Why you should ditch your dictionary

We all remember the first time we set off to read a book in English. At 14, my choice fell on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. My logic behind it must have been a mixture of ‘Look, just a hundred pages’ and ‘This sounds kind of easy’.

But guess what? There wasn’t a single picture in the whole book.

Anyway, I was a big girl so I decided to fight disappointment and embrace the challenge. Armed with an English-Italian dictionary that weighed as much as me, I sat down at the kitchen table and started reading.

Half an hour later, my efforts looked something like this:

It’s been ten years and I still haven’t gone back to the book. Not once. I’ve read most of Wilde’s work, including De Profundis (which isn’t actually in Latin, in case you were wondering) and I’m pretty sure I’ve come across all of his aphorisms on Facebook, but I just kept avoiding that book.

I mean, look what it did to me.

Looking back on it now, I think I know what I did wrong. I wish somebody had told me then, but hey, it was 2007 and there were only so many exciting YouTube tutorials available.

Surely, I’d picked the wrong book to start reading English. If, for example, I’d gone for The Importance of Being Earnest, I’d have saved myself a lot of descriptions and flower names and tears. But I couldn’t get the pun in title*, so I didn’t.

However, the biggest mistake I made was relying on the dictionary as my first and only learning tool. Sorry to break it to you, but that‘s not the way it works. Stay with me and I’ll tell you why.

Dictionaries are boring

There, I said it.

Reading should be fun. But try stopping every 10 seconds to look up every other word in the dictionary… Does that sound fun?

No, because it isn’t.

If you keep interrupting yourself you won’t be able to follow the story properly, let alone find it interesting or exciting. You’d probably end up feeling frustrated — and exhausted — within, say, half an hour of this exercise. Boring.

We don’t really know how to use a dictionary

Nobody likes to admit this, but most of us are hopeless when it comes to use a dictionary.

Even if you don’t struggle remembering the alphabetical order, chances are that first, it will take you a while to find what you’re looking for, then you’ll have a hard time identifying the correct meaning and, lastly, you’ll spend some time staring at the phonetics, not knowing how you feel about those indecipherable symbols and apostrophes.

Of course, nowadays there are fantastic tools like Wordreference.com,** which simplify the searching process and let you listen to pronunciation (you can even select a Yorkshire accent, how cool is that?) but still, that definitely doesn’t help you focus on the story…

Anyway. I could go on listing reasons, but I think you get the picture.

Dictionaries should be the last resort when it comes to learning English through reading. They shouldn’t be used to check the meaning of a word, but merely to double-check it when you already think you get it. And you are, like, 86.7% sure of it.

So, if you want to read in English, start by choosing something exciting, not awfully long and with a limited number of descriptive paragraphs. Plays are great for beginners, but avoid Shakespeare if you hope to be understood when you speak.

Once you’ve got the book, ditch the dictionary. Go on. Throw it to the other side of the room. Let the cat sit on it. Whatever you choose. But don’t go near it until you’ve reached the end of the chapter. In the meantime, let context*** and your fervid imagination help you make sense of what’s happening in the story.

And if you simply can’t go past those paragraphs you don’t fully understand, get a translated copy of the book and read those tricky bits in your own language. But don’t cheat! You need to go back to the English version as soon as they stop talking about the garden.

So, if you want to excuse me now, I’m going to find out what Lord Henry Wotton was up to a decade ago.

*Wilde plays with the fact that the word ‘earnest’ (meaning ‘honest’) and the name Ernest sound the same in English. That’s the pun. But irony is something really hard to get in a second language, so if you’re Italian or American don’t worry too much about it.

**I couldn’t have possibly graduated my journalism degree without it.

**Since you’ve come this far, I’ll tell you a secret. I still don’t know how to translate some words in the first paragraph of The Picture of Dorian Gray. But I get the picture (got it? ha-ha), so it doesn’t really matter.