I may want to be able to review them occasionally. I want the feeling that the words I looked up are not lost. I prefer to rely on building up my own dictionary in my database of saved words and phrases. Traditional dictionaries are simply too time consuming and inefficient. I ignore them with the knowledge that if I continue reading, mostly online, I will eventually come across these words again and either understand them, or look them up online. When reading away from the computer I simply let the unknown words go by me. I can just stay focused on the meaning of what I’m reading, and not focused on dictionaries. In this way I get instant explanations and translations that help me through the text I’m reading. So what I do, at least at the early stages of learning a language, is to just read online and use online dictionaries. So, in my view, the less time I spend looking things up in a traditional dictionary the better. I often have to look up the same word more than once since I forget the translation so quickly. Of course, I need a dictionary to help me read new and difficult texts in another language, especially languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean where different writing systems make it even more time consuming to use traditional dictionaries.
I just want to go in and out, as fast as possible, and get back to the text I am reading.
I don’t want to spend my study time leafing through a dictionary. I would have to look up those other words in order to understand the explanation, and these explanations may also have words that I don’t know. Things are even worse with a monolingual dictionary, since the explanation of the meaning of the word I am looking up often contains words that I don’t know. Without the ability to create a record of my search, to add these words to a retrievable database of words and phrases I have already come across, I feel that I could be wasting time. I’ve already forgotten what I just saw there. I think things are fine when looking at the meaning in the dictionary, but as soon as I close the dictionary very little remains. I put a lot of effort into looking words up. I don’t like using traditional dictionaries. To me, this process is like creating my own dictionary. Furthermore, a dictionary search should be recorded so that I know, when I next meet the word, in a different context, that I have seen it before, even though I will likely have forgotten what it means, and may have to figure out a different nuance of meaning to suit the new context.
So the dictionary meaning is just a hint, a first step towards learning a new word. I know that I have to meet a new word many times in different contexts to get a proper sense of what it means, the scope of its meaning, and what words are usually used together with it. I prefer to treat dictionaries as a quick hint to the meaning of a word, to get me through what I am reading or listening to. Some people even like monolingual dictionaries, in other words dictionaries that explain the meaning of a foreign language word in the language that they are learning. They worry about getting the best possible dictionary. When it comes to learning a new language, some learners like dictionaries.
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