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.)
Ooo thank you for this huge text-wall! I had a similar experience with you too, using social media and doing casual usage of my devices (which almost all use english) was easy, but once I tried english books things got hard😅
After reading all those replies here and doing some thought of my own, I have decided to give some more focus on the flow and search words a bit less frequently (also trying to rehearse those words before I start reading again next time). I also think that I might have fewer unkown words on this book :)
My main issue now seems to be that I get disctracted easily and I want to do many things during summer, so I get a bit of choice paralysis, but I think I might figure these out myself.
Thank you for your time writing all this, it’s nice to see people writing big texts (with proper structure too).😊
Thanks and you’re welcome!
I somehow forgot to mention this: don’t worry too much about rehearsing words. This is not the most effective way to learn them in most cases, because your brain just doesn’t consider something important and worth remembering until it has a very, very good reason to; forcing the repetition of certain words that way usually doesn’t happen to be that reason.
If you know it works for you, though, then go ahead, but otherwise, don’t beat yourself up and don’t give it more time than it deserves. After all, if you don’t happen to ever use the word or even see or hear it in five years or even more, then why really bother? ;)