What exactly is "a lot of words"? Totally subjective, I guess.

One thing I find is that there are words whose meaning I can easily guess but I look them up anyway because I am unsure of the pronunciation. Sometimes I look up a word because I really want to be sure I understand it right, and other times I wonder how a word's nuance is different from a similar word. However, this can slow me down.

It's difficult to balance learning and enjoyment. I don't just want to have fun, or understand the plot, or get through the manga, I also want to learn lots of new things!

I sometimes even look up words I do know. I NEED to bump up my vocabulary.

I do a lot of skimming, looking up words that seem important, and if they still seem important after the lookup then I add them to my SRS. I don't think it's useful to look up every single word I don't know at this point because there are simply too many of them, and since I can only study so many new words per day I want to give priority to the ones that are most common and useful.

I'd like to be reading materials at a level where there aren't new words in nearly every sentence, but I'm having a tough time finding it. This summer I just passed N3 with flying colors (1 question wrong) and am solidly in the middle of what feels like a desolate wasteland between beginner and high intermediate. Nearly all the articles and stories I've found are either too easy or too difficult.

For the time being I'm going with "too difficult" (trying to aim for the easier side of that, obviously) and, under the theory that it's more interesting and better exposure to get through 5 pages per day imperfectly than to decode half a page like it's a puzzle, I skim and only look up/SRS the most important-looking words. I'm looking forward to the day when the percentage of words to look up is low enough that looking them all up doesn't seem impossible.

inertia Wrote:I do a lot of skimming, looking up words that seem important, and if they still seem important after the lookup then I add them to my SRS. I don't think it's useful to look up every single word I don't know at this point because there are simply too many of them, and since I can only study so many new words per day I want to give priority to the ones that are most common and useful.

I've found that because Japanese is so different both linguistically and culturally, it's not always obvious what words are in fact common and useful. I remember the first time i looked up the word 果たし状 and thought "right, that's a bizarre reference that'll never come up again". Not only did it come up several more times in the thing i was reading, i've seen it in no less than 2 other manga/anime (ok, so not super common). And in fact had previously come across it before and skimmed over it (discovered on re-reading). Words are rare until you learn them, then you start seeing them everywhere.

Personally, i've found i struggle to remember words that i've skimmed over, so i'm fairly blind to them cropping up again unless it's painfully frequent. I could easily skim over the same word once a month for a year, and if i didn't look it up, i probably wouldn't even realise. If you're the sort of person who can easily recognize that they've seen that particular unknown word before (weeks/months ago), decide it's more common than you thought, and then learn it, i can see the merit in just skimming over stuff.

It is interesting what crops up again and again. I didn't think "諸刃の剣" would be very useful, but I put it in my SRS anyway, and since then, I've seen it appear in more than one source.

I usual skim something I can't read or have trouble reading.

zigmonty Wrote:I could easily skim over the same word once a month for a year, and if i didn't look it up, i probably wouldn't even realise. If you're the sort of person who can easily recognize that they've seen that particular unknown word before (weeks/months ago), decide it's more common than you thought, and then learn it, i can see the merit in just skimming over stuff.

I tend to note down unknown words on paper while reading and then add them in bulk to my vocab deck later (perhaps 50-100 at a time using rikaichan save to file feature). This is a time efficient way to ensure you don't have to keep relearning forgotten words. It's SRSing that insures these frequently skimmed words will be learned, not looking them up everytime you see them, which is just slow. In this way, you can keep a steady flow of useful vocabulary into your srs for 'pre-learning' during vocab reviews and then truly learn and reinforce them through use (reading/listening/speaking/writing). Keeping the 'pre-learning' (dictionary lookup and srs review) and 'real learning' (reading/listening) separate is much more efficient in my opinion because you're not always shifting your attention. Seriously if you ever want to get through a novel in a reasonable amount of time, put away the dictionary.

nadiatims Wrote:I tend to note down unknown words on paper while reading and then add them in bulk to my vocab deck later (perhaps 50-100 at a time using rikaichan save to file feature).

There's a what? (Tools...Add-ons...Rikaichan...Preferences...)

Well, I never Thanks!

nadiatims Wrote:Keeping the 'pre-learning' (dictionary lookup and srs review) and 'real learning' (reading/listening) separate is much more efficient in my opinion because you're not always shifting your attention. Seriously if you ever want to get through a novel in a reasonable amount of time, put away the dictionary.

I'll often re-read stuff about a month later after the new vocab has settled some (if there was enough of it that my reading was a bit disjointed the first time). Great feeling to read something that was previously hard with 100% comprehension.

For stuff that i read for work, partial understanding is often not an option. I *have* to look up everything i don't know (and even stuff i'm reasonably sure i know, but aren't certain of). If i can't figure something out with confidence, i ask a japanese colleague for confirmation.

As an aside, Novels actually don't really interest me. I rarely read them in English. Most of what i read in any language is non-fiction.

zigmonty Wrote:Rikaichan with a text entry window + the 's' key. Why do people act like looking up a word is such a big problem? So long as there's only a new one every 3-5 sentences or so, it only takes a few seconds. It's a bit different if its a kanji i don't know how to read though.

Because those of us who grew up with, and still prefer to read books, find to our utter astonishment that Rikaichan doesn't work on them!

onafarm Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Rikaichan with a text entry window + the 's' key. Why do people act like looking up a word is such a big problem? So long as there's only a new one every 3-5 sentences or so, it only takes a few seconds. It's a bit different if its a kanji i don't know how to read though.

Because those of us who grew up with, and still prefer to read books, find to our utter astonishment that Rikaichan doesn't work on them!

By text entry window i mean an html page that contains a big box where you can type text. Rikaichan will work on what you type just as well as pre-existing text. Doesn't help you if you're not near a computer when reading your book of course.

Oh and btw, i've seen demos on the net of on-the-fly, real-time ocr software on a phone, using the camera and linked to something like rikaichan. As in, point it at the book, and definitions of words pop up. I guess it won't be long before that sort of thing is common place.