Reading More, Confused Less

Reading more, confused less

If you have not read the book Of Human Bondage, I hope I can persuade you to make up for the regret and if you are willing to analyze the novel with the theory put forward to by Alfred Adler in his masterpiece What Life Could Mean to You, you are sure to obtain much from your reading.

I have impulse to recommend it to you just out of my extremely pleasant experience and enjoyment of reading the book, bringing me to a world of humanity, love, belief, and struggles as well as the beauty of the English language exposed by the writer.

Let me just copy the beginning of this novel:

The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow.

I was caught at the first sight. This is a beginning of my favor. The sentences are short and simple but with much power of kind of depression. It’s the starting chapter of an age, full of melancholy, depression, sadness and restlessness, predicting the future agonies and tortures of the hero of this novel: Philip.

If you are an English teacher or learner, you may have noticed the grammar in the first and second sentences. The day broke gray and dull, brief as it is, so beautiful expression with so much power the sentence is!

It reminded me of a sentence that made one of my colleges confused which says: the moon hung bright. How to understand the function of the word “bright” was the puzzle. If we read novels more, and become familiar the sentences like it, we may understand such sentences easily and get used to such expressions.

Yeah, it’s a good way to promote the comprehension of  the English language: reading more.

I’ll give you another example from another novel. The sentence is : Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation. I dare say this expression is a little shock for many of the English teacher in my region, since we may think it should be: Thomas Gradgrind nodded to give his approbation. Of course, the second one is unable to be counted as a wrong one but obviously not brief and English as the first one which come from a masterpiece by Charles Dickens. It’s Hard Times. Needless to say, we all have experienced hard times when learning and teaching English. But by reading more, we can overcome them one by one and climb to the top of the mountain of the language, which is graceful, beautiful, and full of unique glamour, just like Chinese, my native language.

I have to say, reading more, we can touch more beautiful English and learn to express ourselves in idiomatic English. Now I will give you another example: They were models every one. Why do I choose this one as an example to illustrate that reading more can help us express ourselves in idiomatic English? Just because it may be a little unexpected. Have you ever used “every one” as adverb? Few of us did so. And even we took it as a mistake in grammar. But I tell you that the sentence comes from another time Hard Times by Charles Dickens.

So let’s pick up a classic novel like Of Human Bondage or Hard Times or something like that and begin to read. Read more and you can have a good understanding of how the English language works. If you are a student as a learner of English, no exaggeration, by reading more English novels, you can deal with any English problems when you are habited to do so.

Believe me!