It is usually not practical to try to look up every word that you don’t know in a text. It can take far too much time, and the process of looking may distract you from trying to get any meaning out of what you do understand. So, you need to develop a sense of what words to prioritize for looking up.
The first thing to prioritize are unknown words that appear multiple times in a text or passage. Understanding repeated words will help you stretch your understanding of the text.
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.
What next to prioritize will depend on what your motivation for reading is. If you’re trying to follow the basic plot of a story, then look up nouns and verbs, so you know where, when, who and what. If you’re trying to understand a character, then look up adjectives and phrases that are applied to that character. If you are trying to follow motivations of characters, then looking up words in the clause that starts with the word “because….” might be most helpful. If you are reading a text for class, the comprehension questions your teacher has assigned can help you prioritize what parts of the text you need to focus on.
Part of prioritizing what words to look up is recognizing or having a strong sense as to the part of speech of the unfamiliar word. Using the grammar of the surrounding text, you can often tell an unfamiliar word’s part of speech. The nonsense words in this text also all use regular English grammatical endings, so those can help you as well. Be sure to determine the part of speech based on how the word is used in the sentence and not just on its grammatical ending.
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.
If you are reading a text for class, the comprehension questions your teacher has assigned can help you prioritize what parts of the text you need to focus on. For example, your teacher included a question that asked about the emotional relationship between the man and the girl in the boat. You will need to locate the part of the text that contains that information, and to prioritize those descriptive words that will help you understand that relationship.
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.
Once you’ve prioritized a word for look up, be sure you make a guess about its English equivalent before you actually look it up. If your guess is right (or a very close synonym to the right answer), then you are probably understanding the passage well. If your guess is very far from the right answer, be sure to re-read the passage to understand how that changes your sense of what the passage is about. If your guess is very far from the answer you find, check to make certain that the word doesn't have other meanings that might fight the context. There aren't an enormous number of homonyms in Russian, but many Russian words can be used in different senses or contexts. Be sure that you've got the right sense for your context.
Homonyms to look out for:
есть -- can be an infinitive "to eat," and it can be the third person of the verb быть meaning "there is/there are."
стали -- can be the past tense of стать = to become, begin OR the genitive/dative/prepositional of the noun сталь = steel
Words that are similar, but have different stress
за́мок - (noun) castle
замо́к - (noun) lock
мука́ - (noun) flour
му́ка - (noun) torment