BTT: Vocabulary

From Booking Through Thursday:

I've always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they've never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?

I just keep on reading. First of all, books in Finnish pose no problems for me, unless the vocabulary is very difficult (local dialects or something like that). I've also read enough books in English to read pretty fluently. Of course, just about every book I read has words whose precise meaning I don't know, but I usually grasp enough meaning from the context.

Occasionally I check what a word means, if something bugs me. I have an English dictionary, but it's huge and on the top shelf, so I usually just google the unknown words. Bucolic (a synonym for pastoral) is a word I've learnt this way from some book I read. But if I check something, it's usually not in the middle of reading.

If I'm reading hard science fiction, I sometimes may check some of the scientific concepts to understand them better, but that's fairly rare.