foreign newspapers at college. Then I learned to see the newspapers in English first, to help me understand the foreign newspaper.
One of the problems, specifically with Khmer learners is that there is so little written material for sale in Khmer. American students experienced experience of newspapers, magazines, novels, reference books, poetry, plays, encyclopedias, diaries, biographies, textbooks, comic books... Most Khmers haven't had this exposure.
