[mgaunard]

I find that reading books is a great way to pick up new words; it was quite useful to challenge myself and read while I was learning English.

I never really saw the need to look up words in a dictionary though, you just eventually learn what the words mean as they are repeated throughout the book in various contexts (most authors appear to like using the same words over ans over). I think it's actually more valuable to learn like this since it develops your ability to infer meaning from the various bits of context that you have, as well as the grammar and word structure.

For example the guy looked up "stiffened". That's a fairly weird thing to look up, why didn't he look up "stiff"?