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Simple books in English
Hi. Could you reccommend my some simple English books?? It shoud not be difficult, should have A LOT OF useful daily life dialogues and of course can't be boring.
I'm looking for "normal" books. I mean not abridged nor simplified ones.
My recommendation (as someone who attempted Zum ewigen Frieden as an English speaker studying German) is to stick to cartoon books. The best way to learn vocabulary like a native is to use pictures anyway. Children's books, cartoon books, graphic novels, etc. If you don't mind my asking, how old are you/where are you from originally/what's your native language/are you student? I know a bunch of fun books that you can probably find on amazon.
I don't want to focus on learning vocabulary as such, but I'd like to learn to recoginze and use word collocations, grammatical structures, idioms and daily life expressions. There's probably no better way than "absorbing" great number of sentencs either by reading or listening.
I'm afraid that children's books, cartoon books etc. have very little text, so I'd have to read lots of them to learn hot to use vocabulary naturally(native speaker like), but I can give it a shot anyway. As for your question, I'm from Poland, so Polish is my native language. I'm a student and I'm 21. What do you need this info for??
I expect Skippy requested this information so he could make more of an informed reply. If you were an 80 year old acrobat then you would find different mediums useful than if you were a 10 year old Nintendo addict.
Harry Potter books have proved very successful around the world so they would be a good start
lol an 80 year old acrobat?
Russconha was right, 21 year olds like different types of books than 80 year old acrobats. I'm a 23 year old student from Texas; I was in Germany for a bit and to help me get used to syntax I bought a bunch of German CDs, learned the lyrics, and sang along. That was much more helpful than when I tried to read Kant... Anyway, Harry Potter is one... Your best bet would be to go to a bookstore, most have sections for "Teens." Those are probably slightly simpler than a typical novel... Or another option would be to read a book by an English-speaking author in the Polish translation and then read the original English version; at least then you'll know you'll like the book and you'll understand what's going on and can pick up words based on context rather than using a dictionary (which is the best way to learn vocabulary anyway).
You should follow "deep learning" approach. I mean, if you have a passion for sports stick to reading sports articles for a couple of weeks then go for a different topic like fitness and health then showbiz and so on. I find this approch quite useful for mastering vocabulary. Same words pop up over and over again so you can easily memorize and understand them in context. This is one approach you might want to focus on and see how it goes.
http://www.penguindossiers.com/audio-frameset.asp
bingo,
Jeffrey Archer's stories are not bad for this purpose, though I think he is a mediocre writer. They are short, have interesting plots with twists, there are enough dialogues, you won't find highbrow words.
Even the authors that native speakers would consider often turn out to be not so simple at all for learners. Often native speakers have a different perception of what is easy and what is hard. A native speakers would consider and book hard if it contains lots of big Latinate words, uncommon in everyday usage, but when you think about it this should be easier for a romance language speaker. On the other hand you get kids books full of quaint idiomatic words which are elementary for natives but not so intuitive for foreigners.
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