Spent two years of his life looking up words

[Scoobyqueen]

Recently I met a phd sinology graduate

[Xiao Kui]

didn't have an electric dictionary my 1st 5 yrs of study either. I reckon I also spent a lot of time looking up strokes, radicals, and what not. Now I have Pleco and once I look up a word I rarely look it up again b/c I can review it w/ the flashcard program. On my laptop NJStar WP and Supermemo are also an effective combination. It's funny though, now I'm not nearly as motivated as I was back then. Maybe all that paper dictionary page turning burned me out early!!

[yersi]

Any high level study of a language will ultimately involve a lot of time looking up words, it's just that with Chinese this particular aspect is more pronounced since the vocabulary is so large and you don't have a base vocabulary from your native language.

Thankfully there are many techniques you can use to minimize the amount of time you spend "in the dictionary", to borrow your phrasing. An SRS system is the first thing that comes to mind. If you're interested, I wrote a blog entry about this a few months ago that you might find helpful.

[chrix]

I've spent a lot of time looking up words too, but I really love paper dictionaries, because many online dictionaries are just word lists... and I can't work with that.

As much as I am used to look up characters by radicals, I find looking up things alphabetically so much faster. Fortunately my favourite dictionary, 廿一世紀漢英大辭典 is ordered alphabetically, and for the quick look-up I was able to get a pinyin-ordered 遠東 dictionary (this dictionary is usually ordered by radicals).

But I agree, regardless of which language you're learning, if you want to advance beyond a certain level, you will have to bite the bullet and look up things, at least I do.

[HashiriKata]

Two years is not long in language learning if you're serious, and I don't mind spending time looking up words. It can take me a long time to look up a word in dictionaries but when I've done with the looking up, the word is also, usually, fixed in my memory. There are quicker ways to learn new words, but you forget them more easily too.