The Nonsense Of Reading Children’s Books To Learn A Language

There’s a piece of advice I hear so often that I’ve finally decided to go on record about it. Whenever someone sets out to learn a language, somebody will pop up and tell them that the best place to begin is with children’s books.

The thinking seems sensible enough: children’s books are simple, children are brilliant at picking up languages, so surely reading children’s books to learn a new language is the obvious shortcut. I understand the appeal.

But the idea taken as a blanket rule, is mostly wrong — and I want to explain why, because the assumptions underneath it don’t hold up nearly as well as people imagine.

If you prefer watching videos to reading, hit play on the YouTube version of this post at the top of the page. Or listen to the podcast version below. Otherwise, here's what you'll discover in this post:

Why Do People Recommend Children’s Books?

When people suggest children’s books, it almost always comes from a good place. After, reading in a foreign language is one of the fastest and most enjoyable ways to get fluent.

The logic runs something like this: children are still learning their mother tongue, children’s books are written for them, therefore children’s books must be simple, and if they’re simple they must be a gentle on-ramp for adult learners too. You can follow the reasoning, and I have some sympathy with it.

It’s the same instinct that leads people to say children are the best language learners. That belief comes from watching a child acquire their first language as if by magic and concluding that children simply soak up languages.

It’s only a small part of the truth. Put a child in a foreign-language class twice a week, the way most adults study, and they won’t learn much at all.

The conditions that make a child’s first language look effortless — years of total immersion, constant interaction, no fallback option — are nothing like the conditions most of us learn in.

The recommendation of reading children’s books to learn a new language inherits the same flaw: a reasonable-sounding observation stretched into a rule that doesn’t quite fit.

A Reader Who Made The Case For Children’s Books

Back in 2018, I shared with readers that I’d started learning Italian, and that my plan for the first month was to flood myself with input.

One reader pushed back. He encouraged me to read children’s fairy tales and adaptations, arguing that children’s material is written with simpler grammar and higher-frequency words than adult material.

Because of all that repetition of common words, he reckoned, a month spent only with native children’s material would leave me with more vocabulary and grammar than a month spent with adult material.

It’s a thoughtful argument, and he made it well. I’ll admit one thing rubbed me up the wrong way, though: the insistence that this is simply how it works best.

I’m wary of that kind of certainty. Whenever I come down on the side of a particular strategy, I try to give both sides and to back up my reasoning with research, with the wider literature and with my own experience.

Dogmatic, one-size-fits-all claims tend to be unhelpful in language learning, because learners and their goals differ so much.

But the heart of his argument is a testable claim — that children’s material uses simpler grammar and higher-frequency words — so let’s actually test it.

Does Reading Children’s Books To Learn A New Language Actually Work?

I picked three well-known children’s books aimed at different ages and looked closely at the language in them. You can judge for yourself whether it really is simpler and more frequent than the language in adult material.

The first is Jack and the Flumflum Tree by Julia Donaldson, the much-loved author whose books fill entire shelves in any bookshop.

It’s aimed at roughly three-year-olds — about as young as it gets.

Yet it’s written in galloping rhyme and built around invented words: a made-up illness (the moozles), a made-up tree (the flumflum tree) and a string of nonsense names (stubble-cheeked Stu).

For a small child being read to, that’s pure delight. For an adult learner trying to decode the literal meaning, invented vocabulary and rhyme-driven word order are exactly the sort of thing that causes confusion. There’s very little plain, high-frequency everyday language to lean on.

Next, a picture-book retelling of Hansel and Gretel, aimed at slightly older children.

The passage describing the witch is dense with atmospheric, literary language — elaborate similes, strings of adjectives, words like enchantments and yearned, and long, winding sentences.

Lovely for a bedtime story; a long way from the simple, repetitive, high-frequency vocabulary a beginner supposedly needs.

Finally, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, pitched at older children and read happily by adults the world over.

Its famous opening is delivered through a television news broadcast, complete with British place names, idiomatic turns of phrase and complex sentence structures. There’s nothing remedial about it.

Read those three side by side and the premise starts to wobble. “Children’s book” is not a synonym for “simple.”

A great deal of children’s writing is linguistically rich, playful and demanding — which is precisely what makes it wonderful for children, and often quite hard for learners.

When Children’s Books Genuinely Earn Their Place

None of this means children’s books are useless. I want to be clear about that, because I’m not a fan of dogma in either direction. Almost anything can be a good resource if it’s chosen carefully and used in the right way for the right person.

Even older approaches that often get sneered at, like grammar-translation, have worked beautifully for plenty of people.

A children’s book can absolutely earn a place in your learning if you choose it deliberately — perhaps a graded or simplified edition, perhaps a story whose language genuinely matches your level, perhaps one you already know well (such as Harry Potter) so the familiar plot carries you through.

The mistake is assuming that the children’s label, on its own, guarantees simplicity and therefore suitability. It doesn’t. Selection, and how you use the material, matter far more than the age the book was written for.

Reading Children's Books To Learn A New Language FAQ

So, Should You Use Children’s Books To Learn A New Language?

Honestly, I’ll leave that one up to you. My aim here isn’t to ban children’s books; it’s to dismantle the lazy assumption that reading children’s books to learn a new language is automatically the simplest, smartest place to start.

As those three examples show, children’s writing can be every bit as rich, strange and challenging as anything written for adults — full of invented words, literary flourishes and structures that don’t behave like everyday speech.

So by all means use children’s books if you enjoy them and if the language genuinely suits your level. Just choose them with the same care you’d apply to any books for language learners, rather than reaching for them because someone told you it’s simply the best way.

Stay flexible, question the advice you’re given — including mine — and pick the materials that actually move you forward. That, far more than any single method, is what learning a language well is really about.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.