Whenever I learn a new language, there always comes a time when I start to get good enough at it to recognize and understand certain words, but not good enough to know every word I come across.  I can read half a sentence but not the whole sentence, understand half a paragraph but not the whole paragraph.  This is a difficult time for a learner because you’re just on the cusp of truly using the language to read, but you don’t feel good enough to actually use it because you only understand half of what you read.  How do you get better?

The answer (so I’ve been taught) is you still try to read.  Even if you don’t understand everything, even if you only understand half of it, you try to read what you can so you can get familiar with the language and start learning by using.  Most words we know were probably never defined to us specifically, did anyone ever define to word “anyone” to you?  Instead as learners we pick them up by context clues and other hints, and start using them the way we read or heard them.  This can occasionally lead to hilarity, like how I once heard someone describe a child as homely instead of comely, but it can also lead to learning as you start to use and understand each new word you read.

So if I’m reading something and I come upon words I don’t understand, I was taught not to look each one of them up, but instead to just keep reading and try to figure them out as I go.  I may read a sentence that says “he went to the 餐厅, and after he’d finished his meal he…”.  Although I don’t know what 餐厅 means directly, it seems that “he” ate their, so it must be some sort of eating place.  Now whenever I see that word again I see if it seems to have something to do with eating, and if it does then I can learn by usage that 餐厅 means “a place where you eat.” Through this process I can slowly pick up the language through usage rather than trying to stop and look up every word.

But here’s the secret: this trick also works with scientific writing.  Scientific writing is filled to the brim with jargon and odd definitions.  What is an SDS-PAGE?  What is an HPLC?  And not only are the words difficult, the concepts are difficult, why did they use centrifugation to separate out the nucleus?  Why does electron microscopy not let you visualize the less-rigid parts of a protein?  When you start out as a scientist, you are often told to read scientific papers, and scientific papers can feel like you’re reading a foreign language!  But the same rules apply as reading a foreign language, you don’t always have to know every word when you’re starting out, or even every concept.  It’s more important to develop scientific language fluency so that you can get the big idea out of a paper and understand it when speaking with others.  For example, they used HPLC to separate a protein of interest from all the other proteins in a cell.  OK so HPLC is a purification technique, I don’t need to know how it works if all I’m interested in is that protein of interest.  I can move on to what the paper says about the protein secure in the knowledge that it is indeed pure.  If later on if HPLC becomes more important then I can do a quick search or deep dive to understand more of it, but it isn’t always necessary to know every single word or technique in a paper. Reading scientific papers is a skill, one I’ve had to devote a lot of time to getting better at, but once you develop knowledge of the jargon and techniques it gets a lot easier, and importantly you develop the skills necessary to learn any new jargon or techniques that you come across.  And that is the real skill, not the knowledge of specific things but the ability to learn new things.  That is what truly makes a scientist.