English Short Stories for Beginners and Intermediate Learners: Engaging Short Stories to Learn English and Build Your Vocabulary (2nd Edition)

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.
Uploaded by S. M. Safi

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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!
Uploaded by S. M. Safi

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