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.)
It gets easier, but I think a mix of the two is more proper. For example, fantasy books may use the words hauberk or tabard a lot, but not necessarily you will know exactly what it is, as it would entail that you had encyclopedic knowledge about it. Besides dictionaries, you would have to refer to Wikipedia or other encyclopedias, which is fine and can be interesting if you are curious.
You have to balance your curiosity with the need to read along the text in a rhythm that you like. I also find those estimates used in many internet articles (indicated by x min read) to be much longer than what I usually take.
It gets better and you do not have to be perfect at it, as nobody is.
Yeah, eventually thats what I decided to do, finding a balance :)
Thank you for your optimism and your suggestions😊