> poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary
You can't effectively read material without having enough vocabulary to cover at least some 80% of it.
My most recent language learning experience is Japanese. The difference between trying to read before cramming on an ~8000 word vocabulary and after is night and day.
And the comparison basis here is not reading hardcopy, but electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly). That is to say, even with that tool, which eliminates some of the barriers of the writing system, trying to read is still like pulling teeth compared to the experience when you're crammed on a decent chunk of vocab.
Vocab gets you to that point where you can guess the meanings of unknown words from context, as well as their readings. You can start using mono-lingual dictionaries and other resources.
Now if you're coming from, say, one European language to another, you may be able to get away without using spaced repetition, because of a lot of shared vocabulary (cognates) and concepts.
In any case, brute force reading is spaced repetition. It's just inefficient spaced repetition that fails to schedule the appearance of a word based on your recall performance for that specific word.
I'd like to add that this concept is not just for natural languages. Say you read your first Shakespeare or Nietzsche or any book where your wish to learn and understand the content trumps the plot. Cramming the perspective (historical, philosophical, ...) should help massively in the pursuit of knowledge.
Should, because I've never tried it, but wish I could. Something like Kindle + Audible + augmented learning would be my dream. I always get my additional info from deep-diving Wiki and the internet, but that's obviously not as deep as a good set of notes, or a teacher should get me. There's an undeveloped space between the layman and the scholarly level.
In high school there was this old-school paper database resource I really liked that gave you this perspective for all the great novels. It didn't help you directly with your book report, but it helped find the words, themes and directions to report about. I even remember one: the 'vatersuche'-motif, which is a literary concept where a young man is looking for knowledge about his father via his actions that make the plot. It's so obscure, I can't even google it right now. That, or I don't know the proper translation, which proves the point.
Not the OP, but the reality is that you can read anything that interests you. Especially when you are starting, the first few thousand common words are incredibly common. So you'll get those over and over and over again. The main problem is that depending on what grammar is present, you may have difficulties.
There is something called the "natural order hypothesis" that states that the order in which people acquire the grammatical structures of a language is roughly the same, no matter what order the grammar is introduced. This is one of Stephen Krashen's hypotheses that has some good evidence in trials.
So the problem is that if you pick a piece that has a lot of grammar that you haven't acquired yet, you'll be spinning your wheels for a long time. The solution to this is simply to move on and find something else to read.
As for tools, the rikaichan plug in in Firefox and the Chromium port (rikaikun) are the main ones. There are lots of children's stories on the internet. Search for 昔話. You'll find lots to read :-) If you're a bit more advanced, then news is always good. TBS news is nice because they always give you both the video and audio along with the text (which is invariably exactly the same as what's in the video): http://news.tbs.co.jp/
But you can even read Twitter or and other social medium. I spent a long time reading the Ruby dev list in Japanese to learn computer terms. Good luck on your studies!
> reading hardcopy, but electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly)
Care to share the tool you use to read and the dictionary tool?
You can't effectively read material without having enough vocabulary to cover at least some 80% of it.
My most recent language learning experience is Japanese. The difference between trying to read before cramming on an ~8000 word vocabulary and after is night and day.
And the comparison basis here is not reading hardcopy, but electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly). That is to say, even with that tool, which eliminates some of the barriers of the writing system, trying to read is still like pulling teeth compared to the experience when you're crammed on a decent chunk of vocab.
Vocab gets you to that point where you can guess the meanings of unknown words from context, as well as their readings. You can start using mono-lingual dictionaries and other resources.
Now if you're coming from, say, one European language to another, you may be able to get away without using spaced repetition, because of a lot of shared vocabulary (cognates) and concepts.
In any case, brute force reading is spaced repetition. It's just inefficient spaced repetition that fails to schedule the appearance of a word based on your recall performance for that specific word.