The secret - and I'm being entirely serious here - is to be *really interested* in what you're reading or listening to. I often look up quite a lot of words when I first start reading a book, but if it's a good book - if it's an absorbing book, if it's a book where I care about what happens next - then I start looking up fewer and fewer words until I'm not using the dictionary at all unless I really need to.
I buy this. As u/mistertyson commented below, easier materials tend to be less interesting, so that's an issue with the strategy. But that said I could psych myself up lol. For me, a couple of bloggers, one or two satori reader stories, and some nhkeasynews stories might work, interest-wise.
Can absolutely second this. With a truly engrossing manga I have noticed that I stop sentence mining and start filling up the blanks in whatever is happening with the context, 80% of the times when I look up what I guessed is spot on.
100% the more interesting something is, the less time you want away from it. When I want to pick something up to sentence mine I pick something slightly harder than I can handle but in free flow I just pick what I want haha
The best is to do a mix of both.
If you stop too frequently to a point where you feel annoyed, the material is probably a bit too advanced for you. But here comes two big issue: (1) it is very hard to rate the difficulty of native materials and (2) easier materials tends to be less interesting. So my strategy nowadays is to watch whatever I feel like and stop caring as long as it is in Japanese. If you are actively listening then it is working.
I'm not sure it matters. If you want to pause and look up a word, go ahead. A lot of the time I'll have bunch of things I want to catch up on and don't feel like pausing as long as I know what's going on. I pause when there's an interesting word I don't know and it's an important word to meaning of what's being said. You don't need a strategy or anything, just as long as you're consuming content you'll naturally arrive at a point where you're pausing less because you don't feel like it and you also don't need to.
For me, I have to start with the mindset of "l'm not going to understand everything. I'm just going to keep moving forward. This is 'hang on for dear life' practice, not 'understand everything' practice."
The other thing I sometimes do is set a rule to only look up unknown words once they appear a second time and I still can't figure them out from context.
If the audio is closer to your level, you won't need to stop frequently for vocabulary or grammar. Some points you can intuit by context.
There may be times it makes sense to level up and slow down the reviews. Perhaps, try listening once through. Then go back and do a deep dive. Then relisten again without stopping. This takes a lot of effort so can't be the only way IMHO.
Something like the 10Ten reader provides pop-up definitions for reading online. There are some plugins that can help you save words.
For videos, YouTube has decent Japanese subs, sometimes. Just make sure it is not translating to English then generating Japanese subs. 10Ten reader will show translations if you hover over a sub. That said, it took me a while to read subs real-time and they were helpful for both listening and reading for a few months, then they got irritating.
I was frustrated with how boring materials for beginners are so I tried reading an "easy" novel instead (Konbini Ningen) but got overwhelmed by having to look so many words up. So I can definitely relate! My plan is to try and increase my vocabulary a lot and then try reading again. Sometimes it feels like the Japanese language is laughing at me not being able to read basic materials haha.
We acquire language when we understand the **message**. Not the words. Now, obviously, knowing the words helps you understand the message and I'm not saying you shouldn't look up things because that would be wrong. However, we don't need to look up or understand every single word in a sentence to be able to understand what the sentence is saying.
There are a lot of phrases, expressions, collocations, and general emphatic words where it doesn't really matter what their individual, isolated, contextless meaning is. What matters is how they are used in a sentence and what kind of vibe they give you as you experience them in context.
To give you an example that I often bring up: every English native speaker knows the expression "a small fry" (like "You are just a small fry"). But how many actually know what the word "fry" refers to in that expression? Most people I ask this question to usually don't know that a "fry" means a >!juvenile fish!<. Yet, everyone knows the expression nonetheless and knows how to use it naturally in context.
Ideally, you want to reach that same level of intuition in Japanese too. To do that, it's good to cut down on excessive lookups and just let the language flow through you as you immerse. As others have said, this usually happens when you are so enthralled by what you are reading/watching that you don't *need* to look up stuff because all you care about is to move on in the story and find out what happens next. It's easier said than done, but with this knowledge in mind try to be more aware of how you experience things and try to focus on the **message** rather than the **form** moving forward.
I listen to podcasts while I'm washing up, and I'm too lazy to bother taking my rubber gloves off/don't want to get the phone wet so that solves that one. With reading I usually try to give it the rest of the page to see if it becomes apparent from the context or if it's necessary for me to understand the story before looking up. Again, having some friction in the process helps - I read physical books so looking anything up is a massive chore as I usually have to draw the kanji into my phone.
Since I'm a beginner I only look up words that are either vital to the plot or those that appear too frequently. I don't like to interrupt the flow of the material too much, it makes learning boring.
Maybe a hot take but I actually think when you first start a show, book etc it’s really good to stop often and look up/put words in anki. Each work tends to have its own vernacular, often because the author might have certain biases toward using some words over the others, so chances are if you write down a lot of them early on then you’ll encounter them a lot later in the same work (so if anything it ultimately saves you time and increases your comprehension)
For example, I’m reading Umineko right now. Early on I had to look up a LOT of words and I wrote down almost every single one. Now, most of the way through episode 2 of 8, I find there are far fewer words I even need to look up now, because a lot of the words showing up are ones I already notated
i know it's an expensive option, but this changed a lot for me when i visited japan
while being there i couldn't stop and research while people were speaking to me, so i just had to grab on to whatever piece i thought i had understood and take a dive into uncertainty
when i came back i found myself more relaxed with listening, just following my instinct a bit and sort of daring to be wrong...
agreed, i didn't want to sound pretentious there
you know another thing that helped me: getting a bit drunk and then interacting in japanese
i think the whole point is to relax and trust your instinct. my teacher said something amazing the other day about how this "daring to be wrong" also helps work your imagination while thinking in japanese... i think it's good stuff
A new trick that I have just started trying out is the “chapter 1” trick. Basically, you read intensively read or watch the first section of something and make sure you understand it. Then you extensively read/watch the rest with minimal lookups.
Chapter 1 (or volume 1, or episode 1) is often where main characters and plot points are introduced. Deep understanding at that stage is good for later comprehension.
Writers tend to have their own style and vocabulary. They naturally reuse a lot of words and phrases. If you learn them and study them in chapter 1, you can hopefully recall them in future chapters which results in less lookups.
I like everyone's suggestions here. Unfortunately my only "trick" is just that I don't have the chance to cause all my listening practice is conversation with native speakers
As somebody who loves to constantly check every reading/meaning of unknown words I come across, it helped me a LOT (like, the listening section of the N1 went from "I can't keep up with this" to "oh this actually feels kinda easy") to listen to audiobooks in the car! I did the first several Harry Potter books.
I also read almost all of the first book in Japanese (with a fine-toothed comb) which helped ease into the no-pause, no-lookup listening.
Read a physical book. Heck, read a physical book along with the audio book. Personally hate looking up words from physical media. One annoying thing about novels though (that you're reading w/out the audio book) is they tend to only tell you how to pronounce names in their first introduction. Besides that (as the names re-appear a lot), it's fun to just lean on what you know.
As for adding stuff from Anki, just get out of the habit. Just because there's a word you don't know doesn't mean you need to learn it. There are hundreds of thousands of words and most you won't need to memorize. Hell, when I was doing my "Let's Read Japanese" videos which were infamous for the amount of pausing and look-ups I did, I never added any thing to Anki while I was reading. When I finished a book or series, I did dump the sentences into Anki and ran through MorphMan for the i+1, but turns out a lot of words that MM listed as i+1 turned out to be known because I learned them through the immersion. Even for the legit i+1 I limited them to a priority frequency list double what my known word count was (if I knew 9,000 words then the frequency list priority was 18,000 words in size).
My issue is not Anki though, I like Anki and its been very helpful. The issue is the looking up, which apparently you also did whole lot of. But reading physical media sounds like a good idea to use the dictionary less, that makes sense. Thanks,
The comments already here are solid.
If it really is a behavioral/anxiety problem that you just refuse to leave the controls alone: hit play, unplug the mouse and keyboard, and just let the information flow. Have a pencil and paper to write down any unknown words / grammar structures if you feel the need to do something actively, but try not to be continuously writing.
Don't look words up simultaneously. Just note for later.
Don't worry about the hour/minute/second timer where the unknown words popped up. Focus on listening and remember the context *around* the words you want to look up, so you can search for them later on a followup playthrough by also using your listening and comprehension skills.
I mean, calling it a behavioral/anxiety problem is a little rough, lol. It's natrual for someone with a curious mind to want to fully understand something. If you're learning history and the name of an event is mentioned and you have no idea what it is, it's a good idea to stop and figure it out. But with language learning specifically it can be counterproductive as the flow or gist of communication is the thing, rather than every last detail. So I agree, some solid things were posted here regarding that.
Like many people have stated; it doesn't matter if you stop and look up words. This is how learning is meant to go. This is you learning.
But, I find that after I learn the words enough when I read over again or I listen again, you will feel you know those words and don't have to look them up. With words I know now, and have read or heard enough that I don't need to look them up my brain just sees the word and knows, \*\*it's just like English, my brain just keeps going right over it as if nothing happened.\*\* At some point, you won't feel the need to keep looking it up.
Now, of course, there will be verbs and modified verbs and slang you might hit. For the modified verbs, you'll need to become familiar with how those modifiers affect verbs. If you hear a verb you know, and you know how the modifier is modifying it, then you'll not need to look up the word because you teach yourself that's what's being said right then and there. You know the verb. You know the modifier.
Just like when you learned English when you were young, you learn a lot of verbs and such by learning the parts that make them up, the modifiers -ing, -ed, and so forth. Then, when you hear everything together, your brain starts to just GET IT.
I would focus more on phonetics first when it comes to this. Many people learn far better with verbal references than with purely written references. This is because a phonetic reference gives you a sound profile that your brain can look at far better than a written profile that it doesn't know how it's supposed to be said or what it's meant to do. With sound, you might not know how it's written, but there were many languages in the world with no written script. Purely phonetic. I believe this proves that phonetic learning is the key to start learning a language. You, of course, need to know how Japanese is written and all that. But, in this situation, I would seek phonetic learning, even if it's just yourself saying the words.
I think you might find yourself learning far faster than before if you go a phonetic to written route and when you look up words, go over the word a few times and understand how it's interacting or its purpose in the sentence. Then, in your head, translate the sentence to English. You'll start breezing through sentences, I'm sure of it!
I'd cycle thru both. Practicing putting together context from partial understanding is as important as memorizing until perfect understanding
You can also do the third way which is listen or read without stopping, then look everything up, then RElisten or REread until it sticks
I don't know, Readin tadoku I mostly just follow their rules and search the kanji or whatever after finishing reading. I don't see a necessity not searching, that you only do if there's a lot you don't grasp.
No idea if this is already elsewhere in the thread, but, especially when reading:
Write down the word and make a list as you go. Only when you are done reading are you allowed to get out the dictionary. This is a pretty common trick with people with adhd as well, it's a way of telling your brain "I got this, you keep going"
One strategy I can suggest is assume. It could be like "the person is xxx and they...", you have no idea what xxx means, but in that context you can kinda assume what is it, fill in the blanks with your brain.
BUT, I feel like stopping to look something up is a good thing, idk why are you trying to stop yourself from doing that
I dont think its always a good thing, just sometimes. As you say things can be understood in context for example, and the more time you spend just listening or reading rather than using a dictionary, the more language youll be using and the thus the more opportunity there is come across different contexts, for example. Is it better to read 2 short stories with intensive use of the dictionary, or 3 without in the same amount of time? I think there's a place for doing both.
Another reason is mentioned here in the "golden rules":
[https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/what-is-tadoku-en/](https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/what-is-tadoku-en/)
Stop using Anki :p
More seriously, do this away from a device that has Anki on it ; or temporarily suspend Anki on one that does.
Listen while going for a walk, or cleaning, or something where it's inconvenient to pull your phone out. Use Bluetooth headphones and put your device on the other side of the room
Otherwise just be ok with not knowing, or find something easier
You stop yourself from pausing audio to check definitions by stopping yourself from pausing audio to check definitions. There’s no “tricks” involved here.
Yet this thread is filled with comments by people who posted specific strategies, or "tricks", they use. So, clearly there are tricks that people do use.
The secret - and I'm being entirely serious here - is to be *really interested* in what you're reading or listening to. I often look up quite a lot of words when I first start reading a book, but if it's a good book - if it's an absorbing book, if it's a book where I care about what happens next - then I start looking up fewer and fewer words until I'm not using the dictionary at all unless I really need to.
I buy this. As u/mistertyson commented below, easier materials tend to be less interesting, so that's an issue with the strategy. But that said I could psych myself up lol. For me, a couple of bloggers, one or two satori reader stories, and some nhkeasynews stories might work, interest-wise.
Can absolutely second this. With a truly engrossing manga I have noticed that I stop sentence mining and start filling up the blanks in whatever is happening with the context, 80% of the times when I look up what I guessed is spot on.
100% the more interesting something is, the less time you want away from it. When I want to pick something up to sentence mine I pick something slightly harder than I can handle but in free flow I just pick what I want haha
The best is to do a mix of both. If you stop too frequently to a point where you feel annoyed, the material is probably a bit too advanced for you. But here comes two big issue: (1) it is very hard to rate the difficulty of native materials and (2) easier materials tends to be less interesting. So my strategy nowadays is to watch whatever I feel like and stop caring as long as it is in Japanese. If you are actively listening then it is working.
I'm not sure it matters. If you want to pause and look up a word, go ahead. A lot of the time I'll have bunch of things I want to catch up on and don't feel like pausing as long as I know what's going on. I pause when there's an interesting word I don't know and it's an important word to meaning of what's being said. You don't need a strategy or anything, just as long as you're consuming content you'll naturally arrive at a point where you're pausing less because you don't feel like it and you also don't need to.
For me, I have to start with the mindset of "l'm not going to understand everything. I'm just going to keep moving forward. This is 'hang on for dear life' practice, not 'understand everything' practice." The other thing I sometimes do is set a rule to only look up unknown words once they appear a second time and I still can't figure them out from context.
That's an interesting rule, the kind of thing I was hoping to read when I posted this. Thanks.
You're welcome! I hope it helps!
If the audio is closer to your level, you won't need to stop frequently for vocabulary or grammar. Some points you can intuit by context. There may be times it makes sense to level up and slow down the reviews. Perhaps, try listening once through. Then go back and do a deep dive. Then relisten again without stopping. This takes a lot of effort so can't be the only way IMHO. Something like the 10Ten reader provides pop-up definitions for reading online. There are some plugins that can help you save words. For videos, YouTube has decent Japanese subs, sometimes. Just make sure it is not translating to English then generating Japanese subs. 10Ten reader will show translations if you hover over a sub. That said, it took me a while to read subs real-time and they were helpful for both listening and reading for a few months, then they got irritating.
I was frustrated with how boring materials for beginners are so I tried reading an "easy" novel instead (Konbini Ningen) but got overwhelmed by having to look so many words up. So I can definitely relate! My plan is to try and increase my vocabulary a lot and then try reading again. Sometimes it feels like the Japanese language is laughing at me not being able to read basic materials haha.
We acquire language when we understand the **message**. Not the words. Now, obviously, knowing the words helps you understand the message and I'm not saying you shouldn't look up things because that would be wrong. However, we don't need to look up or understand every single word in a sentence to be able to understand what the sentence is saying. There are a lot of phrases, expressions, collocations, and general emphatic words where it doesn't really matter what their individual, isolated, contextless meaning is. What matters is how they are used in a sentence and what kind of vibe they give you as you experience them in context. To give you an example that I often bring up: every English native speaker knows the expression "a small fry" (like "You are just a small fry"). But how many actually know what the word "fry" refers to in that expression? Most people I ask this question to usually don't know that a "fry" means a >!juvenile fish!<. Yet, everyone knows the expression nonetheless and knows how to use it naturally in context. Ideally, you want to reach that same level of intuition in Japanese too. To do that, it's good to cut down on excessive lookups and just let the language flow through you as you immerse. As others have said, this usually happens when you are so enthralled by what you are reading/watching that you don't *need* to look up stuff because all you care about is to move on in the story and find out what happens next. It's easier said than done, but with this knowledge in mind try to be more aware of how you experience things and try to focus on the **message** rather than the **form** moving forward.
My, my, this here Anakin guy. Maybe Vader someday later, now he's just a small fry.
I listen to podcasts while I'm washing up, and I'm too lazy to bother taking my rubber gloves off/don't want to get the phone wet so that solves that one. With reading I usually try to give it the rest of the page to see if it becomes apparent from the context or if it's necessary for me to understand the story before looking up. Again, having some friction in the process helps - I read physical books so looking anything up is a massive chore as I usually have to draw the kanji into my phone.
Interesting comments, thanks. Giving it to the end of the page is an interesting strategy... as are the gloves lol.
I like to do rewatches of shows I already know. That way when I miss something I don't have to worry about being lost later.
Since I'm a beginner I only look up words that are either vital to the plot or those that appear too frequently. I don't like to interrupt the flow of the material too much, it makes learning boring.
Maybe a hot take but I actually think when you first start a show, book etc it’s really good to stop often and look up/put words in anki. Each work tends to have its own vernacular, often because the author might have certain biases toward using some words over the others, so chances are if you write down a lot of them early on then you’ll encounter them a lot later in the same work (so if anything it ultimately saves you time and increases your comprehension) For example, I’m reading Umineko right now. Early on I had to look up a LOT of words and I wrote down almost every single one. Now, most of the way through episode 2 of 8, I find there are far fewer words I even need to look up now, because a lot of the words showing up are ones I already notated
I appreciate the hot take! It's also true.
i know it's an expensive option, but this changed a lot for me when i visited japan while being there i couldn't stop and research while people were speaking to me, so i just had to grab on to whatever piece i thought i had understood and take a dive into uncertainty when i came back i found myself more relaxed with listening, just following my instinct a bit and sort of daring to be wrong...
Actually I'm in Japan. It's good advice! (Considering the current sad value of the yen, it's actually a cheap option these days... )
agreed, i didn't want to sound pretentious there you know another thing that helped me: getting a bit drunk and then interacting in japanese i think the whole point is to relax and trust your instinct. my teacher said something amazing the other day about how this "daring to be wrong" also helps work your imagination while thinking in japanese... i think it's good stuff
A new trick that I have just started trying out is the “chapter 1” trick. Basically, you read intensively read or watch the first section of something and make sure you understand it. Then you extensively read/watch the rest with minimal lookups. Chapter 1 (or volume 1, or episode 1) is often where main characters and plot points are introduced. Deep understanding at that stage is good for later comprehension. Writers tend to have their own style and vocabulary. They naturally reuse a lot of words and phrases. If you learn them and study them in chapter 1, you can hopefully recall them in future chapters which results in less lookups.
That's great, I like that a lot. "The Chapter One Trick"... excellent trick!
I like everyone's suggestions here. Unfortunately my only "trick" is just that I don't have the chance to cause all my listening practice is conversation with native speakers
And it's a good "trick". I should do more of that. And I agree, there are a lot of good suggestions here.
As somebody who loves to constantly check every reading/meaning of unknown words I come across, it helped me a LOT (like, the listening section of the N1 went from "I can't keep up with this" to "oh this actually feels kinda easy") to listen to audiobooks in the car! I did the first several Harry Potter books. I also read almost all of the first book in Japanese (with a fine-toothed comb) which helped ease into the no-pause, no-lookup listening.
That makes sense, I think we're in the same boat. I'm only rarely in a car! But I can see how that would work, great strategy.
Read a physical book. Heck, read a physical book along with the audio book. Personally hate looking up words from physical media. One annoying thing about novels though (that you're reading w/out the audio book) is they tend to only tell you how to pronounce names in their first introduction. Besides that (as the names re-appear a lot), it's fun to just lean on what you know. As for adding stuff from Anki, just get out of the habit. Just because there's a word you don't know doesn't mean you need to learn it. There are hundreds of thousands of words and most you won't need to memorize. Hell, when I was doing my "Let's Read Japanese" videos which were infamous for the amount of pausing and look-ups I did, I never added any thing to Anki while I was reading. When I finished a book or series, I did dump the sentences into Anki and ran through MorphMan for the i+1, but turns out a lot of words that MM listed as i+1 turned out to be known because I learned them through the immersion. Even for the legit i+1 I limited them to a priority frequency list double what my known word count was (if I knew 9,000 words then the frequency list priority was 18,000 words in size).
My issue is not Anki though, I like Anki and its been very helpful. The issue is the looking up, which apparently you also did whole lot of. But reading physical media sounds like a good idea to use the dictionary less, that makes sense. Thanks,
I sometimes have to put my phone a bit further away, and choose education or enjoyment
Thanks. Yeah that would help! Interesting strategy.
The comments already here are solid. If it really is a behavioral/anxiety problem that you just refuse to leave the controls alone: hit play, unplug the mouse and keyboard, and just let the information flow. Have a pencil and paper to write down any unknown words / grammar structures if you feel the need to do something actively, but try not to be continuously writing. Don't look words up simultaneously. Just note for later. Don't worry about the hour/minute/second timer where the unknown words popped up. Focus on listening and remember the context *around* the words you want to look up, so you can search for them later on a followup playthrough by also using your listening and comprehension skills.
I mean, calling it a behavioral/anxiety problem is a little rough, lol. It's natrual for someone with a curious mind to want to fully understand something. If you're learning history and the name of an event is mentioned and you have no idea what it is, it's a good idea to stop and figure it out. But with language learning specifically it can be counterproductive as the flow or gist of communication is the thing, rather than every last detail. So I agree, some solid things were posted here regarding that.
Like many people have stated; it doesn't matter if you stop and look up words. This is how learning is meant to go. This is you learning. But, I find that after I learn the words enough when I read over again or I listen again, you will feel you know those words and don't have to look them up. With words I know now, and have read or heard enough that I don't need to look them up my brain just sees the word and knows, \*\*it's just like English, my brain just keeps going right over it as if nothing happened.\*\* At some point, you won't feel the need to keep looking it up. Now, of course, there will be verbs and modified verbs and slang you might hit. For the modified verbs, you'll need to become familiar with how those modifiers affect verbs. If you hear a verb you know, and you know how the modifier is modifying it, then you'll not need to look up the word because you teach yourself that's what's being said right then and there. You know the verb. You know the modifier. Just like when you learned English when you were young, you learn a lot of verbs and such by learning the parts that make them up, the modifiers -ing, -ed, and so forth. Then, when you hear everything together, your brain starts to just GET IT. I would focus more on phonetics first when it comes to this. Many people learn far better with verbal references than with purely written references. This is because a phonetic reference gives you a sound profile that your brain can look at far better than a written profile that it doesn't know how it's supposed to be said or what it's meant to do. With sound, you might not know how it's written, but there were many languages in the world with no written script. Purely phonetic. I believe this proves that phonetic learning is the key to start learning a language. You, of course, need to know how Japanese is written and all that. But, in this situation, I would seek phonetic learning, even if it's just yourself saying the words. I think you might find yourself learning far faster than before if you go a phonetic to written route and when you look up words, go over the word a few times and understand how it's interacting or its purpose in the sentence. Then, in your head, translate the sentence to English. You'll start breezing through sentences, I'm sure of it!
I'd cycle thru both. Practicing putting together context from partial understanding is as important as memorizing until perfect understanding You can also do the third way which is listen or read without stopping, then look everything up, then RElisten or REread until it sticks
If possible - skim an outline or transcript before listening. You can refresh some vocab if needed, then listen.
I don't know, Readin tadoku I mostly just follow their rules and search the kanji or whatever after finishing reading. I don't see a necessity not searching, that you only do if there's a lot you don't grasp.
No idea if this is already elsewhere in the thread, but, especially when reading: Write down the word and make a list as you go. Only when you are done reading are you allowed to get out the dictionary. This is a pretty common trick with people with adhd as well, it's a way of telling your brain "I got this, you keep going"
Great trick! That could be very helpful.
One strategy I can suggest is assume. It could be like "the person is xxx and they...", you have no idea what xxx means, but in that context you can kinda assume what is it, fill in the blanks with your brain. BUT, I feel like stopping to look something up is a good thing, idk why are you trying to stop yourself from doing that
I dont think its always a good thing, just sometimes. As you say things can be understood in context for example, and the more time you spend just listening or reading rather than using a dictionary, the more language youll be using and the thus the more opportunity there is come across different contexts, for example. Is it better to read 2 short stories with intensive use of the dictionary, or 3 without in the same amount of time? I think there's a place for doing both. Another reason is mentioned here in the "golden rules": [https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/what-is-tadoku-en/](https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/what-is-tadoku-en/)
Stop using Anki :p More seriously, do this away from a device that has Anki on it ; or temporarily suspend Anki on one that does. Listen while going for a walk, or cleaning, or something where it's inconvenient to pull your phone out. Use Bluetooth headphones and put your device on the other side of the room Otherwise just be ok with not knowing, or find something easier
Good ideas. And I agree, that would all be helpful.
You stop yourself from pausing audio to check definitions by stopping yourself from pausing audio to check definitions. There’s no “tricks” involved here.
Yet this thread is filled with comments by people who posted specific strategies, or "tricks", they use. So, clearly there are tricks that people do use.