Step 4 : Read

En français
I'm writing this especially the show to necessity and power of reading. I recently discovered, when I was writing "Demon Soul" actually that it was difficult for some people to read even five pages a day. For me that was unthinkable, at first it made me laugh because that meant I was able to write faster than people can read. But the more I think about it the more it seems like a scary idea.
Reading those 2500 words would take me less than 3 minutes, I'm a fast reader.
The reading average is 400 words a minute, so that means a bit less than 7 minutes and some people were telling me that they couldn't find time to read that. So I became suspicious and I want to tell you, the first thing to learn anything is to read. So you need to read, anything related to what you are studying and all the time.
Read while watching TV, read while eating, read before going to bed, read in the toilets (more about multitasking and TV later on)

The necessity of reading (a lot) and power of reading

Reading is going to make you happy. It makes some parts of your brain work that nothing else does (not too sure about that) anyway, it will make you smarter. Of course you won't remember everything you read but you will still have an idea about it. Read everything you can either you are learning something specific (languages, history...) or nothing in particular. The whole thing about reading is that it also builds up your mind. It teaches you different pattern and way of thinking, because not two persons write the same way, because not two persons can come up with exactly the same point of view on the same topic. That teaches you to see the world through someone else eyes. It will also show you more about the world and help you to understand other people better. An other good point is that if you really want to remember something you read you can always put it in a SRS and do repetition to remember it (shook head I should have done that while reading Dune)
One of my friend started to go back to read books after stopping for doing his PhD and told me that is was one of the best thing ever. He even started to read more than he planed.

Reading for language learner.

I'm learning Japanese hardcore at the moment, because I can't read the things around me and that's really killing me. I'm reading a bit of Harry Potter everyday, that's extremely slow. I told my friend I can read a sentence, and he laughed at me, not even a page. I feel a bit like a snail already, sometimes I want to throw the book by the window and to stop because it's highly frustrating, I would have finish the book in English by now right. I know but I also know that you can't get faster at reading if you don't practice and that I'll never be able to read a mix of kanji, hiragana and katakana if I don't read. So I need to and I started to read the products' etiquette during breakfast.
It's really important to start reading early, because reading will build up your vocabulary. It will help your pronunciation if you read aloud. You don't need to understand everything and to look for everything in the dictionary, that would be highly time consuming and you would loose patience by loosing the fun part of the story in too much grammar, you just need a global meaning out of it. Of course if a word keep on coming up I will go look for it.

What to read ?

I will go for anything you can find a thing is interesting. I don't really like magazines about people, who cares about their life anyway. I love fiction, whatever fiction it is. There are those books called "Classic", I heard somewhere or read somewhere that they were called that because everybody wanted to read them but nobody actually did. I read some of those in French and English and pretty enjoyed them. I like to read any novel or short stories my friends give me. I'm also a big fan of wikipedia and will read several pages a day on different topic that comes to my mind. Recently it was music as my friend asked me why there was no black fret between Mi and Fa. I knew it was because of the tons and half-tons but I still don't know why they don't call Fa#, Fa and so on to have black fret everywhere. That's the mystery of the moment.
So I'm telling you read everything you can that is useful to you and that you enjoy. But don't forget enjoying it is the first condition, fun always comes first.

You can also read all this blog and the one linked on the right, they contain interesting information.

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