Ocne uopn a tmie trhee lived in a cietarn vlagile a lttile cnortuy gril, the prettseit crteuare who was eevr seen. Her mhteor was ecsisxevely fnod of her; and her ghrodmentar doted on her slitl mroe. Tihs good waomn had a ltilte red riidng hood.

If you are a native English speaker, you will have recognised the initial sentences of Little Red Hood. If you are not, understanding the previous paragraph is more challenging, because your deciphering skill depends on the number of years you have been studying and reading English. The original version:

'Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl, the prettiest creature who was ever seen. Her mother was excessively fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more. This good woman had a little red riding hood.' The words have been modified only slightly, with the first and the last letter still in place and the others shuffled at random.

How can you read so heavily distorted prose? The answer is 'image matching'. Over decades of reading practise, your word brain has accumulated mental word-images of tens of thousands of words. When you read a text, you don't spell the words, you see them. Each word is like a pictogram, and slight variations of the pictogram are irrelevant for comprehension. That is why our 'cnortuy gril' immediately evokes the correct image - and why proofreading is so insidious.

Reading a book is like seeing a movie. Word-images pass across our brain screen at a speed of 5 to 10 words per second and create mental images of things and events. We were too young - 4 to 8 years old - when we acquired this skill, and our memory of this seminal event has faded away. So please sit back for a few seconds, close your eyes and realise what an extraordinary ability reading is: recognising and endowing with meaning, effortlessly and within a fraction of a second, any single subset of 50,000 and more words that inhabit your word brain. This is not a mean feat. You possess this ability because you are the owner of the most complex structure in the universe that has resulted from hundreds of millions of years of evolution: the human brain.

Being the heir of universe's top luxury product is not the entire story, though. Unconscious reading, with your eyes flying over a text at speeds of almost a line per second, cannot be acquired in a few months. Instead, it takes decades of training to tune up your brain to high-speed reading. At present, you read faster than you did at the age of 20; at 20, you read faster than at 15; at 15 faster than at 10; at 10 faster than at 8, and so on. Reading only one hour every day exposes your brain to some 20,000 words, or 7 million words per year. In people with a higher education, reading is the most trained single skill, whatever their profession.

What does that mean for language learning? Well, if reading is like seeing a movie, you certainly must absorb a huge number of new word-images, and as with listening, some segmenting is needed. Take the word parachlorophenylalanine. For scientists with a basic knowledge in chemistry, the meaning and pronunciation of the word is as evident as the meaning and pronunciation of love and peace. Meanwhile, non-scientists will return to first-grade spelling techniques and ask themselves where the syllables start and where they end. Every language has thousands of these complicated words. Remember the examples from the Words chapter (abracadabrantesque et al.) or take a look at words such as leszállópálya, megfélemlítõ, megfigyelõképesség, újjáépített terület. They are from Hungarian, one of the more granitic European languages, and unequivocally signal 'I don't want you to learn me without sweating'. Does that translate into another 1,500 hours of training for your eyes? Relax, you are not in for another brain-breaking Via Dolorosa, this is all a false alarm. Reading is different from listening because training your reading skills comes as a bonus of the obligatory learning of the 5,000 to 15,000 words, as defined in the Words chapter. In order to digest such a huge amount of words, you must read them - again and again - and check them - again and again. These lengthy repetitions are sufficient to create all the word images you need for super-fast reading. We will talk about the details later.

Please note that even with Hungarian or Finnish or Basque, you are still on home ground. Decades of reading the Latin alphabet have conditioned your brain for high-speed deciphering of words from any language that uses this alphabet, even roadblocks such as leszállópálya, megfélemlítõ, megfigyelõképesség, and újjáépített terület. Exactly how familiar and how tremendously important the Latin alphabet is becomes evident if you complicate things a step further and select a language with equally unfamiliar words + a different alphabet + the irritating habit of skipping half of the vowels. The result: Arabic. You suddenly discover, much to your dismay, how often you need to know the function of a word within a sentence - is it a noun? is it a verb? is it the active or passive voice of a verb? - before you can infer the correct pronunciation. As a consequence, reading, which is supposed to support you during the learning process, is frequently of no help at all, because you actually need to know what you are learning before you can read it. The previous sentence sounds complicated, doesn't it? Well, that's exactly how problematic reading and learning a language is when 50% of the vowels are left to the beginners' guesswork. Anticipate one to two years of extra study time.

The challenge of different writing systems is indeed immense. (Chinese is another example, but not Russian as this modifies only some characters.) Imagine painting the façade of a building while standing on a solid scaffold - the Latin alphabet is exactly this solid scaffold. Now imagine painting the same building without a scaffold, just attached to a rope fixed to the chimney. The second procedure is clearly more difficult, more exhausting and agonisingly time-consuming. Now just to make sure that you are not left with any false delusions, add the fact that written Arabic is spoken nowhere except on TV and at meetings or presentations; to speak everyday Arabic you have to learn additional country dialects which, in practise, amounts to learning another language (like learning Italian once you have learned Spanish); and, in Arabic-speaking countries, few provinces and cities have the fascination and vibrations to inspire dreams of fabulous 6-month full-immersion experiences such as Andalusia, Provence, Tuscany, Seville, Berlin, London, Freiburg, Orgosolo, Amsterdam, or Lisbon - and you swiftly realise that you ought to have pretty good reasons to start learning Arabic. At least start early and don't wait until you are 50.

Let's get back to your reading abilities and define the learning material you will use. I recommend that you start studying classical language manuals. Among the dozens of existing manuals, only a few are outstanding, and selecting good manuals is like crossing a minefield. Ask your teacher for help. In particular, make sure that the manual has word lists and comes with a CD-ROM. Personally, I prefer books without pictures and drawings because words are all you need. Neither the Bible nor the Torah nor the Koran comes with pictures.

As with audio files, be prepared for repetitive learning cycles. Read the chapters of your manual 5, 10, or 15 times, until you feel comfortable with every sentence and every word. You will soon find out that reading is easier than listening, because it does not require high-speed processing of several words per second. Instead, while deciphering a text, you can take all the time you need until you understand everything - lingering on single words, going back and forth through a sentence, leaping between paragraphs. Remember that in educated people, most words enter the brain via the eyes; they are not the result of babbling, chattering, gossiping, or palavering, but of intense reading at school, at university or during professional occupation.

After the first manual, you may consider studying a second one, but then you should change strategy. An appropriate strategy for adults is to read what they usually read in their native language. If you are a philosopher, read books about philosophy, if you are a scientist, read books about science. Stick to what motivates you most.

Later, you will discover that words can be divided into three great areas: 1) Language of science, documentaries, and media; 2) Language of prose; 3) Colloquial language (comic strips, etc.). These areas certainly overlap, but only to a certain degree. So even if you understand 99% of the words presented in a collection of newspaper articles, this percentage will substantially drop when you start reading novels or sources that contain colloquial language. The solution: diversify your text sources.

Whatever source you start with - science, novels, or comic strips - you will need a good dictionary to look up new words. A good dictionary is a heavy book that weighs at least one kilogram and has a minimum of 1000 pages. Over the years, you will see that it is the single most important book of your language project. Buy it soon and mark the pages that correspond to the individual letters (see Figure 3.1). This simple manipulation will save you precious time; after just days of training, you will find single words in less than 10 seconds.

Figure 3.1: Preparation of your dictionary for fast word-finding.
Spanish dictionary, 2250 g.

Now take a text of your choice, underline the new words, search for them in your dictionary, write them down in a neat, hand-written list or in a computer document, and learn them. Don't forget to mark the words you have looked up (Figure 3.2). Even if you are not going to learn a whole dictionary by heart, you may decide one day to repeat the words that you are supposed to know.

Now read, read, and read. But... don't neglect the daily listening training prescribed in the previous chapter! Be careful: over several years, steady reading practise alone can lead to a strange syndrome that is highly prevalent among academics: they are fluent at reading the scientific literature about medicine, philosophy, music, or philology, but don't understand a person talking about the very same topics and using the very same words. Their eyes work, but their ears don't.

Figure 3.2: Working with dictionaries, highlighting consulted words.

The diagnosis? Eye-ear dissociation. The cause? Inappropriate training of the auditory brain cortex (see the previous Listening chapter). People can be perfect readers, but, at the same time, poor listeners. (The contrary - the ears understand, but the eyes cannot read - exists too: illiteracy!) To neuroscientists, this is not surprising: eyes and ears are different entry ports for distinct elaboration and storage sites in the brain. Training one brain area, in the case of the present chapter the visual cortex at the back of the head (see Figure 3.3), has little influence on the performance of the auditory cortex. Surprise: what seemed to be a single task - learning a new language - turns out to be a multi-task project for your poor word brain. In the Speaking chapter below, you will find yet another construction site.

Figure 3.3: Reading words: High activity in the visual brain cortex.
Adapted from Raichle, 1988.

Let's summarise:

• After decades of reading, you have developed amazing skills. At full speed, reading compares 5, 10 or more words per second with a huge library of word-images stored in our brain.
• Your skills are valid only for your 'native' alphabet. Languages with different writing systems (Arabic, Chinese) require extra years of practise.
• After finishing your first language manuals, start reading articles or books that you would normally read in your native language.
• Over the years, your dictionary will become your single most important language book.
• Beware of eye-ear dissociation.

The last three chapters - Words, Listening, Reading - may suggest that language learning can be done without teachers. As a matter of fact, for the most time-intensive tasks, such as word learning and speech recognition, teachers are of little help. However, words alone don't make up human language. You need rules to arrange them in sentences, and, in the process, some words will be modified. Grammar is the collection of these rules. Fortunately, the number of grammar rules is fairly limited, and if you have some experience with grammar, you can generally manage on your own. If you haven't, you need good language teachers. Finding them can be a hard nut to crack.

Due to the heavy exposure to written words during vocabulary learning, no extra time is needed to develop fast-reading abilities. For the present chapter, we just need to book 100 hours for the text study of one or two language manuals. Your total workload is now

>>> Chapter 4: Teachers

"After reading The Word Brain, you may decide that you have no time to learn a new language - but never again will you say that you have no talent for it."