How to learn vocabulary while reading

Looking up every unknown word feels like studying. It usually stops you finishing the page. The words that stay are the ones that blocked a sentence you understood the rest of, saved with that sentence, and met again before you forgot the scene.

Read the sentence before you collect the word

Finish the line once, even if a word is fuzzy. You are checking whether the sentence still tells you something. If it does, you can often skip the lookup. If the sentence collapses without that word, it is worth saving.

This is the opposite of building a list from a frequency deck and hoping the words show up later. The text chooses the vocabulary. You only keep what the text forced you to notice.

Look up what blocks the meaning

• Save words that carry the action, the claim, or the new topic.
• Skip names, one-off numbers, and words you can already guess from the sentence.
• Skip a word you will not meet again unless it is the whole point of the paragraph.
• If a dictionary line is ambiguous, keep the gloss that fits this sentence, not every sense in the entry.

A glossary of the whole page becomes noise. A short list of blockers becomes tomorrow’s review.

Save the sentence, not only the gloss

“save; keep; preserve” is not a memory. The line you were reading is the memory. When the word returns, you want the original sentence in view so you are recalling a use, not a detached translation.

That is the review taihaa is built for. The Mandarin and Cantonese reading guides show the same idea with pinyin and Jyutping. German and French use the same save-and-review loop, with English glosses.

Cap the number of new words

A workable cap for a short page is about three to eight new saves. Under that, you are being too shy with words that actually stopped you. Over that, review becomes a second job and you stop reading.

If a page would need twenty lookups, the text is too hard for extensive reading today. Switch to a shorter passage or a graded text, and keep this article for later. Quitting a page is better than saving a pile you will ignore.

Review recognition before production

Reading vocabulary is mostly recognition: can you understand the word when it shows up again in a sentence? Speaking and writing need a second kind of practice. Mixing them on day one makes both slower.

In taihaa, Learning keeps a word on a short interval. Known and Easy push it further out. Again brings it back later the same day. Ignore drops it from review when you saved something you do not want. The schedule is simple on purpose during the beta. It is there to return the sentence, not to simulate a full memory algorithm.

A session you can repeat

1. Choose a page you could finish in one sitting. A news paragraph, a story page, a class handout, or an EPUB chapter is enough.
2. Read with support on if you need it: pinyin for Mandarin, Jyutping for Cantonese. Turn it off for a second pass when the line is no longer new.
3. Save only the blockers. Edit a gloss that does not match the sentence before you keep it.
4. Stop while you still know what the page was about. The plot or the argument is the hook for the words.
5. Review the next day from the saved sentences, then read another page.