Why Reading in Another Language Is So Tiring at First

I grew up speaking Swedish, and I had read books in English for years. Then I started learning Dutch, and the first book I tried to read in it was Harry Potter. I had the paper book in one hand and Google Translate on my phone in the other. Every word I did not know meant unlocking the phone, typing the word, spelling it right, and finding my place on the page again.

A page later I would look up the same word again, because there were too many new words to remember. It was hard work and not fun at all. I could not follow the story, so there was nothing to enjoy, and I gave up after a couple of pages.

If that sounds familiar, it is not because you are bad at languages. Reading in a language you are learning is more tiring than reading in your own, and there is a clear reason for it. It also gets easier the more you read.

Why is reading in another language so tiring?

Because recognising the words still takes effort, and that effort uses up attention you need for the story. In your first language, you do not notice yourself recognising words. You see a word and you know what it means.

In 1974, the researchers David LaBerge and S. Jay Samuels described reading as a series of stages, from seeing the letters to understanding the meaning. Each stage is learned, and they told apart two levels of learning it: accurate and automatic. In their words:

At the accuracy level of performance, attention is assumed to be necessary for processing; at the automatic level it is not.

LaBerge and Samuels (1974)

So when word recognition is automatic, almost all of your attention goes to the meaning: the plot, the ideas, the jokes. When it is not automatic yet, a lot of your attention goes to working out the words, and less is left for the meaning.

You can see the extra work in how people's eyes move. In a 2015 eye-tracking study, 19 Dutch-speaking university students read an Agatha Christie novel, half of it in Dutch and half in English, their second language. In English, their sentences took about 20% longer to read and their eyes stopped on words about 21% more often. The researchers write that this could mean that getting faster at recognising words is the main thing that drives reading development, in a first language and in a second.

The psychologist John Sweller made a similar point about learning in 1988: an activity that takes a lot of processing capacity leaves that capacity unavailable for anything else. Working memory can only hold a few things at once: about four chunks of information, in a 2001 review by Nelson Cowan. While you read, it holds the word you are working out and the sentence so far. Every word you have to work out takes space that would otherwise go to understanding.

Looking words up adds to it. Each lookup takes you out of the sentence, and when you come back you have to find your place and start the sentence again. That was my problem with Harry Potter: every lookup meant the phone, and I kept looking up words I had just looked up.

So the tiredness is real, and it does not mean you are doing it wrong. It is what reading feels like before word recognition is automatic.

Does reading in another language get easier?

Yes, as you keep reading. Reading is also what makes word recognition faster. In Gordon Logan's theory of how skills become automatic, practice increases how much you can retrieve from memory and how quickly, and a task becomes automatic once you can do it by retrieving what you did before. Applied to reading, every time you meet a word in a sentence is practice at recognising it, so the words you meet most often are the first to stop taking effort, and that attention goes back to the story.

That's one reason each book can feel easier than the one before it: you learn new words, and you get faster at the ones you already know. I wrote more about this in how every page makes the next one easier.

So when a page wears you out, pushing harder does not help. What helps is reading in a way that is easy enough that you open the book again tomorrow.

What helps you read without getting so tired?

Pick a book you can follow

Choose a book by how much of the story you can follow, not by how impressive it would be to finish. If you can follow the story, your effort goes into reading it. If you cannot, your effort goes into working out every line, and that is what wears you out. A book that feels a little too easy is a good choice: the first of Richard Day and Julian Bamford's principles for extensive reading is that the reading material is easy. I wrote about how to choose one in how to pick your first book in another language.

Keep going when a sentence is not fully clear

You do not need every sentence to make complete sense to follow the story. If you understand what happened, move on. Many of the words you missed will come back in other sentences. In a study by Stuart Webb, learners knew more about at least one aspect of a word each time the number of encounters went up, and meeting a new word ten times in context could lead to sizeable learning gains. More on this in you don't have to understand every word.

Keep sessions short and regular

Do less at a time, more often. Ten minutes most days is easier to keep up than an hour once a week that leaves you not wanting to open the book again.

There is also research on spacing. In a 2006 review of 317 experiments, material studied across several sessions was remembered better than the same material studied in one go. Those experiments tested recall of words and facts, not reading a book, so treat the benefit for reading as likely, not measured.

Make each lookup quick

If lookups are most of your tiredness, as they were for me, make each one take less time and stop looking up the same word twice. In Simply Fluent, you select any word or phrase on the page and see what it means in that sentence, without leaving the book. A translation you save is shown above that word or phrase in every book you read in that language, so you do not have to look it up again.

Whatever you read with, a quicker lookup leaves you more attention for the story.

In short

Reading in a new language is tiring at first because recognising the words still takes effort, and that effort uses attention you need for the meaning. It gets easier as you read, because practice makes recognising the words faster. Pick a book you can follow, keep going when a sentence is not fully clear, keep sessions short, and make lookups quick.

When a page wears you out after ten minutes, stop for the day and open the book again tomorrow.

Sources

All checked on October 31, 2026.

• LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. (1974). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 6(2), 293–323: doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(74)90015-2
• Cop, U., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2015). Eye movement patterns in natural reading: A comparison of monolingual and bilingual reading of a novel. PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0134008: doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134008
• Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285: doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4
• Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114: doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922
• Logan, G. D. (1988). Toward an instance theory of automatization. Psychological Review, 95(4), 492–527: doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.95.4.492
• Day, R., & Bamford, J. (2002). Top ten principles for teaching extensive reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 14(2), 136–141: doi.org/10.64152/10125/66761
• Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 46–65: doi.org/10.1093/applin/aml048
• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380: doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
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