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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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.๐Ÿซค Thank for sharing your experience and your advice, if I start writing the words down I might let you know :)

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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) ๐Ÿ˜ญ