So my main language is Greek and I read english and greek books. Depending on the book/author I may have 2-5 words per page that I may not understand (or at least I want to understand them better). Thus, many times after I finish a page, I use aard2 and either search the word in the english-to-english dictionary or (rarer) in the greek wiktionary for a translation. (For context, I’m reading ~mainly fantasy, sci-fi or dystopian books of the 20th and 21th century and currently I’m on “Croocked kingdom”. I haven’t dared to try reading a classic book in english.)
The issue is that this effectively slows me down by an extra ~50% time per page and I’m not even very sure that those words are remembered. I could simply keep reading without searching the words up and just use the context to get a vague sense of their meaning (or simply ignore them as they ~usually aren’t necessary to the plot), but I think I’d miss on the whole experience by doing this and it doesn’t address the underlying issue (being that I don’t know english extremely well even if I have C2 and scored high on vocabulary), which will perpetuate the problem. I’d like to note that I have made searching words almost as efficient as it gets by using downloaded dictionaries, so I don’t think I can reduce the time I spend looking up words by anything more, at least on paper books.
I’d like to ask anyone who searches up words like me:
Did you eventually reach a point where you learnt enough words this way, that it wasn’t that much necessary to use dictionaries anymore? (I’d be kinda satisfied if I could reduce the frequnecy of unknown words to 1 per two pages or something.)
I’ve seen your comments about reading digital media but if you can get an eink screen (kobo, amazon paper white, etc) it Doesn’t feel like a screen at all. Then you can look up words right there. Ive started doing it every once in awhile as a native English speaker since its so convenient.
That said I’m gonna start picking up French again (hopefully) and that’s gonna be tough because my vocabulary was always lacking in French and I haven’t really read anything in French in years.
I hope you enjoy crooked kingdom. I really liked both books. All the characters are so cool :)
Yeah, I might buy an eink reader one day, they seem useful (at least if I find one I can freely modify its software?). Especially because I don’t have much physical space to store books.
I’m in the beginning of the second book, so not much to comment about it, but I liked the first one, lots of action and nice characters/world :)
Good luck with the french books😄
I’m a native English speaker with a fairly robust vocabulary and I still look up words now and then. E-readers make it super easy, and since I get most of my books as e-books from the library it’s easy to learn new words. My recent word is “solicitude”.
Hmm, yes. I’m glad you’re enjoying reading. I’m showing care and concern for someone…
EDIT: It was a dumb joke about the definition of “solicitude”.
It gets better, but learning vocabulary at that level is going to feel very slow no matter what. I would recommend keeping a fairly low bar for just ignoring words and moving on, as keeping up the reading habit is by far the most useful. If reading feels tedious it’s easy to lose interest.
One to two new words per page sounds high enough where you are bound to get repetition, so you may want to only look up words that seem either important for context or familiar (i.e. feels like something you’ve seen before) to get the most value. I combine that with spaced repetition (Anki) for words that I seem to look up often, but Anki has a bit of a learning curve so it may or may not suite you.
Oh thank you, I guess I should find some balance then between ignoring and searching up words.
Also tnx about the Anki/flashcards suggestion, might look into it in the future.
Add an additional step into your word-lookup routine: practice it a little bit. Repeat it several times, preferably out loud and with proper pronunciation, consider the definitions a little bit, and compose an original sentence or two that incorporates the word. Personally I sometimes look up the etymology as well, that stuff just interests me in general though.
This will take a few extra minutes, but will seat the new vocab word in your memory better. It can still sometimes take two or three individual encounters to finally have the word fully remembered, but eventually it does just permanently enter your vocabulary.
You’re basically trying to force it from your short-term memory into your long-term memory just like you would with basic schoolwork, using similar techniques.
Haha been there.
You’re used to reading at 300wpm and then you switch languages and you’re reading at 70wpm, feels mad annoying
