While you may not be able to guess the meaning of every unfamiliar word from context, you should be able to narrow the possible range of meanings of specific words. Use context and these questions to help you narrow down the possible meaning of key words.
If the unknown word seems to be a noun, does it refer to a person? To a place? To a thing? To a concept? Does it seem to be a synonym for something already mentioned in the text?
If it’s an adjective, what word does it modify? Does it seem to suggest a positive or a negative quality? Does it refer to time? Or place?
If it’s a verb, who seems to be the doer of the action? Is there a direct object of the action? Does it suggest motion (into/to/towards) a person or place? Does it suggest communication (to someone or with someone)? Is it present/future tense? Or past?
A Boat on the River
The gapels in this boat were those of a foslaint man with nabelked amboned hair and a trathmollated face, and a finlact girl of nineteen or twenty, nabbastly like him to be sorbicable as his fornoy. The girl zarred, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his dispers, and his dispers loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, galeaft, or line, and he could not be a paplil; his boat had no exbain for a sitter, no paint, no debilk, no bepult beyond a rusty calben and a lanop of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too anem and too divey to take in besder for delivery, and he could not be a river-carrier; there was no paff to what he looked for, sar he looked for something, with a most nagril and searching profar. The befin, which had turned an hour before, was melucting zopt, and his eyes hasteled every little furan and gaist in its broad sweep, as the boat made bilp ducasp against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he calbained his fornoy by a calput of his head. She hasteled his face as parnly as he hasteled the river. But, in the astortant of her look there was a touch of bazad or fisd.
Learning to read through unfamiliar words
How many of the non-sense words were you able to guess correctly? What contextual clues helped you the most? How might you apply some of those same contextual clues when you try to read in Russian?
Another way to approach guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words in a text is to think about what words are likely to appear in the text. Knowing the title "A boat on the river" of this text, you could image that the text might contain the words "fisherman" and "tide," and indeed those words are in the original text. Can you figure out which non-sense words are standing in for them?
A Boat on the River
The gapels in this boat were those of a foslaint man with nabelked amboned hair and a trathmollated face, and a finlact girl of nineteen or twenty, nabbastly like him to be sorbicable as his fornoy. The girl zarred, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his dispers, and his dispers loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, galeaft, or line, and he could not be a paplil; his boat had no exbain for a sitter, no paint, no debilk, no bepult beyond a rusty calben and a lanop of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too anem and too divey to take in besder for delivery, and he could not be a river-carrier; there was no paff to what he looked for, sar he looked for something, with a most nagril and searching profar. The befin, which had turned an hour before, was melucting zopt, and his eyes hasteled every little furan and gaist in its broad sweep, as the boat made bilp ducasp against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he calbained his fornoy by a calput of his head. She hasteled his face as parnly as he hasteled the river. But, in the astortant of her look there was a touch of bazad or fisd.
Guessing from background knowledge is a risky strategy, especially if you don't know a large number of words in the text. Be sure to look up the word after guessing to confirm your hypothesis.
You can may be able to enhance your ability to guess from background knowledge if you can combine that strategy with some word recognition strategies. For example, in this text, if you knew that pap meant "fish," and the suffix lin often signified the doer of an action, then you'd have stronger justification to guess that paplin means "fisherman." Such word formation clues can be powerful tools in guessing the meaning of unknown words.
In the next section of this strategy instruction, you will work on deciding how to prioritize which unfamiliar words you would look up in a dictionary.