English short

ENGLISH SHORT STORIES FOR BEGINNERS AND INTERMEDIATE LEARNERS

Engaging Short Stories to Learn English and Build Your Vocabulary

Language Guru

SECOND EDITION

Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

How to Use This Book

Chapter 1: Illness and Medicine

Chapter 2: Food

Chapter 3: Exercise

Chapter 4: Hobbies

Chapter 5: Work

Chapter 6: Animals and Nature

Chapter 7: Town and City

Chapter 8: Staying at Home

Chapter 9: Family and Occupations

Chapter 10: Education

Did You Enjoy the Read?

Answer Key

INTRODUCTION

We all know that immersion is the tried and true way to learn a foreign language. After all, it's how we got so good at our first language. The problem is that it's extremely difficult to recreate the same circumstances when we learn our second language. We come to rely so much on our native language for everything, and it's hard to make enough time to learn the second one.

We aren't surrounded by the foreign language in our home countries. More often than not, our families can't speak this new language we want to learn. And many of us have stressful jobs or classes to attend regularly. Immersion can seem like an impossibility.

What we can do, however, is gradually work our way up to immersion no matter where we are in the world. And the way we can do this is through extensive reading and listening. If you have ever taken a foreign language class, chances are you are familiar with intensive reading and listening. In intensive reading and listening, a small amount of text or a short audio recording is broken down line by line, and every new word is looked up in the dictionary.

Extensive reading, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. You read a large number of pages or listen to hours and hours of the foreign language without worrying about understanding everything. You look up as few words as possible and try to get through material from start to finish as quickly as you can. If you ask the most successful language learners, it's not intensive reading and listening but extensive that delivers the best results. Volume is much more important than total comprehension and memorization.

In order to be able to read like this comfortably, you must practice reading in the foreign language for hours every single day. It takes a massive volume of text before your brain stops intensively reading and shifts into extensive reading.

This book hopes to provide a few short stories in English you can use to practice extensive reading. These stories were written for both beginner and intermediate students in mind, so they should be a little easier to digest compared to native English. While it's no substitute for the benefits of reading native English, we hope these stories help build confidence in your reading comprehension skills overall. They offer supplementary reading practice with a heavy focus on teaching vocabulary words.

Vocabulary is the number one barrier to entry to extensive reading. Without an active vocabulary base of 10,000 words or more, you'll be stuck constantly looking up words in the dictionary, which will be sure to slow down your reading. To speed up the rate at which you read, building and maintaining a vast vocabulary range is absolutely vital. This is why it's so important to invest as much time as possible into immersing yourself in native English every single day. This includes both reading and listening.

We hope you enjoy the book and find it useful in growing your English vocabulary and bringing you a few steps closer to extensive reading and fluency!

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

To simulate extensive reading better, we recommend keeping things simple and using the short stories in the following manner. Read through each story just once and no more.

The words that have been written in bold appear on a vocabulary list at the end of each story. Whenever you encounter a word you don't know, try to guess its meaning using the surrounding context before going to the dictionary. Alternatively, you could make the reading easier by first going over the vocabulary list and looking up any words unknown to you.

After completing the reading for each chapter, test your knowledge of the story by answering the comprehension questions. Check your answers using the answer key located at the end of the book.

Memorization of any kind, however, is completely unnecessary. Attempting to push new information into your brain forcibly only serves to eat up your time and make it that much more frustrating when you can't recall it in the future. The actual language acquisition process occurs subconsciously, and any effort to memorize new vocabulary and grammar structures only stores this information in your short-term memory.

If you wish to review new information that you have learned from the short stories, there are several options that would be wiser. Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS) allow you to cut down on your review time by setting specific intervals in which you are tested on information in order to promote long-term memory storage. Anki and the Goldlist Method are two popular SRS choices that give you the ability to review whatever information you'd like from whatever material you'd like.

It's also recommended to read each story silently. While reading aloud can be somewhat beneficial for pronunciation and intonation, it's a practice aligned more with intensive reading. It will further slow down your reading pace and make it considerably more difficult for you to get into extensive reading. If you want to work on pronunciation and intonation, take the time to do it during SRS review time. Alternatively, you could also speak to a tutor in the foreign language to practice what you learned.

Trying to actively review everything you learn through these short stories will slow you down on your overall path to fluency. While there may be an assortment of things you want to practice and review, the best way to go about internalizing new vocabulary and grammar is to forget it! If it's that important, it will come up through more reading and listening to more English. Save the SRS and other review techniques for only a small selected sample of sentences you feel are the most important. Languages are more effectively acquired when we allow ourselves to read and listen to them naturally.

And with that, it is time to get started with our main character John and the ten stories about his life. Good luck, reader!

CHAPTER 1:

ILLNESS AND MEDICINE

For the past few days, John has had some difficulty breathing. He was 30 years old, and it was a bit odd for someone of his age to have this symptom. Maybe if he was a smoker, things would make more sense, but John has never smoked a cigarette in his life. He decided to go see his doctor about it.

Luckily, he was able to schedule an appointment that very week and get himself checked out. At the doctor's office, there was a considerable waiting period before you could be seen by the physician. John brought a book to read in the waiting room, but he found it hard to focus for very long, given his condition. After 20 minutes, he started to get a splitting headache. In anticipation of such a scenario, he kept over-the-counter pain relievers in his car. Following a quick trip and back, he washed down the pills with water from the water fountain and took a big sigh of relief.

The nurse called John back to room 107 and did some routine check-up procedures. She took his blood pressure, measured his height and weight, and asked about his family's history of health problems. John was fortunate enough to not have any hereditary health issues. There was no heart disease, cancer, diabetes, nor arthritis to worry about. The nurse also asked about any and all current drugs he was taking, but he replied that he doesn't take any medication.

After John's information was recorded, the nurse left the examination room and told him the doctor would be with him shortly. Just two minutes

later, he was finally face to face with the man who could help cure him in no time. Dr. Spetzel was his name, and he was as friendly as could be. The two chatted about John's breathing issue, and John went into more detail about his condition. Chest pains were occurring throughout the day, but there were no heart palpitations. There was a little coughing but no wheezing. The doctor placed his stethoscope on John's chest and asked him to take a couple of deep breaths.

With a few subtle nods, it appeared Dr. Spetzel had reached a final diagnosis. It was asthma. He said it was common for adults to develop asthma and not just children. An inhaler would immediately curb his symptoms, but it's a medication he would be required to take for the rest of his life to keep his symptoms at bay.

Carrying his prescription from Dr. Spetzel, John headed towards the pharmacy to receive his inhaler. He dropped it off at the customer service desk then started to wander around the store. It would be some time until his prescription was filled, so he browsed the various medicines on the store's shelves. He saw tons of products to treat colds, allergies, and the flu. There were even over-the-counter treatments for constipation and diarrhea.

The pharmacist called out to John, for it was time to pick up his prescription and head back home. While out in his car in the parking lot, John took his first dose and instantly felt much better. It became significantly easier to breathe, and his chest pains subsided. He was grateful for the miracle of modern science and medicine.

Throughout the ordeal, it occurred to John how important his health and body were to him. Being in a constant state of bad health would make for a very poor quality of life. His diet would be the first place to start making improvements.