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.)
this probably won’t help you, but just in case:
I went through a phase in my development where I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary. There was a constant tension between wanting to stay with what I was reading and wanting to look up a word.
I got in the habit of keeping a pad of paper and a pencil nearby when reading, and I made it a habit to look up each word I wanted to know - I could either look it up later and keep reading, or I could look it up right then. After a while I got faster at navigating the alphabetic order of the dictionary and I could open the dictionary close to where the word would be. It was just a matter of practice.
Writing the word down was not just a deferral strategy, but also a way for me to memorize and appreciate the word I looked up - I put in effort to stop reading and look it up in a separate book, and when I first started I would keep forgetting the word and I had to look up words multiple times. Writing it down at first let me quickly refer back to recent words I was trying to learn or remember, but I noticed even just writing it at all made it more likely I wouldn’t forget in the first place (so my pad of paper wasn’t even all that necessary as a reference, though I could and sometimes did use it that way).
This is all much more effort than the digital approaches you are talking about, but it was a method that really helped me learn. I would say the learning phase was really intensive for a three to four month period, then it leveled out and I was looking up words less frequently and it was less necessary. It was especially helpful to study the etymology and learn Latin and Greek roots, which then helped me piece together the meaning of words without a dictionary (just from context and etymological guesses). For a while I even stopped carrying a dictionary, and instead carried a concise etymology dictionary, which let me learn the roots of the word and generally had much less about the definition (but gave me better access to the meaning and being able to memorize it).
Writing down unkown words and searching them on a paper dictionary was how I studied vocabulary in the past, so I see what you mean. I think its gonna be very time consuming and distracting for me so I might not use that strategy.🫤 Thank for sharing your experience and your advice, if I start writing the words down I might let you know :)
Yeah, I agree that it is time consuming and distracting. When I was able to do it, I was studying full-time so I could afford the time and effort.
These days I hardly look up any words (digitally or otherwise) 😭