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Is that definition from the Kenkyusha dictionary or from experience? I'm still working from Jisho but found a 4th edition of Kenkyusha for a good price that eBay keeps reminding me about.
It's not a binary thing. I will certainly have used a dictionary at some point, but whether it was Kenkyusha is lost in the haze of the past. I have dictionaries of idioms, for example. And I don't use dictionaries to look up words. I read them. Which gives me lots of experience.
My language-learning differs from all other linguists I know (and I know very many). It's rooted in my family background, but to summarise the surface view, I have found three approaches that I swear by. I'm not saying they will be useful or relevant to you, or anyone else, but I've found over the years that it can be useful and sometimes inspiring to hear how other people think. That's one of my own favourite things, and so I offer my own experiences in that spirit.
So, back to our muttons. One approach I swear by is to learn every word in 6 or 7 contexts. I read years ago that you had to encounter anything about 6 times before you memorised it. At school, other people learned lists of vocabulary by repeatedly chanting them. I learned them by exploring contexts until I had found 6 or 7. Not always possible in those pre-internet days. One way I used was to pester my teacher. There was a word - I've forgotten which - that had something to do with balls. I asked the teacher what was French for tennis ball, what was French for a masked ball, and so on. So I was learning words other than ball, such as tennis and masked, but also getting my dose of 6 or 7 contexts. I was learning associations and nuances. We all do this, of course, but I was doing it on turbocharge. I did this all the time and drove the teacher spare. I remember this particular item because I managed to stump him: he didn't know what a billiard ball was in French. But in the process I learned a little about French culture. I didn't ask about cojones because I was only 11 at the time. The result was that with my approach I scored 100% in language exams and no-one else got beyond 70%. That was pretty strong reinforcement, and it was reinforced even more by a teacher giving me half a crown for getting my first 100%.
The second approach that was useful for me was an accidental discovery. I was a chess player from a very young age and so used to follow the Russian scene. In my case that meant learning to read Russian chess magazines. What I picked up from that exercise was that if you stick to one topic in language learning it can be super-efficient to devote a lot of time reading about your topic in that language. The point is that you are only seeing words that you want and never seeing words you will never meet again, so it's close to 100% efficient in vocabulary terms.
My awareness of the value of this approach was reinforced by a small blip. In one of our class vocabulary lists was the French word glycine, given as wisteria. I had absolutely no idea what a wisteria was, couldn't find out, and never did find out till I was in my thirties. Other flower words in the list easily stuck in my head because I had associations (e.g. a carnation was used as buttonholes at weddings and featured on tins of Carnation evaporated milk we had as a special teatime treat). But a wisteria was not part of my experience, and never likely to be, so I was inclined to ignore it. Nevertheless, probably because it stood out, it did stick in my mind, and much, much later I discovered that it was really a mistake because it was named after Caspar Wistar and so should properly be wistaria. Nowadays I walk several times past a cottage that is covered in purple wistaria, so it's turned out to be a big word in my life! That's part of something else I learned early on: nothing is ever wasted when learning. You never know what coincidences will turn up later on. Inefficiencies can turn out to be efficient.
Because this efficiency-based approach worked very well for me, the feedback loop reinforced it in my head, and I eventually used the same approach when teaching a Japanese reading course at Newcastle university. My students were all PhD candidates, which helped of course, but the most important feature was that they were all naval architecture students and had a very limited range of interest. They wanted only to read (not speak), and to read only Japanese shipbuilding magazines. So the vocabulary was limited, but so was the grammar (e.g. dearu form not desu is used in such technical articles, no -masu forms, no onomatopoeia, etc). As a result the course was just 49 hours, of which 12 or 13 was devoted to using Nelson and Kenkyusha. About a dozen students took a final exam, which was to translate a paper supplied by the local ship research association. All passed with honours and then we parted. I thought I'd never find out how they got on with their Japanese. But years later, after I had moved to London, my eldest daughter was at school was approached by another pupil who said, "My dad knows your dad." She had twigged from name, which is unusual down south, and some reference to hearing that I knew Japanese, that I was a person her own father had talked about. And it turned out he was still using his Japanese as a naval architect. So, again coincidences do have a habit of biting you in the bum, but, more to the point, it confirms that a stripped-down but tailor-made approach to language learning can be fast yet highly efficient.
My third approach is that, as I say, I read dictionaries. The starting point may be to look up a word, but I then read round about that entry to see if I can get my ration of 6 or 7 contextual examples, and before I know what's happened I may have read 3 or 4 pages about other words. I find this especially fruitful in English, or my huge Morohashi Chinse-Japanese dictionary, because they give etymologies, sources or early citations, which I lap up. And which eventually turn out to be useful - nothing is ever wasted. I've learned a lot of Greek from etymologies, and quite a bit about Chinese histories and Tang poems.
As readers will know from my posts on go terms, associations and nuances of words play a big role on my thinking. We all rely on associations, because that's how the brain works, but they are made by the subconscious brain and we are not usually aware of the process. However, I get the impression that for many people one area will tend to come to the surface often. For what I call numbers guys, they can be very aware of number associations. At least, some of them have told me things like looking at car number-plates and working out their prime numbers (or something like that). I had a classmate at grammar school who became an eminent musician and who would tell me what key things like church bells were sounding in as we walked along the street.
In my case it's word associations I'm aware of. As an example, when you mentioned bijin what leapt in to my mind was a very long association. The starting point was that you rendered bijin as beautiful woman, but I jibbed at that because bijin is asexual, and from that came the word handsome, which is usually used of men, but I remembered Handsome Nell. That poem reminded me of the word (and the spelling) compleat, which was sparked off by the word happo (all directions = complete). Compleat brought to mind Izaac Walton who wrote The Compleat Angler. I have no interest in angling but Isaac Walton was coincidentally the name of the shop where we had to buy our school uniforms, and this shop had a framed print of a cover of the book. Thinking of schooldays also brought back to mind days of having to sing Burns's songs (for non-Brits he was the guy behind Auld Lang Syne, but there's about 600 other songs of his). And so by then (though with a little side trip up a cul-de-sac to ponder on the difference between Izaak and Isaac) I was led inexorably to quoting Burns's poem, which seems to be perfect description of happo bijin.
Since then my mind has wondered on along the same track, with forks such as Eskimo Nell. But the path I have followed is that, again by coincidence, as it is our Autumn Ball, and one of the ladies I hope to dance with is a descendant of Burns, tonight I have decided to wear my Burns kilt, which is made up of a black and white check. Which brings us back to go.... Sumire wears the border tartan in her face-mask. She too has to get dolled up for photographers in beautiful kimonos, and so has to be a bijin. Which brings us back to the subject of this thread, Xie Yimin.
That's how my mind works. Very much word-based, but as I said, I like hearing how other minds work. Any offers?