One of the best ways to prepare yourself for a trip to a host country is to get acquainted with the language. While there are limitations to how much you can learn from a language practice program given your schedule, you can complement that by doing foreign language readings in your spare time.
Here’s how you can make the most of it.
- Decide why you need to read a particular piece. If you have no strong reason in mind, it’s so easy to get disheartened and give up. Find a reason and remind yourself of it.
- Learn to skim. Even with limited facility in the target language, you can skim through your readings using the few things that you know. Read through all the headlines, stick to the topic sentences, look for emphasized sections and jump to useful summaries when they’re available.
- Use both top-down and bottom-up techniques. It helps you get more familiar with the nuances of a language when you read the same text in varying ways. They really do tend to highlight different things about your topic.
- Give the dictionary a rest. You will be tempted throughout your reading to keep referring to the dictionary. Resist it. Instead, draw context clues and use them to guess meanings. You’ll learn better that way.
- Learn to read context. Being able to discern context in foreign reading materials helps clue you in on many cultures and behaviors in the host country. You’ll be glad you did.