Inferring New Vocabulary from Context in Novels - Your Experience?

[Lawyer&Mom]

I look up next to nothing. Maybe a word that caught my eye because I’ve seen it in other books and now it’s bugging me, or maybe if a plot point hangs on understanding a single word, which rarely happens. I just hate stopping so much that I don’t care if my vocabulary acquisition is inefficient. I’ll learn vocab elsewhere.

[uncertaingoblin]

I look up next to nothing. Maybe a word that caught my eye because I’ve seen it in other books and now it’s bugging me, or maybe if a plot point hangs on understanding a single word, which rarely happens. I just hate stopping so much that I don’t care if my vocabulary acquisition is inefficient. I’ll learn vocab elsewhere.

A different perspective to what I normally see on this forum! Can I ask you what the percentage of unknown words is or about how many unknown words per page you normally encounter?

I also hate stopping and I really prefer books to digital reading devices yet I worry about making progress without lookups and additions to my Anki decks. I don't personally think it's a big deal when I miss some words as long as I am able to lose myself in the story, but perhaps people like you and I have higher tolerance for ambiguity?

[anitarrc]

It totally depends on the situation:

At work, unless it is hot air for marketing purposes, I look up every single word I don't know and if it is likely to reappear, I make an entry in our database with the source link or dictionary.
After all, we have to produce comprehensible text.

At home, again, it depends on the context. If I can conclude it must be some medieval garment, I couldn't care less because there is a good chance it would be as incomprehensible in another language. so I register it under an abstract "clothes" label. Same goes for dialect or other uninteresting subjects like hairstyle. (curly, long and short is all I need to know).

But if they talk about food, nature, history politics .. well you get the idea.. AND I can't guess it easily because I don't recognise the word from another languages, I will ask Wikipedia and if that doesn't help, the search starts just like at work.

[Odair]

Learning words from context gets easier the more advanced you are in the language. I suppose one would have to be near native to let go of dictionaries and rely on this process for further vocabulary improvement.

[Lawyer&Mom]

I look up next to nothing. Maybe a word that caught my eye because I’ve seen it in other books and now it’s bugging me, or maybe if a plot point hangs on understanding a single word, which rarely happens. I just hate stopping so much that I don’t care if my vocabulary acquisition is inefficient. I’ll learn vocab elsewhere.

A different perspective to what I normally see on this forum! Can I ask you what the percentage of unknown words is or about how many unknown words per page you normally encounter?

I also hate stopping and I really prefer books to digital reading devices yet I worry about making progress without lookups and additions to my Anki decks. I don't personally think it's a big deal when I miss some words as long as I am able to lose myself in the story, but perhaps people like you and I have higher tolerance for ambiguity?

This varies *wildly*. For example, I just counted the words on a random page of my Elena Ferrante novel and out of 288 words there was only *one* I didn’t know. (Une gifle is a slap in the face. Who knew?) But Elena Ferrante’s novels are very conversational and don’t use a ton of world building vocabulary. In contrast I’m also reading “Leurs enfants après eux” which is set in the 1990s, and the author’s description of a typical teenage boy bedroom of that era was filled with nouns and adjectives I didn’t recognize. The good thing is you can skip a lot of these and still follow the story. Of course you don’t learn teenage boy bedroom vocabulary that way.

For context I’ve watched 500+ hours of TV and read 7000+ pages of French. I’ve picked up a lot of vocab on the way.

[uncertaingoblin]

I look up next to nothing. Maybe a word that caught my eye because I’ve seen it in other books and now it’s bugging me, or maybe if a plot point hangs on understanding a single word, which rarely happens. I just hate stopping so much that I don’t care if my vocabulary acquisition is inefficient. I’ll learn vocab elsewhere.

A different perspective to what I normally see on this forum! Can I ask you what the percentage of unknown words is or about how many unknown words per page you normally encounter?

I also hate stopping and I really prefer books to digital reading devices yet I worry about making progress without lookups and additions to my Anki decks. I don't personally think it's a big deal when I miss some words as long as I am able to lose myself in the story, but perhaps people like you and I have higher tolerance for ambiguity?

This varies *wildly*. For example, I just counted the words on a random page of my Elena Ferrante novel and out of 288 words there was only *one* I didn’t know. (Une gifle is a slap in the face. Who knew?) But Elena Ferrante’s novels are very conversational and don’t use a ton of world building vocabulary. In contrast I’m also reading “Leurs enfants après eux” which is set in the 1990s, and the author’s description of a typical teenage boy bedroom of that era was filled with nouns and adjectives I didn’t recognize. The good thing is you can skip a lot of these and still follow the story. Of course you don’t learn teenage boy bedroom vocabulary that way.

For context I’ve watched 500+ hours of TV and read 7000+ pages of French. I’ve picked up a lot of vocab on the way.

Thank you, of course now I want to know what exactly you mean when you say "picked up a lot of vocab" because I cannot seem to imply from context if you mean that you learned lots of vocab strictly from context or if you mean you learned a lot from context/inferrance and other activities.

As for unknown words per page, I can relate! I cruise through some pages with only one unknown word and sometimes even none, while in others I get attacked by a bunch of words i've never seen jammed into a paragraph or two.

Can I ask what you do for your side vocabulary study? Following your lead perhaps, I'm prepping myself to jump into true extensive reading without lookups. However, not being brave enough to just dive into it, or feeling like I want some support perhaps, I am going through a french-english paper dictionary and adding every unknown word to an Anki deck. I'm hoping to build a deck of 1500 words+ to supplement my vocab when i take the plunge.

Surely, at some point in our study, though it may take years, there must come a point when lookups and flash cards cease?

[einzelne]

Surely, at some point in our study, though it may take years, there must come a point when lookups and flash cards cease?

When I read non-fiction or newspapers in English, I don't need to look up words. Even if I don't know it, it usually doesn't hinder understanding.

With fiction, it really varies. Ferrante is a great example. 5 years ago, I breezed through four of her novels in English. When it comes to fantasy or sci-fi, China Miéville would still be challenging for me. Or, I tried to read Herman Melville's Pierre the other day. I could easily follow the plot and understand the general idea but then I opened it on Kindle I realised that I was missing Melville's nuanced and sardonic sense of humour. But most of these words were outdated, rather esoteric, or described the 19th century legal reality (like "verdigris", "chartered aristocracy", "the law of entail", "peerage", "earldom", "patroon", "distrain" etc.) Can I read this novel on paper? I believe I still can although a lot of nuances will be missing. But if I love the writer and I have an opportunity to read his/her novel on Kindle, I think I would do that, so I can get as much from the original.

And again another tip: just like you, I'm a big fan of paper books, yet my tolerance for ambiguity is rather low. Here's what I did a couple of times and with some books it worked really well: I would the first 100 pages or so on Kindle and then switch to paper. Usually, 100 pages is more than enough to get the firm grasp of writer's universe and style.

[Lawyer&Mom]

I look up next to nothing. Maybe a word that caught my eye because I’ve seen it in other books and now it’s bugging me, or maybe if a plot point hangs on understanding a single word, which rarely happens. I just hate stopping so much that I don’t care if my vocabulary acquisition is inefficient. I’ll learn vocab elsewhere.

A different perspective to what I normally see on this forum! Can I ask you what the percentage of unknown words is or about how many unknown words per page you normally encounter?

I also hate stopping and I really prefer books to digital reading devices yet I worry about making progress without lookups and additions to my Anki decks. I don't personally think it's a big deal when I miss some words as long as I am able to lose myself in the story, but perhaps people like you and I have higher tolerance for ambiguity?

This varies *wildly*. For example, I just counted the words on a random page of my Elena Ferrante novel and out of 288 words there was only *one* I didn’t know. (Une gifle is a slap in the face. Who knew?) But Elena Ferrante’s novels are very conversational and don’t use a ton of world building vocabulary. In contrast I’m also reading “Leurs enfants après eux” which is set in the 1990s, and the author’s description of a typical teenage boy bedroom of that era was filled with nouns and adjectives I didn’t recognize. The good thing is you can skip a lot of these and still follow the story. Of course you don’t learn teenage boy bedroom vocabulary that way.

For context I’ve watched 500+ hours of TV and read 7000+ pages of French. I’ve picked up a lot of vocab on the way.

Thank you, of course now I want to know what exactly you mean when you say "picked up a lot of vocab" because I cannot seem to imply from context if you mean that you learned lots of vocab strictly from context or if you mean you learned a lot from context/inferrance and other activities.

As for unknown words per page, I can relate! I cruise through some pages with only one unknown word and sometimes even none, while in others I get attacked by a bunch of words i've never seen jammed into a paragraph or two.

Can I ask what you do for your side vocabulary study? Following your lead perhaps, I'm prepping myself to jump into true extensive reading without lookups. However, not being brave enough to just dive into it, or feeling like I want some support perhaps, I am going through a french-english paper dictionary and adding every unknown word to an Anki deck. I'm hoping to build a deck of 1500 words+ to supplement my vocab when i take the plunge.

Surely, at some point in our study, though it may take years, there must come a point when lookups and flash cards cease?

I’ve done about 60,000 reps of the 20,000 cards in the Clozemaster French Fluency Fast-track deck. Other than that, just reading and listening. I actually think Clozemaster helped more with grammar than vocab. Going through the deck there is much more repetition of basic grammar structures than repetition of vocabulary.

I dove into reading novels after finishing Assimil. So *way* before I was “ready.” But I have an exceedingly high tolerance for ambiguity. The first book was rough sledding, the subsequent books got easier and easier. And then one day you are reading a book that won the Goncourt prize. How did it happen? Pure sorcery. I only started formal grammar study after I was comfortably reading novels. Input works. (For understanding input. Output is a different beast.) (Also, remember French and English are highly related languages. I would totally use this method with any FSI category one language. Outside of that, maybe not.)

[Lisa]

I don't think I learn words from context in reading, other than cognates (which is not insignificant in Spanish and German). My extensive reading is paper books, and since I avoid screens in the evening I only lookup rarely in the paper dictionary, when the word is critical to the meaning (or my curiosity just does not let me rest!) Or sometimes I'll keep a list of words to lookup later. If I want to find good words to learn I'll read online where lookup is much more efficient.

Reading sure does help get the words settled into my brain, though. I'm resting my hopes of someday sorting out german verbs by reading, since these must be impossible to learn by just memorizing.

[uncertaingoblin]

@Lawyer&Mom
I found myself frustrated with Clozemaster even at the lowest frequencies constantly encountering words I knew. Maybe I should spend a bit of time on the fluency fast track deck. I stumbled across reading after completing Pimsleur 5, total reading pain level. I kept going even though it was very frequent lookups. I seem to differ here from others in regard to output. I find in my case that there is absolutely no doubt that input improves my output. I check in with Francophone online friends every few months and I encounter French speakers in stores now and then who I strike conversations up with. There is no decline in my speaking ability and each interaction i have I do better than the last. I only read listen and do flashcards. I also don't understand how people can learn from studying grammar deliberately. But, clearly we have a lot of variety in how we learn here. I'm inspired to learn inferrance/context alone has resulted in vocabulary acquisition for you. There's also of course great tips from our more study-focused members here.
Perhaps the reality is all of these methods can work depending on who you are.

Because I am more inclined to do things the way you do I tend to really appreciate your experiences on this matter... but in case it doesnt work out for me I'll keep my savings towards a kindle reader going!