conuly

Well, you can't 100% rely on "looking it up" or "using context."

I've been translating some Agatha Christie novels for my own amusement. I'm not exactly a kid anymore, and there are a very few words in the text, that I've seen many times in many places, but if you asked me to define them, I wouldn't come close because I don't use them actively. I've used the "in context" method in English so much that basically I ignore the word and only care about the context. That's fine if you are reading to get on with the plot and you don't need to care about some stray adjective. But when translating, yeah, I need to stop and think and probably look it up to be sure.

Why can't you rely on just looking it all up? Well, that's fine if you are looking up one word in a page or even as many as one in a paragraph. But studying Russian many times I'd have to look up three words in a sentence, and literally would forget the definition of the first word by the time I was looking up the third, particularly if every sentence on the page had three words I'd needed to look up! It gets to be a horrible grind. At some point even in a foreign language you have to use what you understand to help get through the parts you don't, or you'll just give up.