Today I have made a turn-around on my Urdu. First I bounded into Urdu Newspaper Reader, but the vocabulary was getting away from me. So I returned to Volume II of Barker’s A Course in Urdu, Ch. 21, where full essays are in nastalyq (Arabic) script, very hard for me to read. Today I realized that even Ch. 21 material had me going a little slow, so I went all the way back to Ch. 16 where I know all the vocabulary quite well and lack of familiarity with a word does not enter into my perception of the script. It also serves to go back over all the vocabulary of Volume II so I can then cruise into Ch. 21-25 and absorb all the vocabulary there that I do not have a firm grip on. Once done, I can then reread the articles in the Newspaper Reader and focus on the new vocabulary.
An additional advantage to reading Ch. 16 on is I can have my friend ask me questions about the reading in Urdu whose answers will be pretty available to me, in Urdu. The point is not my production but my use of his questions as input. That’s where I think the face-to-face interaction produces acquisition not found in reading