Reading skills are more important than ever, especially as we interact so much online and through our phones! Besides reading books, menus, and museum signs, learners now also read text messages from new friends, subtitles on Netflix, and the latest celebrity gossip on Reddit in the language they're studying.

Here's everything you need to know about reading in a new language, and how to use Duolingo to get you there!

How Duolingo teaches you to read in a new language

Duolingo courses get you reading words and short phrases right from the start. At the beginning of each unit, learners see a lot of exercises focused on reading to help you recognize new vocabulary and grammar. Sentences get gradually longer and more complex throughout the course to scaffold your learning and help build up your reading skills. 

But we don’t stop there! You'll also be reading short, fun dialogues and paragraphs that you'll enjoy so much you might forget that you're reading a new language! 

Here are some of our favorite reading features on Duolingo:

Reading exercises
In each lesson, learners engage with a variety of exercises to practice reading. Have you seen our newest exercise types, like the reading comprehension exercise on the right?

Exercise of Lin next to a dialogue bubble with a sentence in French and a clickable speaker button followed by three possible answer choices, all in French. The caption reads 'Select the missing word.' Exercise that presents two columns of five buttons each that contain vocabulary in English in the left column and in Spanish in the right column. The caption reads 'Tap the matching pairs.' Exercise of Oscar next to a dialogue bubble with a paragraph in French and a clickable speaker button followed by an incomplete sentence in French with three possible answer choices, all in French. The caption reads 'Read and respond.'

Stories
Duolingo Stories are fun and silly dialogues written just for learners! You'll read about the (mis)adventures of our Duolingo characters while experiencing the language in realistic contexts. Stories are available in Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, and Portuguese.

                   
Screenshot of a Duolingo Story that shows lines of dialogue in French next to an avatar of a character and a speaker icon. Under the dialogue is an incomplete sentence in English and three answer options. The checkbox for the first option contains a green checkmark, and a green banner at the bottom of the screen reads “Excellent!” right above a “Continue” button.         Screenshot of a Duolingo Story that shows lines of dialogue in French next to avatars of Vikram and Priti. Each line begins with a speaker icon. At the bottom of the screen is a green “Continue” button.         

Duolingo Podcasts
If you’ve never listened to our award-winning podcasts, you’re in for a treat! You can choose to listen only, or you can use each episode’s written transcript to improve your reading skills, either with sound on or off. Our podcasts are available for English speakers learning Spanish or French, and for Spanish and Portuguese speakers learning English.

Exercises for new writing systems
We’ve designed a series of tools to help you learn how to read languages that have a different writing system, like Japanese, Korean and Arabic!

Exercise that presents a Japanese character in a clickable button that plays a sound and three answer choices below it. The caption reads 'What sound does this make?' Exercise that presents a small clickable speaker button and then a larger work space where the learner can drag different tiles of partial Hangeul characters to form a Korean character. The caption reads 'Build the character in Exercise that presents a small Japanese character next to a clickable speaker button and a larger work space with a light gray grid and a blue line and arrow showing how to trace the character. The caption reads 'Draw the missing stroke.'

Roleplay
With Roleplay, you have real-world conversations with our AI-powered characters. They might text you about planning a trip, ordering coffee, shopping, and basically any topic that your lessons cover! After each chat, you'll get personalized feedback about your accuracy and the complexity of your messages to help you improve for next time. Roleplay is available for Max subscribers studying Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and English.

How to learn to read in a new language

Reading is a receptive skill, which means you receive the information in the new language—that is, someone else wrote it! 

In many reading contexts, you have the chance to go back and re-read the information: You can think about all the different words and endings used, and you can reconsider and re-think what it means and why. However, in lots of digital reading contexts, like texting and social media posts, you'll want to read fast!

When you read in a language you know well, your brain jumps right away to the meaning of what you're seeing. However, when you read in a new language, it takes a long time to automate that process—after seeing a word, you have to identify each of its parts (like prefixes or verb endings), retrieve the meaning of each part from your memory, then put them together to understand the whole word, and finally link them to other meanings you just read. 

This process is called bottom-up processing, but reading also requires top-down processing: integrating what you know and expect about the situation, topic, and person writing it. Skilled readers combine top-down and bottom-up processing to efficiently grasp the author's meaning—both the message they wanted to convey (the content) and the way they express it (friendly, formal, annoyed, etc).

Illustration of a woman with black hair and dark skin sitting at a desk in a library and reading a book

Reading differences across languages

Learners also face different reading challenges depending on what language they're learning. Languages like English are alphabetic, because each letter represents a sound, but even alphabetic writing systems can vary widely, for example: 

  • Hebrew and Arabic are written from right to left, and they normally include only consonants and some vowels in writing, with other vowels either implied or indicated selectively. Arabic letters also change how they look depending on what letters they're next to! 
  • The Korean writing system, Hangul, is a special kind of alphabet—its consonants were designed to show the shape of your tongue when you pronounce them.

Sometimes the language you’re learning to read doesn’t use an alphabetic writing system at all! This is the case for many languages, such as:

  • Hindi, which uses the Devanagari script, whose characters represent not sounds, but entire syllables.
  • Chinese, which uses the Hanzi script, whose characters represent whole words or concepts, and can be pronounced differently depending on which other characters they’re combined with.
  • Japanese, whose learners are faced with three different writing systems—two with characters that represent syllables, and one with characters that represent meanings! 🤯

Tips to practice reading

To make real progress, find ways to incorporate reading practice in your everyday routine!

  • Change the language on your phone to the language you're learning.
  • Add the language's keyboard to your phone to make googling for reading material even easier.
  • Read blogs, follow social media accounts, and join online communities with posts in the language you're learning. These are great ways to learn informal and current language!
  • Read articles and news in the language. You'll often be able to rely on your general knowledge of current events to help you understand. 
  • Read Wikipedia and books in the language. 
  • Become an expert reader in one well-defined area. If you want to go even further, you can select a hot topic in current events, and read about it in the news repeatedly over a period of time. Because the names, vocabulary and structures in those articles tend to get recycled a lot, you can actually become a pro at reading about this specific topic!

For beginners, start with reading material on familiar topics—this way, you have a sense of what to expect, which makes it easier to understand the content and learn new words and structures (that’s top-down processing at work!). 

You can explore short books, children’s books, or translations of stories you already know. If available, reading the bilingual edition of a book you love (with one page in the language you’re learning, and one page in the language you already know) can also be a really fun strategy. Finally, if you enjoy movies, try rewatching a favorite with subtitles in the language you’re learning! 

For intermediate and advanced learners, diving into entirely new reading material can be a rewarding experience. You might also explore informal, conversational language through social media posts and online discussions. As for movies and other video content, try watching with both audio and subtitles in the new language—pairing text with sound can further reinforce your reading skills.

Illustration of Duo lying on his stomach and reading a book with an amazed look on his face

Taking your reading to the next level

Successful communication always relies on combining your language skills! Now you know how to become a confident reader in your new language 💪