Here’s how you can make the most of it.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

1. 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.

Improve Your Vocabulary.  According to many language experts, improving your vocabulary immediately increases your ability to comprehend materials in a foreign language.  When you sit down to read, always keep a dictionary handy so you can check confusing items, taking careful note to study them further during your practice sessions.

Greater Exposure. Some people, on the other hand, believe that the fastest path to improving overall reading and comprehension skills is to simply immerse yourself in more materials.  Surround yourself with text and audio in the foreign language, consuming them with regularity.  In time, the assimilation will happen on its own.

Keep It Interesting. Many teachers believe that a fiery interest is at the core of speedy integration of languages into your everyday life.  Whether you use a language software or other materials, if you focus your study on things that interest you (e.g. practice reading on books about your favorite hobbies), learning will become much more natural.

At the end of the day, as long as you keep practicing, you’ll eventually improve, of course.  To develop as fast as you can, we highly recommend trying out all of the above techniques and seeing which one works best for you.  Additionally, couple it with solid language instruction and a good language learning software tools for best results.

Experts say that in order to read an English language newspaper with full comprehension, you need to have a fluent mastery of at least 4,000 words in the vernacular.  Basing on that, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine newspapers in other languages requiring the same amount of skill before you can competently understand them.

Here’s the good thing, though.  Reading newspapers at a language you’re not yet very good in can help you become more competent in it.  After all, the more words and sentence constructs you are exposed to, the wider your familiarity grows.  It is actually a very good aid to formal lessons, regardless of whether you’re attending classes or studying on your own with a language learning software.

Online news aggregators are some of the best ways to practice reading skills, because of both the breadth of the news items they offer, as well as the customization options you get with them.  Large aggregators like Google News have ties with newspapers in most every national language the world over, including some written in regional languages.  As such, you have a bevy of choices whatever language you’re trying to familiarize with.

You can choose among dozens of newspapers in French, for instance, along with customizing which sections you want to read.  If you don’t want to bother with headlines and just be delivered the sports pages, you can easily customize it, saving you a lot of time as well as only giving items that are most significant to you.

If you’re trying to master the business vocabulary in Italian, for instance, then choose to receive business and finance news in the language.  Next month, when you move on to science and technology vocabulary, then choose the appropriate newspaper sections to be delivered.  It’s much easier (not to mention, more informative) than running through a dictionary or a list.