31 Steps to Learn a New Language: Step #14 - Read Children's Books

It might seem silly, but reading children's books in a foreign language is a great way to improve critical reading skills. The vocabulary and grammar used in these books are often straight-forward and simple. Thus they are easy to understand but are still educational. The familiarity of these stories also allows the learner to make use of context clues to guess the meanings of certain words. The vocabulary is largely repetitive in most books, which facilitates memory retention.

Reading children's literature is an engaging way to strengthen and improve comprehension skills. These books are also filled with example usage of simple sentence patterns and tense structures. As previously mentioned, the basis of language learning is communication. The learner is able to do exactly that when they manage to read and understand children's literature. Further along the line in their language learning journey, they can move on to more difficult text to improve their skills.