I have somewhere between 60 and 70 shelves of books in this house, well over a thousand of them, in several languages, and I have finally started cataloguing the lot. Going through them reminded me why paper still matters to me. The research is fairly clear that we retain more from paper than from a screen, and I think the reason is simple. When it is just you and the book in your hands, there is nowhere else to go, no pixels, no navigating, no temptation to scroll away. When did you last read a paper book for three hours straight?
Yeah, they don’t depend on Wi-Fi. Yesterday, I was without internet for the whole day due to a technical issue, so I couldn’t read on LingQ. However, I ended up reading a physical book for a couple of hours to kill the boredom. I think both forms of reading have their place, but with physical books, you’re not dependent on external factors like Wi-Fi and internet access.
I have a tablet, which is a screen, and I read lot’s of books on it, from Schopenhauer ‘The World as Will and Representation’ (which is no light reading) to Herbert Spencer (very long baroque sentences which they don’t make anymore these days). All in all, material which requires a high amount of concentration. As far as I am concerned the issue is to remove all distractive material from the tablet, to remove everything which is about social communication, notifications and stuff, and to turn off the internet connection. Another good practice is to make the color of the pages and the light of the screen easy to your eyes.
I am practically married to the tablet, because I read a lot. It comes in handy too that in that way you can have a dictionary at hand. Using a leather cover, it feels less cold.
If your capacity of concentration is strong enough, it does not necessarily have to make a difference.
I usually read digitally, but I recently started a physical book: Peter Gay, Modernism. I felt the need to occasionally copy a quote from that book and save it in a separate file, so I could easily find it again later. I started typing those quotes. However, that took quite a bit of time, so I decided to start using a digital version to easily copy and paste the quotes I wanted to save. An added benefit is that, working on my laptop, I could easily and quickly find information about the many historical figures mentioned in the book. For me, therefore, this is a much more enjoyable way of reading and studying than working with the physical book.
The other day in a used bookstore I found “French Short Stories 1” in the Penguin Parallel Text format – the French on the left page, the English on the right.
This allows one to read a paperback in French with the English translation a few inches away. Fun!
I agree that paper has a different feeling when it comes to focused learning. I also find that with a physical book, it is easier to stay with the material for a longer time without getting distracted.
At the same time, I think screens can be very useful for language learning because of features like quick translations, audio, and searchable text. For me, the best approach would probably be using both rather than choosing only one.
