this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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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.)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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😄

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I think I've heard of people putting custom images on kobos but I Don't know too much about it. I'm just using stock kobo and not connecting it to the internet and it's been great for me