When my students ask me, I tend to tell them to focus on the nouns and verbs that repeat within a text, but it really isn't a very precise answer. How can you know what is a frequently appearing word unless you read the entire text? Sure, you can look up words upon a second reading, but this technique really doesn't help for a first reading.
However, if you have electronic text or if you can scan in your text, there is a product online that can give you a very precise answer.
VocabGrabber is a thesaurus that allows you to copy and paste in text you are reading and it will show you which words are the key words from the text.
Example
For this blog post, I copied and pasted the entire book Daisy Miller by the American author Henry James into VocabGrabber. Here are what the results look like:
Do you know the meaning of the words parasol, Colosseum, or coquette? According to VocabGrabber, you just might need to know these words if you read Daisy Miller!
Exercise
Take text from an English book/article you are currently reading and see what VocabGrabber recommends as your necessary vocabulary for comprehension.
Note: Daisy Miller is a brilliant tale of a young, naive American who gets up to mischief in Rome during the mid-nineteenth century. If you haven't read it but you are trying to break into native English language literature, this might be a great tale to start with.
Second Note: I won't leave you hanging with the vocabulary words I mentioned above in Daisy Miller. Here are their definitions:
Essential Vocabulary
parasol ~ a sun umbrella for women which was very popular in the nineteenth century and earlier.
Colosseum ~ this is the famous stadium from the Roman era in Rome.
coquette ~ a polite term for a female who is a flirt. Originating from French.
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