I would never try to learn all the new words in a book before trying to read it - but it's a good idea to 'learn ahead' for just one sentence or paragraph at a time so that you don't have to look things up in the middle of it. Apart from that, using bilingual texts is my solution to the need for immediate solutions to lexical problems, popup-dictionaries is another useful tool, but then you have to read onscreen.
And by the way, as I promised in my previous message I have done some more Serbian wordcounts to check my current status, and as expected my status is basically unchanged since 2021 - around 50% known headwords. So whatever I do it seems to keep my vocabulary at a stable level. I'll write some more about it in my
own log instead of cluttering this more general thread, but the message must be that it IS possible to learn a lot of words fast, and it is NOT impossible to retain a reasonable part of them. What you have to do that is the big question ....
I did however notice at the top of this page that einzelne apparently didn't read literature in French during one year, and that would definitely be a valid reason for vocabulary loss - but reading non fiction should actually be enough (that's what I read, and therefore I may be weak on day to day vocabulary, but strong on scientific and cultural topics).
I have a pattern with
Irish where I sometimes work hard for maybe a couple weeks, and then I leave it aside because I haven't got much apart from Harry Potter to study, and it's irritating to spend time on a language which most people in its home country hate because they have been forced to (not) learn it in school. But each time I return to Irish for one more active period I have to relearn most of my vocabulary just to read a simple text, and of course that also is a factor that limits my involvement with this language. With Albanian and Indonesian it's the same thing, except that there are populations here that actively use them- the main problem is that their Wikipedias aren't the most compehensive in the world, and I am never confronted with those languages here in Denmark.
The inference seems to be that you don't have to reinforce the concrete words, but you have to keep the languages
in general active.