Dr. Lombo said that when she set out to chose a language and a novel, she asked these questions: “How much am I interested in it? What do I want with it? What does it mean for me? What good is it for me?”

It just seems so incredibly sensible to me that Dr. Lombo was essentially saying, allow the learner to choose a language and study materials that have meaning for him or her, and to choose those stories that he was interested in. I liked the story of “Dances with Wolves.” I related to the main character, who is living in another culture, so different from his own. Quite often, in Germany, I considered writing a book, entitled “Dances with Translators.”

I cared what happened on the next page and I wanted to learn the language, simply because I wanted to read faster.

Interestingly, Dr. Lombo also suggested not using a dictionary while reading this foreign book. If there was a word or phrase, which repeated and was clearly pivotal to understanding the book, but you haven’t figured it out by the fourth or fifth viewing, then you could reach for a dictionary. But, from my own experience, using the dictionary, the story had no joy, no relevance, and no flow. I could neither follow nor remember the story. Once I abandoned the dictionary I found the story flowed. I just read and read. Where I understood, great, where I didn’t understand, also great. Words and phrases that made no sense on page twenty came to life on page eighty.

My next book was “The Body Guard,” then “Dracula.” Next, I was in France at a street market and saw a very compelling book about a kid growing up in war time Germany. My French reading level was quite bad, but so strong was my desire to read the book that I bought it anyway. Upon returning to Germany I brought the book to a book shop where they helped me find the German language version. It was the fourth book I read in German and the first where I had no idea of the story before reading.

In addition to reading, I kept up with my TV watching. In Germany, TV is dubbed. Unlike terrible dubbing employed in the old Russia, where a single guy reads all of the parts, they have excellent, professional-quality dubbing in Germany. Famous American stars, such as Robert Deniro or Arnold Schwarzeneger, had their own official dubber. So, from movie to movie, their voices remained the same. I would watch “The Godfather,” “Simpsons,” “Star Trek,” — anything I enjoyed watching I watched again in German. German students would come in the TV room and ask me “Did you understand all of that.”

“No.”

“You shouldn’t watch that.”

“Why, are you going to ship me off to a camp?” Sometimes I actually said things like this as a way of getting Germans to leave me alone. Sometimes, I felt like practicing my speaking, so I continued the argument. It was like a free German conversation lesson, the cost of which was a little anger.

“Aren’t you worried that you don’t understand everything?” asked the German.

“Why? Do we have a test?”

“You shouldn’t be watching TV and reading things you don’t understand.”

“But if I only read things I understand, I won’t learn anything. Besides, it would be really boring because I would only be reading children’s books.”

“But ‘The Simpsons’ is a cartoon. Cartoons are for children.”

“Don’t say, that!” Like all delusional people, I became aggressive when my delusions were challenged. “‘The Simpsons’ is more than a cartoon. It is a way of life.”

A huge advantage of reading novels or watching TV is that you get relatively real dialogue. Yes, we don’t all speak exactly like Clint Eastwood in “Ein Mann Sieht Rot”, but none of us speak the way people do in dialogue 23 of the average language textbook. Why do all language textbooks have dialogues about renting hotel rooms or going to market and buying vegetables? These aren’t discussions I would ever have with a native speaker. These are things I just don’t do all of that often. But watching “The Godfather” I learned all of the vocabulary necessary to live as a Mafia don. This is something I have aspired to for years anyway. And now, I am qualified to do the job in two languages.

Fast forward more years than I care to count, and I am in Taiwan, studying Chinese. My Taiwanese friends, the ones who are dedicated students of English constantly read books about English language: books on idioms or gender biases in grammar exercises…. They never just sit down and read a book. As a native speaker, you have most likely never sat down and read an entire book about the English language. But you have probably read, enjoyed and learned from literature written in English.

In school curriculums, language learners, if they read literature at all, are subjected to Mark Twain, “Charlotte’s Web,” and often Shakespeare. These are terrible choices for people who want to learn language. Mark Twain is brilliant, but the dialect makes it hard for low-level learners to read. Do we really want a bunch of Taiwanese kids talking like Riverboat Jim? Shakespeare is the least logical thing to have kids read in a first language classroom. Why on earth would we make them read it in an English learning environment? Kids in Taiwan love baseball. Why not have them read a biography of Babe Ruth?

In my English language classroom I show the kids videos, such as “Mulan” and “Kung Fu Panda.” The context is Chinese, and the stories are familiar. Mulan, for example is an ancient Chinese legend, which the kids had all read in Chinese, before seeing the Disney movie. For myself, I use these and other Disney cartoons to practice Chinese listening. Disney DVDs are equipped with a language switch, so you can choose English or Chinese, complete with same language subtitles. 

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