Does reading in a foreign language affect learning?

This is not the usual type of article you’d expect from me. It’s a more detailed description for a question I asked on Quora — Does reading in a foreign language affect learning?.

The point is that I’m not sure if and how does reading in a foreign language affect learning. How does it affect what you recall from what you read?

I’m asking the question because I’ve been monitoring my progress on various books and it always seemed that I’m better at remembering details from the ones written in Romanian rather than English or French.

Unfortunately, the books I’m reading are rarely translated into Romanian, so what I’m trying to do is devise a strategy to improve my retention while reading in foreign languages.

To give you more context, the books I’m reading are mostly non-fiction, technical, how-to books, and I’m quite familiar with the vocabulary and the terms. I just get this weird feeling I’m not “ingesting” as much as I could or should.

Thanks in advance to anyone who answers! I will do my best to document all the answers I receive on Quora, below. This is so others can also benefit, no matter if they have a Quora account or not.