While Christmas shopping, I discovered that my local Walmart carries the kind of romances that I like in Spanish, so I bought one.  For a long time, I have been wondering how much longer it takes me to read in German and Spanish than in my native English.  Since I also have one of these romances in German, and many in English, I came up with an interesting experiment.

All of the books are the same size with the same size font.  In addition, the romances are all written on about the same reading level.  What that level is exactly, I don't know.  So I thought that if I timed myself reading the same amount of pages in all three languages, I could see exactly where I was.  I had read the German one years before and have no memory of the story, and I chose an English one I hadn't read before.

It took me two and half minutes to read 4 pages in English, just over 8 minutes to read the same amount in Spanish, and nine and a half minutes to read the German.

This experiment showed me several things.  One, it explains why I get bored easily when reading in a foreign language.  It takes me so long to read one page that I just want to stop.  To go from reading a page in English in less than forty seconds to it taking nearly two and half minutes in German is a big jump!

The fact that there was a significant difference between Spanish and German is not surprising to me.  I have always felt that it was easier for me to read Spanish.  German sometimes just looks intimidating!  In addition, I felt that I understood everything in the Spanish, but maybe missed a detail or two in the German.  Also, just to be fair, I haven't been working on my German for the last several months, while I have read things in Spanish to my class and in preparing for my class.

My reading speed was a factor in graduate school as well.  I very often read things in English translation because I just didn't have the time to read them in the original German.  I really like Thomas Mann, and I have always thought that I would go back and read them in German but beginning to read a several hundred page book is quite a time commitment.  And that is a higher reading level than Harlequin romances!

Now, I have to begin working on improving my reading speed.  I don't know if it's just a matter of reading more or what.  I have to do some research.  There are several other areas that I am going to focus on with improving my languages as well.