Reading Guides by Language

General advice about reading in a foreign language runs out quickly. The moment you pick a language, the questions get concrete: which books are actually readable at A2, whether the news is too hard, how many words separate you from a novel, and what to do about a writing system you cannot yet decode.

These guides answer those questions one language at a time. Each one names real books and real publications rather than describing categories, maps them onto CEFR levels, and is explicit about where the estimates come from and how much they vary.

The vocabulary-target articles lean on Paul Nation’s coverage research, which asks a useful question: what proportion of the words on a page do you need to know before reading stops being decipherment and starts being reading. The answer, roughly ninety-eight percent, explains more about why a book feels impossible than any level label does.