Listening to the audiobook before, after or instead of reading

[Jan Finster]

I wonder if and how listening to the audio book of a book you "read" affects your reading skills positively or negatively.

 

I can "read" a book much faster if I listen to the audio book sentence by sentence while "seeing" the text. I wonder if this is positive for your reading skills or harmful. Part of me thinks it is a crutch or cheating, but another part of me thinks, if it helps me read more characters per hour and provides the sound, it should be beneficial (?)

 

What do you guys think?

Do you listen to the audio before, during or after reading?

[mungouk]

Interesting question.

 

6 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

if it helps me read more characters per hour and provides the sound, it should be beneficial (?)

 

My initial reaction would be that if you're following the text while listening to the audio, then you're not really reading. Or you're not necessarily exercising your recall of the characters. More like being "read to" when you're a young learner of your mother tongue.

 

But then again, once we're familiar enough we don't really read everything anyway... we assume common collocations and whizz through the text, often making mistakes with those assumptions that probably don't affect meaning much, if at all.

 

I may try this myself. I expect the level is fairly critical... not much point in doing it with a text you could read 100% anyway. But it could be useful as a way of reading slightly above your level, or at the very least building confidence?

 

 

 

 

[thelearninglearner]

is there a list somewhere of easy to read book for hsk 4-5 with accompanying audio-books?