luke wrote: I might should look up more words than I have been, but I've been doing this as kind of an extensive reading experiment. Some words though are difficult to get from the context. Probably should start marking them with a highlighter or something so I can look them up later or even look them up now.
This is always a question for me. How many words should I look up? What should I do with them? I'll write down here the chaos that's in my head regarding the topic.
1. Giver of good advice: You've already learned English. How did you gain your vocabulary knowledge? Try to think back, and build on the experience.
Me: As far as I remember I read a lot of books, hardly ever looked up new words, never studied new words intensively. I don't know, after a while they just stuck.
Giver of good advice: So, what's the problem?
Me: As far as I remember, I don't know. These two phrases.
2. Once I've seen a video with Paul Nation about the effect of extensive reading on vocabulary. He said that one needs to meet a certain word 7 times for retention. My take: this number is an average. There are certain words that I need to meet only once, and there are others that I need to meet 14 times. Is it a good idea to force a certain word list on myself? Is there a way to find the '1-3 times words' and learn those ones? Can I turn a '10-14 times word' into a '1-3 times word'? If yes, how? Trying to figure out the meaning from context? Searching for texts that create emotions? I hope it doesn't sound philosophical, but somehow I think that I don't choose words, words choose me.
I've tried Anki, but it was a total failure. It was so boring that I couldn't learn any words. I just gave up doing the cards, didn't try to recall the words, always pressed 'I don't know'.
Now I have a small notebook and write the new words in it. But there might be better options. When I work with the El País articles, I highlight with colour codes, but that's totally different. The type of the text also determines what you can do with the vocabulary. In the case of newspaper articles it was obvious for me.
Colour 1: key words (important to talk about the topic)
Colour 2: connectors
Colour 3: grammar structures that I'd like to remember (including word+preposition structures)
Colour 4: new words not related to the topic, fixed expressions, frequent combinations
Then I try to summarise the text.
But with novels? I don't know either, how the get the most out of them.