When you read something in Chinese, do you...

[anonymoose]

a) make sure you have a general understanding of the text, and then move on

or

B) methodically go through every word you don't know, including the obscure ones, and make an effort to learn them

?

I tend more towards (B), but it can become quite tedious reading difficult texts, making endless dictionary searches, and ending up with pages of vocabulary to learn.

[wushijiao]

I tend to lean towards option B, looking up almost everything. However, I have a system for it. When reading for say, an hour or two, I’ll always read with a pen. Anything that I might want to re-read, I underline. I also make notes to myself in the margin. If there are any words that I don’t know, I usually double underline them.

Then, at the end of the day, I spend a half an hour or so looking up all the words I didn’t know from the text. If they are worth knowing, I’ll put them into a flashcard system.

This system works pretty well for me because I learn vocab from reading real texts, which gives me a better sense of how to use the new words in the correct context, hopefully. Also, I’d mention that if I’m reading and realize that a word is immediately important for understanding the passage, then I’d just look it up, and not wait till the end of the day, or whatever.

Also, I think I’ve received an additional benefit from my geeky obsession with highlighting important parts of texts. For example, I might read a few sentences slowly. Then I might mull over the meaning for a while, and eventually realize it is important. Then, I’ll underline it extremely quickly. Well, this quick underlining helped me to start to read in big blocks of characters, and entire sentences, rather than just individual characters. In other words, this had the added bonus of making me a better speed reader by simply speed reading texts that I already knew the meaning of.

Anyway, I hope this helps. I’d be interested if anyone else has developed any systems of reading.

[gato]

I also use the "underline and look up later" approach, which I think is the best way to both maintain a decent reading speed and learn new vocabs. However, if you truely have pages of vocabs and endless dictionary searches with a particular text, it might be too difficult for you at the moment and should be put off until later. I think the right balance might be somewhere around 1 new vocab for every 100 characters, or about 10 new vocabs for a one-page article. Anything much above that would be too much of a chore to read.

[Lu]

Depends. If I need to read a text for pleasure, I look up as few words as possible. If I have to look up more than one word every few pages it's not reading for pleasure anymore.

If I read a text because there's information in it I need, I look up every word I don't know, because it might just be crucial. I write down all the words, and after every paragraph look them all up, then reread the paragraph. This makes very slow reading and I don't like it.

If I read to learn some new words, I look up a few words that seem useful on every page, write them down and learn them. And then I usually start seeing those words everywhere, making me wonder what else I'm missing.

[atitarev]

I also heavily use my pencil in underlining (unknown words), putting a tick next to a word I met before but if it needs some attention or the way it's used is interesting. Very interesting expressions I mark with NB! (nota bene!) symbol or ! (exclamation mark), put a ? (question mark) where I get stuck in understanding.

I never get tired of putting tone marks above characters (nobody mentioned that we are learning Mandarin Chinese, not another language ), even if I remember but vaguely the correct tones, sometimes I write pinyin above or on a margin (I made some progress, before it was just pinyin ). Now I feel that the words I know I also know the correct tones. (I know some people learning Chinese but quite often they can't remember the correct tones, it was the same with me, so I am working on it).

Of course, there is no point in doing this if you're not planning to review. Especially efficient it is when you get back to this text after a longer period (meanwhile doing some other reading). Then if a large percentage of words are still unfamiliar, then you didn't do a good job of learning them.

[Shadowdh]

As I am at the "reading for learning" stage still I tend to read the text (still very basic) and look up new words on the go... then after I will reread the text again (usually 2 times) to piece it all together...