I am reluctant to post on these phonics threads because they often turn heated. However, I agree entirely with cat64 and Openbook. I think context and pictures are very important. I know that when I was young, I tried to avoid the use of a dictionary unless it was absolutely necessary, because it slowed down the process of reading books and turned it into a chore.
When I read Paddington Bear as a child, I did not understand all of the words. However, I was able to ignore certain difficult words and still understand the gist of the story. For other words I was able to infer the meaning from the context.
There will be children reading Paddington in China who may not know what marmalade is, but they can infer that it is something that Paddington likes to spread on his sandwiches, and that is a sufficient understanding. If they are shown a real jar of marmalade or a picture of marmalade then this will stick in their memories and the word will make more sense. The dictionary definition of marmalade i.e. "a preserve or confection made of the pulp of fruit" won't help them much.
Cartoons contain pictures and are very useful to learn to recognise and read words. If you see a picture of Dennis the Menace aiming his catapult at someone, the word catapult, with its strange spelling, gains meaning and sticks in the memory. The dictionary definition of a catapult as a slingshot is not very helpful and doesn't convey the image of a Y-shaped stick with elastic attached that enables projectiles to be fired.
If I read about "the hoplite phalanx marched into battle, singing a paean ..." I don't immediately reach for my dictionary, but am happy to infer that a paean is some sort of song, a hoplite is some sort of soldier and a phalanx is some sort of formation of soldiers. Reaching for the dictionary will slow me down and make me want to eventually close the book. The more I see the same words used in different contexts, the deeper my understanding of the words becomes. If a word becomes vital to my understanding and there is no way of making a rough inference, then I will be forced to resort to the dictionary.
On a first reading of Hegel, something like this would not make complete sense to me
"Pure Being and pure nothing, are therefore, the same? or that ?They are (i.e. being and nothing) in this unity (i.e. becoming) but only as vanishing, sublated moments. They sink from their initially imagined self-subsistence to the status of moments, which are still distinct but at the same time are sublated?? "
but I would hope that the meaning of sublated would become clearer as I persisted with the text. Reading complicated books and having to constantly refer to a dictionary soon becomes unpleasurable. It will eventually lead to you not attempting to read the book at all.
If you try to read novels in a foreign language, you soon realise that you have to make guesses at meaning from the context, because there are far too many words that you have never come across before. If you see no smoking signs of a cigarette in a red circle with a red line through it, with the words "rauchen verboten" and no entry signs with "eingang verboten", you can soon infer that verboten means forbidden.
I agree with cat64 that reading is complicated and does involve things like context and picture cues.