Reading in English Since I am training to take an English exam, I want to broaden my vocabulary and my reading skills. Reading novels is obviously one of the best ways to do that. I must confess that sometimes, when I come across an "adult" novel in English, I have to look so many words up that I finally give up and stop reading the book. That is the reason why I thought that children books, as well as young adults novels, might be a good choice. These days I have been reading Five on a Treasure Island, one of the famous Enid Blyton's stories. I bought a pack with the three first novels of the series for my Kindle device. I usually prefer to read on paper, but I have to admit that when it comes to read in a foreign language, e-readers such as Kindle are really useful. With them, you can look for the meaning of a word just by clicking on the word. That is extremely convenient when you are reading a book in a language other than yours. Anyway, you need to pay attention to the fact that, when it comes to read in a language you are learning and you don't command yet, it is not adviseable to look up every single word whose meaning you don't know. Whether you do that, you are most likely to get tired of reading, because you can't keep the flow of the story and you feel that you are not moving forward or at least that you do it at a very slow pace. If you look every word up, most of the times you are going to quit and drop the book. The best thing to do, when you want to read a book in a foreign language, is not to look the words up and try to understand the meaning of the sentences, even if there is one o two words whose exact meaning you are unaware of. Most of the times, you can get a rough sense of those words from the context, so that you can keep reading without losing the gist. If you come across a word you don't know but you can get from the context that it is some kind of tool, is it really so important to know the exact equivalent in your language? By carrying reading, you keep the flow going and you still get familiar with lots of words and collocations that maybe you knew but you couldn't use properly. So even though you don't look up every unknown word, you are still strengthening your vocabulary. Obviously, sometimes it is absolutely necessary to know the meaning of a word in order to properly understand the passage. Also, usually you see that some words are coming back again and again. That means that these are important words and you should go and look them up.