My son just finished reading “Cat in the hat” in English after reading it so many times in Hebrew (English being our second language). He loved it of course, kept comparing words for meaning between Hebrew and English.
I remember doing exactly the same at the beginning of my deep longtime romance with English literature…The first book I read in English was Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy”. I was enchanted and delighted, discovering new words in English that I never had a chance to stumbled upon before in class, and the reading was so much easier because I knew the plot.
If you want to help your child read fluently in a second language, pick his or hers favorite book, get it in both languages and start reading…
And remember, if the going gets tough – DON’T PANIC! the answer is as always = 42