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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[–] Strider@thelemmy.club 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah I miss the feel of real paper in my hands but I have hundreds of books in this little black box and I like to reread most of them so it's handy. Sometimes I'll dust off my Kindle if I'm planning on reading for more than a few hours: the matte screen is a lot easier on the eyes.

That is a fun fact! I try to minimize the number of apps I have installed for that very reason, and the only things I have on my home screen are Moon+ Reader and my email, dialer, and texting apps.