I understand both your historical question and the more concrete practical one. Separating reading comprehension as a skill from all the other discrete functions of a language is very straight-forward [1] and, in fact, there are some good analog resources for this.

For French: Dandberg and Tatham, French for Reading

For German: Jannach, German for Reading Knowledge

I've used both and swear they're magic, especially if you're trying to learn to read in a scientific domain that you're already a specialist in (versus literature).

Once you've sort of "learned the game" it isn't very hard to do a similar process for other languages on your own. Then, my main recommendation is to take a text you're deeply familiar with in your native language or English that exists in X other language and just go ahead and start reading it with a dictionary. It starts slow, but progress is very very fast if you stick with it, especially compared to learning to speak or even just listen to a language.

For life reasons, I've found myself having to learn Danish, so I'll let you know if I figure out any good resources for Scandinavian languages.

[1] The only downside I've encountered is trying to later learn to speak a language I had been reading for a while where overcoming the sort of "fictitious phonetics" that existed in my head proved problematic.

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vidarh 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

My last year of German, I brought it up a grade by reading Faust in parallel in German and a century old Danish translation... I'm Norwegian, and the old Danish translation was a decent mid-point between Norwegian and German to let me get through the German without having to resort to the dictionary very often.

I think, for Danish, if your German is decent, look to older, more formal Danish books you can also find in German, or maybe try to find work in both Danish and Low German / Plattdeutsch and see if it forms a good midpoint for you.

Dutch might possibly also form a decent parallel - the combination of my Norwegian, German and English means I can slog my way through more formal Dutch reasonably well without ever having tried to learn it.

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agentcoops 3 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the tips! It's really interesting going back to that point of indistinction in these languages where even the proximity to old English is so strong. I've been hoping to try and read some of the old sagas in the process, but that's probably a bit too far back -- I'll have to see if there are some good century old translations thereof, as you suggest.

The phonetics, on the other hand, are presenting some challenges...

	▲	vidarh 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, the phonetics can be far harder. I struggle to even make out discrete words in spoken Dutch despite finding it quite easy to read. For Danish, it's so similar to Norwegian it's a lot easier, but there's an old Norwegian joke that Danish is just Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth... To us, Danish sounds like they're failing to enunciate every single sound... Incidentally, pronunciation got a lot easier to me when I started looking at mouth placement of natives when speaking. Just watching and copying mouth placement and movements have fixed so many pronunciation issues for me that no amount of listening and repeting could address.

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srean 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's very encouraging thanks. I hear that Norwegian, Swedish isn't very hard for an English language speaker. All the best for your next language.

Apparently I was good at picking up languages other than my mother tongue, as a child (4yrs). But now those same languages that I apparently was fluent in appear quite incomprehensible, like first contact incomprehensible.

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agentcoops 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, language learning is such a wild thing. I have a five month old son now and I'm just getting to see the process of language acquisition firsthand. He'll be going to early school (eventually) in Danish, but probably won't end up living here forever, so curious if it'll stick with him through life or not.

What's your mother tongue out of curiosity?

Good luck with your studies!

	▲	srean 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's Bengali.

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bawis 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Are there other books in other languages with the same idea (reading comprehension) ? do you think they are worth reading even for readers not interested in those specific languages but in learning techniques to apply ?

	▲	agentcoops 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm sure there are, but I can personally attest to the quality of those two. The French one in particular is just astonishingly well-executed that I would recommend looking at it if you were interested in techniques. The "magic" of it is in the composition: each chapter, you read a little description of a new grammatical concept, you work through various related sentences with help, and suddenly you're reading a whole French text composed of those past sentences and able to answer comprehension-related questions. It just builds and builds like that to great complexity. What always makes learning to read easier is that time is completely in your control. The principle is pretty straightforward: if you have enough time and patience, you can read anything (with a dictionary, grammar book etc) and the more you read in that language the less time it starts to take. These books basically just bootstrap the process. I mentioned it above, but the other way is if you have a book or article you really know well in your mother tongue that exists in a language you want to learn, just patiently try and read it in that language. I think programmers actually have a bit of an advantage in this, as it's really just pattern recognition -- and it isn't that different from trying to understand a program in a language you haven't worked with before.