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Skipping unknown words when reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4645 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 1 of 24 13 September 2013 at 4:39am | IP Logged |
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I'm reading a Japanese novel during my train commute home every day. I know enough Japanese that I can follow the very basic plot and understand what is happening, and it is very interesting, but there are still a lot of unknown words and phrases and grammar per page - I'd say roughly 10-25 per page.
The number of unknown words is not really a problem as far as reading the book is concerned, since I am able to follow the story (albeit with not much detail), but at the same time I'm a bit worried because I hardly look up those new words/phrases. I often have to stand up on the train, with the novel in one hand and my other hand holding one of those hanging ring thingys that help you not to fall when the train hits a curve. Only when I come across a word that I absolutely must know to advance the story (and I can't make an educated guess at) do I close the book, put it in my bag to free my hand, then fish for my dictionary and look it up. That works, but I certainly do not want to go through that ordeal every time I come across a new word. And it is supposed to be extensive reading anyway. So what I do is just skip those unknown words/sentences and move on. But do you think that it is okay to just skip those unknown words/sentences? I always feel like I should be learning something when I read, and not looking up those words and skipping them feels like a wasted opportunity for me. I'd like to hear what you all would do in that situation. And I do know that: * ...10-25 unknown words per page means that the book is probably above my level. Can't get much lower than that level without venturing into children's books. * ...Kindles, ebooks, etc., are better than paper books, because you can use pop-up dictionaries, etc. * ...having a translation on hand would mean that I don't have to use a dictionary. (Getting a translation is easier said than done, and limits me to a few materials. I find the translation distracting, anyway.) * ...I could highlight or underline the unknown words and look them up later. (I would do this, but this is a library book. Even if I underline in pencil, I don't want to erase all the lines in a fury before returning the book.) So any ideas regarding this particular situation would be helpful. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4707 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 2 of 24 13 September 2013 at 8:02am | IP Logged |
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I think you are doing the right thing. I would only suggest that you read the book at least one more time, perhaps looking up a few more words on each read through the book. Does it go without saying that you can only do this with a book you really enjoy? With each successive pass through the book, you will find that there will be fewer unknown words than before because more of them just make sense in the context, and you will have seen them in context several times.
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| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6901 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 3 of 24 13 September 2013 at 10:04am | IP Logged |
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This is always a difficult balance as sometimes I seem to end up wanting to look up
every word. One thing I try and do is only look up a word if I see it multiple times on the basis that its word frequency means it would probably be useful to know - and I do realise the frequency in a particular publication will be dependent on genre / subject matter / author etc. A further tip.... photograph the page using your camera phone and look it up at your leisure later on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6501 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 24 13 September 2013 at 10:07am | IP Logged |
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I divide my activities in intensive and extensive. When I study a text intensively I want in principle to understand all words and the grammar at all levels, but this takes time, and I prefer writing things down in order to keep track of all the things I learn. Not so with the extensive activities, whee the point is to get as close as possible to the way I read or listen in my best languages. So in a sense an extensive activity is focused on using the things I already know, and if I do write something down it tends to be expessions or grammatically interesting passages rather than single words. But the whole point of the exercise would be lost if I had to look things up all the time.
To minimize the risk of hitting a wall somewhere you have to use things that are 'comprehensible', i.e. with a low ration of unknown elements. I often use homemade bilingual printouts, and for texts on the internet you can also use popup-dictionaries, which are faster than paper dictionaries. But for speech it is mostly a case of trying to hang on and skip all unknown elements. Edited by Iversen on 13 September 2013 at 10:08am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Kami_77 Diglot Newbie Italy Joined 3893 days ago 11 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 5 of 24 13 September 2013 at 10:07am | IP Logged |
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I am not an native English speaker, but I remember that when I was actively studying it,
I rarely had this kind of problem. I literally 'got' English just by reading and listening alone. For japanese it is a completely different story. Despite the fact that I have been actively studying it for the past 4 years now, I have your same problem. I came to the conclusion that japanese is objectively more difficult than English. There are too many more words that are quite common than English. My suggestion is to continue to read and ignore this problem because it is intrinsic to this language. One day everything should come together and hopefully make sense. Edited by Kami_77 on 13 September 2013 at 10:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4072 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 6 of 24 13 September 2013 at 10:09am | IP Logged |
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My situation is very similar (with Chinese). I've tried children books but found them
boring. Most readers designed for students are not very interesting either and they all revolve around the same subjects again and again. Those that I *did* find interesting (real novels simplified mostly) are not numerous and I think I'll soon have read them all. So, as I prefer reading "real" literature, the ideal extensive reading threshold as defined by Krashen (i.e. if I remember correctly 98 % of known words) is very far away. So there is no silver bullet, I'm afraid, but I try to use several crutches, hoping for the day when I can stand on my feet. The "crutches" can be: - Try and find interesting readers, i.e. simplified literature, as it seems you're into novels. Once you've read an interesting simplified novel, read the same novel, but the non-simplified version. - Read the same novel twice (obviously it has to be short and/or very interesting). - Use an e-reader a lot. Myself, I often have to read standing in the metro. Looking up vocab with an e-reader, at least, is easy. I use an e-reader specifically designed for Chinese (Pleco) that also allows you to add the words you've looked up to vocab lists that you can review later. I force myself not to add more than 25/words a day in such lists, to keep them manageable. Maybe there's an equivalent product designed for Japanese. - When I'm tired of using an e-reader, because it's too easy and I have the impression I'm not learning as much as I could from reading, I use paper books. I buy my books, so I can underline words and characters (not more than 25/day). It's feasible while standing in the metro. If you can't write in the book, maybe buy a small notebook and scribble a few words/day. Once you've reached your daily quota, keep on reading without writing down antyhing. But buying your books is easier. If only because, when you have finished reading, you can skim through it again, see what you've underlined, and marvel at the number of words you've actually remembered! My golden rule is: "skip everything but 25 words a day". Those 25 words are added to vocab lists and are supposed to be studied afterwards. Past that threshold, I do lookup some words, either because I'm using an e-reader and it's just easy, or, when I'm not using an e-reader, because I absolutely have to look it up to follow the story. I make a mental note of these words but I don't try to study them actively. My hope is that my vocab will grow slowly but steadily and that, one day, I will notice that there are not 25 unknown words per page, but just 15, then 10, then 5, then... Edited by lorinth on 13 September 2013 at 10:11am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4626 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 24 13 September 2013 at 10:14am | IP Logged |
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What I would do in this particular situation would be to try to quickly write down in a
small notebook any particularly important-seeming, or just interesting-sounding or - looking words, or If I had a voice recorder (is there one on your phone?), I'd say the word, maybe a few times into the recorder, perhaps with comments on spelling and context....maybe say the whole sentence or phrase. Then look them up at home. I don't know how well that would work in Japanese though, especially the writing part. I agree with Jeffers that it's generally ok to skip (at least some) words, otherwise the process will take too long and you might tire of the book altogether, and that would be a shame. I very rarely look up every word these days, except in the rare situation that I really want or need to understand precisely the meaning of a sentence or paragraph. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4357 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 8 of 24 13 September 2013 at 10:56am | IP Logged |
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I'm afraid I don't have an ingenious solution to offer. Given the particulars of your situation, I'd just ignore anything that doesn't open itself up to you almost immediately. Normally, I might make a little pencil mark next to the line the word appeared on and look it up later, but since that option is off the table, you should probably just pick your battles and try to keep a good pace. You said you can follow the plot passably well, so I'm assuming that there are quite a few words on each page that you infer from the context. Focus on racking up as many of those as possible. That's how extensive reading works.
Yeah, in a sense each ignored word and sentence is a missed opportunity, but on the other hand, every word you look up slows you down, which means you're encountering fewer "transparent" words per reading session. I suppose you could try batching your look-ups: for example, you could first read a suitably long segment extensively, and then look up all the unknown words in one go before moving on. Edited by sans-serif on 14 September 2013 at 12:44am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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