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Using a Dictionary while Reading

Kumakun

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22 Mar 2014
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Hello! So, some background on me--I've studied Japanese for three years, including some immersion stuff. I can speak about everday stuff very well, but when I get into any sort of jargon things get difficult. I can recognize a lot of Kanji, maybe about 1,000, but I can't produce all of it.

I'm trying to improve my vocabulary through reading. Sources online tell me that at the point I'm at this point I should be avoiding dictionaries. I think that the people who say that are thinking of languages like French, or Russian, where I could pronounce the words I manage to guess. My kanji knowledge isn't at the level where I could always guess which reading a word is using, and many of the books I'm interested in don't have furigana. How did/do you all use dictionaries during your intermediate phase?

Thank you!
 
I definitely use a dictionary! I don't know the advantage of not using one when studying alone. I think furigana is much more of a problem.

Do you have an electronic dictionary? I found it helped me with stroke order having to do the electronic input repeatedly.
 
It's not either/or. I wouldn't not use a dictionary at all, but it is useful to at least some of the time try to read without one. In those cases you may want to just make a note (I sometimes underline lightly with a mechanical pencil, if it's a book I own) of which words you want to look up later. Accept that you will likely not know every word in the text and try to power through anyway.

This is sometimes called "extensive reading" (as opposed to "intensive reading" where you do stop to look up words/grammar and pick apart the text until you're sure you know all of it). You should really do a mix of both. When doing extensive reading you try to rely on context etc. to help, and don't worry if there are words you don't recognise. I think this (although it's talking from an ESL perspective) is a great explanation.

The difficult part is finding things of the right level for extensive reading. If it's too hard you'll just get frustrated - in those cases, it's okay to give up, and move onto something you can make headway with. If it's something you really want to read, you can do some intensive reading/vocabulary mining and then come back to it later.
 
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