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- I understand both your historical question and the more concrete practical one. Separating reading comprehension as a skill from all the other discrete functions of a language is very straight-forward [1] and, in fact, there are some good analog resources for this.
For French: Dandberg and Tatham, French for Reading
For German: Jannach, German for Reading Knowledge
I've used both and swear they're magic, especially if you're trying to learn to read in a scientific domain that you're already a specialist in (versus literature).
Once you've sort of "learned the game" it isn't very hard to do a similar process for other languages on your own. Then, my main recommendation is to take a text you're deeply familiar with in your native language or English that exists in X other language and just go ahead and start reading it with a dictionary. It starts slow, but progress is very very fast if you stick with it, especially compared to learning to speak or even just listen to a language.
For life reasons, I've found myself having to learn Danish, so I'll let you know if I figure out any good resources for Scandinavian languages.
[1] The only downside I've encountered is trying to later learn to speak a language I had been reading for a while where overcoming the sort of "fictitious phonetics" that existed in my head proved problematic.
- Try reading "French for Reading" by Karl C. Sandberg. It refreshed my French a lot, very quickly, and I was able to read young-adult-level fiction with a little help from a dictionary. Also, I can grok technical stuff pretty well. I get no practice at spoken French, unfortunately. We don't have a large population of speakers here.
- I learned to read French with the book French for Reading. Perhaps the German version would help you. https://smile.amazon.com/German-Reading-Second-John-Wendel/d...
