lichtrausch wrote:I don't doubt that you make progress, I'm just not sure that it's actually the most efficient way to learn rare words. Perhaps I would add a caveat for a relatively small group of rare words like "to scrounge". And of course you're right that if you really don't enjoy doing this type of targeted input, then best resort to other methods.
I'm sorry but you completely missed my point. As a native speaker, you
think these words are common so you can find them a lot in literature or newspapers. In fact, they are not. That's why I gave these words as examples — something which you consider to be quite common is not for a non-native speaker. I didn't see these words only once in my life, of course, but sometimes the time interval could be several months or even a year, if not more. And I could recall their meaning the second time, only because I reviewed them.
I've been reading in English more than 13 years (fiction, non-fiction, news, magazines, literature in my field). I've watched hundreds, if not thousands of hours of TV series and movies and
the first time I met the 'essential' expression 'to total the car' was this summer when I was reading a Philip K. Dick novel. With nonnative speakers this happens all the time — sometimes we don't know even some basic words, even if we had thousands of hours of exposure.
Yes, when I read books in my field, I rarely meet new words. And although I can easily read general fiction, newspapers, etc there are still gaps in my vocabulary. Sometimes even advanced learners don't realize what a huge gap separates them from native speakers.
Statistical estimations provide a rough picture, but still they indicate the complexity of the issue and why extensive reading is problematic. Here's
an interesting article: "To meet all the 10,000 most frequent words in English 10 times, you’d need to read 79.1 books that are 80,000 words long."
As I said, I only have about 2 hours (may be 3 in my best days) for language related activities in
all my languages. I'm happy when I can read one fiction book per month in a given languages. Depending on the language, an average book will give me 400-800 new words. Some of them would be obscure or irrelevant for me. But some of them are pretty common like 'to total a car'. If I happen to review them, I increase the chances of getting them into my long term memory. My review sessions don't take much time (usually it's a batch of 50 word which takes about 5 minutes to review — I can easily go through it during a coffee break), so I don't see I need to give up this tool when intensive reading alone with low frequency words stops working.