Quote:
Originally Posted by rowjimmy
nay, never, nix, not, by no means, negative, no way, not at all, not by any means, uh uh, nope . . .
No, not a dictionary - a thesaurus maybe.
I also stay away from dictionaries when reading in a foreign language. Guessing at the word through context and studying the endings to determine the word's place in a sentence seem to work best for me. The word can be jotted down to check it's meaning later so that the story isn't interrupted (barge in, interject, disturb, intrude, interpose, intersect, interfere, cut in on).
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As a teacher, I commend your ingenuity in determining the meaning of an unknown word from context clues.
I have to wonder, however, how often you actually follow through with checking in a dictionary. As Marc stated in his post, many words have multiple meanings and the subtlety with which those meanings can change based on the way the word is used can alter the text dramatically. As I do not know any language other than English and the American version, at that, I can't state as fact that this is true in other languages, but for English, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not double checking an assumed definition. Before I had my ebw1150, which has dictionary look-up, I frequently thought to myself, "I'll look that up later," but would only rarely do so, even though I have many dictionaries that are conveniently located.
As an educator, I can think of nothing better to improve our vocabularies than to have a dictionary always available at the click of a button.