I often wonder which is the most helpful procedure for me when looking up new vocabulary words. Should I look up an unknown word as soon as I see it in a sentence/passage, or should I wait and try to understand the whole sentence and guess an unknown word’s meaning from context and then look it up?
jjhayes84,
The best way, imo, is to try to understand the sentence first and deduce the meaning of an unknown word by context. I just hate it when I need to go to the glossary or a dictionary, cause it then feels like I’m translating instead of learning the language. Besides, words stick better when you work hard on them than if you take the easy road of the dictionary.
Vale, amice!
everybody learns differently… do it however it works. 
On the other hand, it’s tempting sometimes to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word based on context and related words and not really take the time to study its nuances. The dictionary is the best way to find both the literal and figurative uses of a word. Context only provides one possible meaning. Sometimes NOT using the dictionary is the lazy way out (at least for me).
-David
Well, on the one hand, I can’t imagine looking a word up in the dictionary without, on some level, making an educated guess as to what it might mean. I mean, don’t you just naturally speculate about a word’s meaning the moment you see it, whether based on the context of the sentence or on whatever roots you might recognize? I think it would be awful not to do this at all, but rather to mechanically consult the dictionary without giving the matter any thought. (Then again, in situations where a line is made up of four five-syllable words you don’t know, sometimes you can’t do much with the sentence without looking all four words up. See: Aeschylus.)
On the other hand, no matter how good your guess is, I’d think you would want to confirm it before moving on. Even if my guess turns out to be right, I like seeing the nuances of a word, seeing the different contexts in which it’s used, see what other words it is connected to (rarely does a word exist in isolation; if you have a new noun to learn, you might as well learn the verb and adjective connected to it), and, sometimes, realize that your guess was entirely wrong. Often you can’t even tell what part of speech a word is without looking it up, so your analysis of the entire sentence will change once you realize that, say, a form ending in -us that looks like a 2nd declension nominative singular is actually an adverb.
I think it is very important to see how the word fits into the sentence first, what part of speech and what conjunction/verb person/number. That way if you are in an exam trying to translate an unseen passage you can often make a half-right guess. It would impress the examiner if you wrote “verb, imperfect tense, 3rd pers.plural” next to your wild guess rather than leave a blank. At least that would show you understood the context.
Thanks for the response everyone. It seems that most of you would recommend reading the whole sentence in order to guess first the meaning of the word. What of Hale’s article The Art of Reading Latin: How to Teach It? It seems in this artcle that the best method is to parse each word in order before moving on to the next.
everybody learns differently… do it however it works. >
I agree that everyone learns differently, but after two years of Latin and three of Greek I’m still trying to figure out what is best for me!
Hale’s method, if I remember correctly, is to read Latin just as the Romans heard it: that is, keep in mind every word as you come to it instead of scanning through the whole sentence, finding the verb, then looking for the subject, etc, etc, an entirely artificial method which has more to do with code-breaking than understanding. Based on my limited experience learning (I haven’t taught Latin yet), it seems like a good idea, though only for fairly advanced learners.
I don’t think that Hale’s really talking about learning vocabulary: he assumes, I believe, that you know most if not all the words before attacking the sentence. But I still think his method can work with new words: try to guess the grammatical function as you go along, and infer meaning from context. Then check the dictionary to check your accuracy and to reinforce the nuances of the word.
David