Reading adult, native material without furigana feels like a pipe dream

Yeah, I guess what I’m trying to say is that guessing words is definitely an inherent part of reading, but to an EXTREMELY limited degree. Like maybe a handful of words per book.

Anything past that isn’t a natural property of reading, but rather something you decide for yourself when it comes to your own experience. Its a product of your own reading ability (or lack thereof). When you see 1000 words you dont know in a book, its not because thats just how reading is, its because you suck at the end of the day. So yeah, by all means just look up all you can before you tire yourself out, but I think its very important to recognize that anything over a handful of words per book is a result of 勉強不足 and not “well, ya cant learn them all!”. So I think that until you truly get to the point of “well, ya cant learn them all”, its a good mindset to want to keep learning and not getting complacent with guessing if you wanna keep a good pace.

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I just want to bring up an interesting point that came up in a blog I sporadically follow. Reading itself is a separate skill, and they argued that if you always look everything up instead of ‘guessing’, you won’t be developing your reading and ‘context’ skills as much. The person who doesn’t look everything up will be reading more, as well. That’s why I don’t think it’s that clear cut. Post is here. I think it’s an interesting read.

I don’t really disagree with your points, but it sounds a bit extreme if you’re saying the only way to learn new words is to look them up (correct me if I’m wrong). I think I’m pretty much in the middle road with regards to looking up vs. just guessing words, e.g. looking up the more frequent ones. That said, lately I have been adding all the unknown words to Anki because it has begun to be manageable :laughing:.

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I dont recall ever saying this unless you’re referring to the reading in which I said you need to look it up or see furigana to be sure, yeah.

Eh I’d say its irrelevant in the long run. Youll hit the softcap for context skills way before you hit the softcap for vocab. So even if you just focus on looking up words, by the time you hit the softcap for words youll have read 100+ books anyways lmao

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I think that’s an issue with many discussions on language learning honestly - a lot of focus on the best possible, most efficient way to reach maximum better-than-native proficiency in as short a time as possible, but in the end a lot of arguably “not quite optimal” methods do work in the long run, as demonstrated for instance by people not consistently failing to learn languages for the past few millennia.

I still maintain that the single most important thing to do in language learning is sticking with it. If something’s likely to put you off learning a language, it’s gonna harm your progress way more than looking up a few words in a dictionary ever could.

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To be fair the person made the post in july 2020 and his 2021 reading challenge was one book a month. Im not sure hes anything close to an expert on better than native level. But I dont think he claims to be.

Oh no, that’s not what I’m trying to say at all. Just that the focus on finding the perfect way to learn a language as is often the case in discussions about what you should and shouldn’t do when learning a language can mean losing sight of the “good enough” ways to learn a language.

So while if you’re looking for that perfection, whether you decide to look everything up or just enough to make sense of a story makes a difference. If you’re just looking for something that works… either is fine in the long run, because both will result in the same thing: you end up learning a language, which is the end goal. Getting there in the first place is more important than getting there as fast as possible, IMO.

Pretty much the only consistent factor across all effective learning methods is long-term persistence/perseverance, and I firmly believe it to be the single most important part of it (other than the ever so slightly fundamental part of actually doing stuff with the language, which shouldn’t need stating but somehow it’s something that’s sometimes overlooked).

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Ah yeah I totally agree.

I think its also the case however that the people that DO have the drive to get to near native level aren’t gonna be offput by small nonpreferable things that speed up their learning.

I feel like the people that quit over the more “minor” stuff were never gonna make it to begin with.

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That’s a fair point, but effort and motivation work in strange ways.

Something minor to you can be a huge hurdle to someone else. And while quitting outright because you’re tired of looking up words in a dictionary is a pretty decent indication that you weren’t gonna stick with it regardless, in my case for instance just allowing myself to read a manga without understanding 100% of it means I end up reading more manga. I’d read manga regardless, and I’d still stick with learning Japanese, but that bit of practice I’d get understanding 80% of what I’m reading would be no practice understanding 100% of what I’m reading when my head is on a certain way. And more practice beats out slightly better practice any day of the week.

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I wouldn’t worry all that much about it. It’s all about trusting the process and you’ll get there eventually. As long as your process is good to begin with it’ll inevitable lead to good results. WK + vocab SRS + grammar and some light reading and you’re solid.

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(Emphasis mine)

This doesn’t quite sit right with me, but maybe I’m reading it in the wrong light. Apologies in advance if that is the case.

IIRC when I was reading books as a child I’d very regularly encounter words I didn’t know, much more than the handful claimed. I think that was the norm.

Likewise as an adult if I pick up an advanced text in English I’m finding frequent new words (e.g. proof theory and type theory).

If I try read up on history, architecture, or law I’ll run into a worse version of this problem as I’ve never studied those - e.g. I have no real knowledge of the vocabulary used to describe pieces of armour, castles, or chapels.

For longer books (1) and/or complex texts it seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to find texts with lots of seemingly unfamiliar words (since recognition isn’t perfect, I might appear to not know the same word multiple times).

My overall point is that a given language (and it’s vocab) isn’t really a single thing, but instead is a collection of different “sub-languages” (or at least vocabularies).

Apologies if I’m misunderstanding your point.

(1) The eye of the world in English contains ~11,559 unique words (310,191 non-unique words), and is not a long fantasy book (it’s the shortest book in the series).

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I don’t think you’re actually disagreeing with Vanilla, I just think maybe the wording of “you suck” gave an impression that didn’t quite match the point that was made.

You’re absolutely correct here - but that’s also kind of the point, the reason for that isn’t that “that’s just what reading is like”, the reason is as a child (much like as a second language learner) you don’t know as many words as an adult will.

In part the same applies as above, but also these terms are likely to be explained by said texts. If not, you’re likely going to remain very confused about all this mention of pauldrons, couters and vambraces.

And I think therein lies a crucial difference, you’re expected to have a certain baseline of knowledge in terms of vocabulary, and whatever words fall outside that are (assuming a text is well-written) either in a context that makes their meaning clear, or they’re explained, meaning it doesn’t matter that you don’t know those words. But if there are more words you don’t know, things quickly get confusing, because you’re missing that context and those explanations.

Like I also mentioned in the discussion about that, it’s not always as cut and dry as “you need to know this many words to be able to read this”, but while there’s defintely an element of “context will clarify and sometimes you just don’t know a word” (or “can’t lern them all” as Vanilla said), there’s also an element of “you’re expected to know these words given the target audience of this text”. It’s why you don’t give a law book to a ten year old, and why journalism around scientific articles is almost always crap.

Absolutely. Different topics have different vocabularies (and sometimes use existing vocabularies in different ways), and the more technical you get, the more separated that vocabulary becomes from everyday language. But that’s not really a separate thing - it just means you have different vocabulary to learn, even as a native speaker. You can be fluent in English but make zero sense of a scientific article describing the role of intestinal CYP3A4 in antidepressant metabolism.

But the key point here is inferring from context will only carry you so far in that, and at some point you’re going to have to either brush up on your vocab to make sense of things, or make peace with the fact that you have no idea what this bit of text says.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by unique words (unique to the book or the series? That seems like a lot) but given my experience with fantasy novels in general I’d say those are either explained, introduced in such a way that they make sense within context, or are not so crucial that you can’t follow the story without understanding their full meaning (sometimes knowing something refers to an important person is enough, for instance).

…That looks a bit unhinged, sorry about that :joy: TL;DR: yes, sometimes you don’t know a bunch of words and that’s highly context dependent. But sometimes the remedy to that really is to learn more vocab and/or look things up, even if you’re a native speaker.

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Exactly. You emphasized the point im trying to make so I dont think you disagree with me and might have just misinterpreted the intent of that bolded portion since, well, I did use pretty strong language.

Not knowing everything is something inherent to reading. You literally just cant get them all.

However, just because you dont know a word doesnt mean that its just because you cant get them all. If you come across the word neko in a book and are like man ive never seen that before, guess you cant get them all!..youre delusional. You not knowing that word is just because of your own incompetence in the language.

So yes, the exact things you brought up show what its like to not know words because of incompetence. Kids just lack vocab. They are gonna not know a lot of hard words us adults know because they just arent there yet. Reading advanced texts in a field youve never studied and finding unknown words is the same way because youre just not competent in that field. Like you cant pick up a book on computer science and get stumped on the phrase boolean operator and just blow it off as ah shouganai man cant get them all. Like no you just dont know anything about computer science and thats actually a super basic term.

The amount of words that are actually shouganai cant get them all are usually very limited or sometimes nonexistent depending on what youre reading. If youre coming across 1000 words in a book you dont know, thats a result of your own incompetence and not just because of the author.

Even if Im reading something like the tale of genji and come across a buncha unknown words, I cant just say that well shouganai man its old so it uses a lot of archaic words. Im just incompetent at reading older texts.

And yes, I agree that language is a collection of different sub vocabularies. Thats exactly what gives rise to this entire post. Lets say I am a competent reader at school life light novels and within all the school life light novels, there is one super obscure archaic word I come across that well call word A. If I am reading a school life light novel and see word A, thats a hard shouganai. If I am reading tale of genji, however, and in that work, or works like tale of genji (from the same period) word A is a very common one, then suddenly word A isnt shouganai anymore. Thats just my incompetence if I cant read it because that word is completely fair game for the context Im putting myself in. I dont get to call that word obscure because its not anymore.

Vocabulary is highly context dependent, yes. But so is your own competence. Competence in a certain field or area GUARANTEES that reading about that area wont have you coming across a 1000 new words per book. Thus if you are coming across 1000 or more new words in a book, thats because of a lack of competence in that field or context. Again, a handful of shouganais is par for the course, but not 1000

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I experience this, although in much ligther context, beacuse my reading currently is limited to Visual Novel games. But I admit, I got kind of addicted to the instant look-up feature. Even when I know a word I got a nasty habit of double-checking myself - it became kind of a crutch.

But there are also those wonderful-feeling moments when I understand a bunch of lines without looking up anything - although that applies mostly to simple slice-of-life dialogues :wink:

And when I notice that I look up almost every word in a line, then that’s a sign that I’m really tired and it’s time to sleep :smiley:

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