Before you start grumbling that you have to "do the reading," at least realize that this step is a little bit easier than Tuesday's listening task. What you get to do today is pick any short selection and try your hand at reading it.
It is expected that you will not understand all, and most likely not even half of what you read. So what is the point? You familiarize yourself with the way the language shapes sentences in a completely different format: the written word. Being able to understand both colloquial speech as well as written documents is an invaluable skill that is often overlooked by learners interested in quickly learning survival phrases.
Certain things to think about while you try to read a short selection: look for words you don't know and try to guess their meaning like you would in your native language. You'd be surprised by how much you can correctly guess. If you see some words repeatedly coming up, it's probably time you learned it. Take note of it somewhere and use Friday to learn these new words.
Based on your level, try focusing on some of the following:
- Look for simple sentence structures
- Find words you recognize and notice how they are used in the sentence
- Look for grammatical structures you've learned and how they convey a certain meaning different from a simpler structure
- Notice certain conjugations (if applicable)
- Try to understand the overall idea of a sentence rather than how each individual word contributes to that meaning
- Notice the rhythm of each sentence, if they tend to have lots of commas or prefer to be short with rigid grammatical structures