Free Voluntary Reading: How not to do it

When I was in Germany a couple of years ago, I bought a German translation of Agatha Christie's A Death in the Library (Die Tote in der Bibliothek).

I did this as part of a personal experiment in Free Voluntary Reading (FVR - sometimes also known as Voluntary Free Reading, or VFR, but only by people who aren't into brand names).

The core idea behind FVR is that you are more likely to persevere with reading in a foreign language if you are reading something you actually enjoy, and which is interesting enough to keep you going (because you want to know what happens next or see how it ends).

Textbook reading activities are boring.  Trashy teenage romance novels, on the other hand, are fun and engaging.  So get your language learners to abandon their carefully selected passages from Goethe and go straight for the trashy fun stuff.

Agatha Christie novels are fun.  Murder mysteries are designed to keep you guessing.  It seemed perfect.

I wilfully ignored another element of the FVR ethos, however, which was to choose books that aren't too difficult.  If you want to improve reading fluency, you pick books that are within your current reading level.  If you want to improve your vocabulary, you pick books that are mostly within your current reading level - keep it close to what you can comfortably do, with a bit of stretch.

Now, I had successfully ignored this element in the past, when I found a copy of Ursula Wölfel's Julius, oder die wahre Geschichte vom Ziegenbock, der die Leute solange ärgerte, bis alle ihn haben wollten - a hilarious children's book about a couple of sparring communities who had to share an adopted goat.

Sure, I only understood half of what I was reading - but I got the gist, I enjoyed the book, and I understood enough to make it fun rather than confounding.

However, I didn't count on a crime novel written for adults being more textually dense than a comedic children's book.  I didn't get past the first couple of paragraphs, and left it on a shelf for my German abilities to catch up (something that doesn't currently look likely).

Then, last year, I found a copy of the book (in English) in audio format in my library.  I'm quite fond of crime audiobooks, and I thought I might be more capable of making my way through the German version if I was already familiar with the plot and characters.

Then, I had a flash of inspiration - I stopped the CD at the end of the second last chapter.  I took it out of my CD player, and returned it to the library.  I had listened to the entire book, except the last chapter - to find out how the book had ended, I would read the German version.

Brilliant, isn't it?

I had just enough motivation to start reading the first couple of chapters of the book - and just enough knowledge to begin making a decent fist of it...

And then, for one reason or another, I didn't have time to keep going.  And then my German classes didn't work out quite as I had planned, and my German actually regressed rather than improved...

And now it's a year later.

Over a year later.

It turns out that I'm actually not in the least bit frustrated by never finding out whodunnit.  Oh, I'm sure I'll get around to discovering the end of that story eventually, but I don't feel a great need to complete that narrative in order to feel at peace in my life.

Meanwhile, the book is still sitting on my shelf.  Seemingly further away from me than ever.