Practical Tips for Reading with ABC George Every Day

ABC George is simple to operate: download a book, read, long-press the words you do not know. Whether it becomes a habit depends less on the app than on the book you pick and the twenty minutes you give it. These are the things I would tell a friend who was starting. Treat them as suggestions, not rules.

Choose a Book That Feels Slightly Too Easy

The most common mistake in reading for language is picking a book that is too hard. If you are looking up a word in every line, you are decoding, not reading, and decoding is exhausting.

The Start here shelf exists for this reason. It holds thirty short, plainly written classics picked for learners. Start there even if you think you are past it. A book you finish teaches more than a better book you abandon on page thirty.

Do Not Look Up Every Word

This sounds odd advice for an app built around lookups. But if you understand the sentence without the word, keep going. Look up the words that stop you, and the ones you have now seen three times and still do not know.

The words you skip will come around again. The ones that matter tend to repeat.

Use Chat View on Tired Evenings

Chat shows a chapter one sentence at a time as bubbles, with dialogue on the right. On a night when a full page looks like too much, it is the easiest way to keep the habit alive. You press Next for each line, and one line is never intimidating.

When you are awake enough, switch to Pages or Scroll. Your place carries over to the same sentence, so switching costs nothing.

Let the Play Button Read for You

Chat also has a play button that runs the chapter by itself, a line at a time. It is useful for a dialogue-heavy chapter where you want to follow the conversation at a steady pace. If a line goes past too fast, pause.

Hear Words You Cannot Pronounce

Select a word or a whole passage and choose Speak. It is read aloud at the speed set in Settings under Speaking speed. English spelling is unreliable enough that hearing a word once can save you from pronouncing it wrong in your head for years.

Keep the Daily Quiz Small

The daily goal starts at 20 quiz answers. That is about right for most people, and some days 10 is better. The Leitner schedule does the planning for you: words you get right come back after longer and longer gaps, out to about five weeks, and words you miss come back soon. It only works if you come back, so a small daily goal beats an ambitious weekly one.

Use the Word Book Filters

The Words tab can filter by Starred, Due, Learning and Mastered. Starring a word is a quiet way of saying “this one matters to me”, and a Starred quiz is a good way to spend five minutes on a train.

The NGSL and NAWL lists are also in there. They are frequency lists of the words English uses most, general and academic. If you are preparing for study in English, the NAWL list is worth a look.

Turn Off Saving When You Are Just Checking

Sometimes you look up a word you already know, just to confirm a meaning. If you do not want those in your word book, turn off Save every lookup in Settings. You can still save a word by hand from the lookup sheet.

Download Before You Travel

Everything in the app works offline except two things: downloading a new book, and the Cambridge and Translate actions, which open web pages. If you are about to fly or ride a long train, download the next book or two before you leave. The dictionary, the word book and the quiz will all work without a signal.

Read on the iPad in Bed, Not Only on the Phone

On a large iPad, the column of text is held to about seventy characters so lines stay easy to follow. That makes the iPad a comfortable reading device, and the Sepia or Dark page colour is kinder at night. Reading position and word books are kept on each device, so pick one device per book if you can.

Where to Go Next

If you are still setting up, start with our getting started guide. To see how the app compares with other ways to read English, read ABC George vs other apps, or see who the app is for. All related posts are under the ABC George tag.

Pick one of these to try this week. Choosing an easier book is a good place to start.