Okay, now we have a study set and hopefully we have gone through it a few times…. (at least once?). Now we re-read. A lot of people like to write all over their books as they read–which is great–you do what works for you. When I try to do that it just becomes a huge mess, mostly because I have the world’s worst handwriting ever. It is basically unreadable, even to me. It also becomes a huge distraction with me ” method” (do I really have a method? am I the kind of person that anyone would look to for a method?? :). I am distractable and lazy enough that if I have English written all over my Irish book then my eyes will go straight to the English and just read that. There is even a scientific name for this (the XX strope effect??). Once you become a reader your eyes are drawn to words. You literally have a difficult time, neurologically speaking, keeping yourself from reading. We must be hijacking some seriously old evolutionary brain structures with the skill of reading? Or maybe it is because reading is now literally tied to our survival? Anyhow, English gets in my way.
What I do instead is underline the word or phrase that gets in my way. This does two things for me. First, it allows me, when reading to acknowledge what I don’t know, but more importantly, it allows me to keep going. I try and guess what the offending word means out of context–exactly how we read in our native language. “He took the snaggleflux out of his pocket, aimed it at the target and shoot.” Who knows what a ‘snaggleflux is? No one, I made it up 30 seconds ago. Who can guess? Anyone who understood even most of the rest of the sentence. A snaggleflux is a type of weapon, a sort of gun. This is the ideal way to learn new vocabulary–in context and part of a story.
As you re-read you will find other phrases that you missed. Maybe you half understood them and now you realize that you mostly did not get it right. Things will start to make more sense.