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Skipping unknown words when reading | ||
Tags: Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4143 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 9 of 24 13 September 2013 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I'm doing extensive reading, I skip any words that I don't know. If the same word comes up time and
time again, then I might look it up later - but I don't worry too much about it, so long as I understand the gist of the story. When I do look up a word, it's because it's been burned into my brain by seeing it multiple times - so I know that it's important to the story. It helps to read a book that I've already read in English or French - it makes it much easier to follow the plot. That said, I'm reading children's novels, and it doesn't sound like you're interested in doing that. Reading children's novels isn't a sacrifice for me - I spent 8 years teaching elementary school, and I have a deep appreciation for quality children's literature. I do think that children's novels are a lot better and more complex than some adults realize! I'm actually planning on "recycling" my books, and reading most (all?) of them a second time. I can't finish a book and then restart it immediately, but I have no problem revisiting the same book a few weeks or months down the road. I do think that rereading is a really important part of learning to read in a foreign language. I think there's a market for easy readers aimed at adults - something beyond the watered-down rewritten classics that are pretty easy to find. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4273 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 10 of 24 13 September 2013 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Although I've said in another post that I've often found children books "boring", I'd like to stress that this applies only to the books I've been able to put my hands on. In fact, I do appreciate children literature (after all, I've been reading children books to my kids every night for years...). So, to be more precise, the children books I can read easily in Chinese for the purpose of extensive reading are extremely simple, written for little kids and, frankly, not very interesting. However, every time I've tried to read books written for teenagers, I've found that, in fact, they were not significantly easier than "adult" books, in terms of vocabulary, syntax, etc. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough. In fact, I'd very much like to be proven wrong. Does anyone have reading ideas? Edited by lorinth on 13 September 2013 at 4:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4687 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 11 of 24 13 September 2013 at 5:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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As most other people said, I agree that in this particular situation you're probably best off doing just what you're
doing. I can't speak to the question of how well you can figure out the correct reading of the Kanji when you don't know the word, but you should be able to learn a ton of new meanings from context over time by doing this. Another suggestion I'm surprised nobody has mentioned is not only to reread a book, but to read a book in Japanese that you've already read in English (or another language you understand well, if any). As a personal example, I've reread the Harry Potter books numerous times in different languages. I've basically memorized half of the first two books, and I thus can learn amazing amounts from context, because I'm basically doing one tremendously long Assimil lesson when I read. Perhaps Harry Potter isn't your speed, but just try to find something you're interested in. If you're very familiar with the story and the text already, I don't see 25 unknown words a page as a problem, and 10 is definitely fine, IMO. It's only if you do NOT know ahead of time what you're reading that you need to get a higher percentage of coverage to understand, so you can read much more advanced texts profitably if you do what I suggest. Oh.And go back and reread Iversen's post. =) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4735 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 24 14 September 2013 at 12:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Do you have a book-off anywhere near you? I can't imagine that it would kill your budget
to pick up some second hand books now and again, which would make the pencil thing possible. If I'm really not allowed to break the rules of your question, then no, I don't think it's a problem to ignore words. I do it all the time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 13 of 24 14 September 2013 at 1:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I skip those words, and try not to let my guilty conscience take over. And I promise myself to look up the words that irk me most later on, ones that I think I've seen before or that seem to be important in some way. And, words I know either the reading or the meaning of.
It helps to sometimes put short texts aside with notes/highlighting the difficult or unknown words, and to look at them again a couple of months later. That's the only way I notice the progress I've made and the contribution extensive activities made to it. And to tell myself that extensive reading is an activity for times that couldn't be used for intensive study anyways. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 14 of 24 14 September 2013 at 2:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I tend to look up almost all unfamiliar words, or even vaguely unfamiliar words, inthe
first couple chapters with a new author, and rarely skip over them. Once I settle into the book's style it becomes easier to skip over the words I don't know, or to guess their meaning. Edited by kanewai on 14 September 2013 at 2:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4289 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 15 of 24 14 September 2013 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I do what I do in my native language, English, to not search the words but to infer their
meaning based on context. Only if I repeatedly see the word and still cannot infer the meaning, then this would cause me to search it. In English, I cannot remember the last time I have looked up a word, since I usually find the meaning by re-reading the context(s). I usually also do this since I can form a habit of incorporating techniques of what I do in English to foreign languages. However, if for example, 90% of the sentence is composed of unlearnt words so that context cannot be inferred, in this particular case it might be advisable to use the dictionary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 16 of 24 14 September 2013 at 3:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I find I'm usually looking up at least a couple of English words a week. Often they are
fairly specialised, or I'm interested in their origin. At other times, I just know approximately what they mean, and I start to feel it's about time I knew their proper meaning. Sometimes, it's for a crossword. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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