The project itself is deceptively simple: I'm going to read Estonian children's books (as in, books that are written in Estonian for children). I'm going to read them rather slowly.
I've always struggled with reading in Estonian - much more than German. With German children's books I have a fighting chance of nutting it out as I go along and getting some sort of flow happening, but not so much with Estonian.
English and German belong to the same language family, so they play according to similar rules. Estonian is a completely different kettle of fish. As a result, whenever I start trying to read in Estonian (particularly authentic texts) my brain gets really tired really quickly. There's no flow. So I tend to give up sooner... which means I don't read as much... which means I don't build up good reading muscles... which means it's hard for me to read in Estonian and my brain gets tired really quickly...
Its a vicious circle.
Plus, in spite of the fact that I've been learning Estonian for some time now, children's books never seem to get any easier. My fluency in reading passages in textbooks is improving, but whenever I go to authentic texts I hit the same problem: too many unfamiliar words and too many unfamiliar forms of familiar words.
I can't select texts based on the Five Finger Rule, partly because I'm not in a position to look at books before I order them, and partly because I've yet to encounter a sentence in the wild where I'm 100% sure of every word, so I run out of fingers quite quickly.
So, what I'm going to do is a sort of Repeated Reading/Intensive Reading activity. I'm only going to read short sections (say, one page) of a children's book, leaning heavily on my dictionaries to translate as I go (I know people say you shouldn't do that, but I haven't got much choice), and picking apart a couple of selected sentence with the aid of some grammar books.
BUT, and here's the bit that will hopefully make it interesting, I'll reread every section I've already read before starting a new section.
So by the time I finish the book, I'll have read some pages multiple times. Especially the first page. I'll have read that one a lot.
In my learning diary, I'll talk about what I noticed, what stood out for me and what seems to be getting easier. I'll also pick a few sentences that tickled my fancy and dissect them.
Here's what I think that will achieve (my hypotheses, if you will):
1. I'll start to become so familiar with the words on the first pages that I'll pick up a bit of automaticity concerning them. As I continue to encounter those words later in the text, I'll (hopefully) start to just know what they are, and gain a bit of flow. When I encounter those words in other books, I'll won't need to consult the dictionaries so often to remind me what they are.
2. I'll also start recognising particular grammatical constructions and noticing morphological patterns, which will make those same constructions/patterns easier to identify and interpret as the project continues.
3. By the time I reach the end of the book, I'll be consulting the dictionaries and grammar reference books less often, and reading with more fluency. This will (I hope) improve with each subsequent book I read.
4. As a sideline, I think this will also improve my ability to write in Estonian, as my understanding of the written language will improve. I'm not sure how to pre-test and post-test, especially since I've already started reading and I didn't think to try to write a passage before hand. I might do that over the weekend anyway. At the very least, I'll be able to talk about how I "feel" about my writing ability.
I'm starting with Kust tuli pilv? by Epp Petrone because, of all the Estonian books I own, this has been the easiest one for me to try reading in the past. I have attempted to read it previously, so it's not completely new to me, but I never *read* it in an "I know what those words actually mean" kind of way. More of a "I've scanned it, recognised a few words and used the pictures to fill in the blanks in a hap-hazard fashion" kind of way.
My study is somewhat limited by the fact that my library is somewhat limited. I can only use the books I have access to, and I live in regional Australia. I'm going to order a few more books by the same author so I can at least do the "proper" Narrow Reading thing to an extent.
My ultimate goal is to magically keep this up as I progress through the books in my collection and get to longer works like Kunksmoor by Aino Pervik and Nukitsamees by Oskar Luts. With the longer works, I'll have to think strategically about how I'm going to divide the books into sections and how many sections I'll reread before starting a new section, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
It may take some time.
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