I was just learning about the concept of extensive reading a little while back, and came across this cool website that let’s you find media and rank it by difficulty level.
It only supports Japanese, Spanish, German, and Korean for now, and most of the focus seems to be on the former. Still, it seems like a great resource. And it’s very easy/fun to jump in and contribute.
I’ve seen a similar site at https://languageroadmap.com/. It supports way more languages and has lots of media catalogged, but most seem to have no info. As far as I can tell it’s kinda dead… but also seems like it’d be really cool if not for that.
To bring it back to discussion - what are some (recent or favorite) books you’ve read, or shows/movies you’ve watched in your target language? What are some that you found especially good for learners? And how do you find new material at your level?
Man I wish I had found this a while ago. But now I can read pretty much whatever I was reading before, but en my target language. It gets so much better at that point. I found it really helped to start with some books you’ve already read in your native language and then diversify from there. Or in my case I had read half of a really long book series in English then when I went back to it I decided to restart in Spanish. The first half of the series I used my knowledge of the books as a crutch to help with context, then halfway it became new content but I was already familiar with the author’s style and vocabulary.
That sounds great! I’d love to get there - the idea of replacing most of my English language reading-for-enjoyment with Japanese is so appealing.
But for now I’m still in graded readers mostly. While they are fun, they’re maybe not stuff I’d be excited about reading without the language learning aspect.
In Spanish I did go through a short horror story collection for grade school kids. Really hit the sweet spot of interesting, challenging, and intelligible. When that happens it’s so satisfying.