A friend had taught himself Japanese by painstakingly reading texts using a Japanese-English dictionary. Such a technique seemed extremely ambitious and far too tedious for me at the time, but over the years I have found a similar process helpful in ameliorating my knowledge of Spanish  (Having a similar alphabet undoubtedly makes the effort notably easier, if not easy.)

It is at times a slow undertaking, but also deeply satisfying like the joy of unraveling a mystery. Each new word gives a clue to the story and if successful the tale becomes coherent and alive. But errors do occur and can lead to some considerable pondering. Why was the mother bringing only a large “hammer” when leaving her family for days? I thought about this for sometime and tried to imagine some logical scenarios, none of which seemed fruitful. It then occurred to me that I was confusing “martillo(hammer)” with “maleta(bag)”.

I now know to keep the dictionary closer at hand when the prose tend toward the discordant or surreal.