[brownbat]

> this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.

This tracks with some self reports for the most advanced L2 language learners though, that your ability to learn new words itself improves while you are learning new words. Maybe just requires a ton of exposure.

MattVsJapan talks about drilling vocab early on, then once he hit a certain level, he could often just look up a new word once and know it almost indefinitely, more like with English.

2nd grade is, what, 8 years of immersion? Exposure to something like 100-250,000 sentences, with practice or exposure for all available hours every day? It's a lot to catch up to.

Even so, with 2nd graders, we're not talking like "perspicacity" or "abrogate." Some words and some concepts will be harder than others.