READ FIRST

The common illusion in a second language is that more underlines mean more reading. An underline is a mark. Learning is the one line that says why you stopped. That line becomes tomorrow’s writing and speech. A book full of highlights, reopened a month later, will not remember its own reasons. Marks are traces. The one-line reason is the article. The failure case is almost always the same. A finish-the-volume target, speed only, every unknown sentence marched into a dictionary. Plot survives as fog. Expressions do not. Ten pages lose to one page; one page loses to two sentences. Stop on a line you like. Put it back in your own words, short. Open the dictionary for those two sentences only. The rest of the unknowns can wait. The book will not die. A day can be small. Twelve minutes on a commute, one sentence, one reason. A heroic weekend chapter is less durable than those weekday minutes. If someone else is in the same book, show them the line. The moment you explain it, reading has become output. If you cannot explain it, you did not read it. You passed it.