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.)
Both ways can work. Looking up words, and trying to guess the meaning from context. I use both, depending on my mood and the situation.
I like trying to guess the meaning because you have to think things through. That helps you remember the answer. Doesn’t matter if you got it right or wrong. It’s not always easy, but it gets better with practice.
You can usually look at the situation and narrow it down to a few possibilities. If my guess seems decent enough to get the gist, I keep going. Usually, you’ll find something that helps you figure out if you were right.
If I see a word several times, I usually look it up. Otherwise, it’s probably not that important (unless I happen to be curious).
And if I look up a word and forget it, no big deal. Happens all the time. I’ll either come across it again, or it wasn’t that important.
It can be slow going, no matter what option you choose. But if you keep at it, you can get to a point where you rarely have to look things up.