Dictionary use seems too basic to think about, and then a learner meets 走って and cannot find it, because dictionaries list 走る.
Three specific skills make the difference.
Skill one: getting back to the dictionary form
Dictionaries list verbs in plain form. Real text contains conjugations.
To look up 食べさせられました you must work back to 食べる. The steps:
- Strip politeness: ました → た → plain past
- Recognise the ending: させられる is causative-passive
- Arrive at 食べる
This gets faster with practice, and it is genuinely worth practising. It also forces you to understand the grammar of what you are reading rather than just its meaning - the plain form.
Skill two: looking up kanji you cannot read
You cannot type a word you cannot read. Three ways around it:
Handwriting input. Draw the character on your phone. Stroke order affects accuracy, which is one practical argument for having written kanji at least a few times each: reading versus writing kanji.
Radical search. Identify a component - 氵for water, 木 for tree, 言 for speech - and search by it. This is the traditional method and it teaches you to see kanji as assembled rather than whole.
Camera lookup. Point your phone at the text. Excellent for signs and notices; unreliable on handwriting or low light.
Skill three: reading the entry properly
Most learners read the first line and stop, which is where wrong word choices come from.
A good entry gives you:
- Multiple senses, numbered. The first is not always the one you want.
- Register labels - formal, colloquial, vulgar. Ignore these and you will use anime vocabulary at work: learning from anime.
- Transitivity - whether the verb takes を or が. Critical for the transitive and intransitive pairs.
- Example sentences. The most useful part of any entry, and the part to copy into your word list.
Do not look up everything
When reading, most unknown words can be skipped. Ask one question: does the sentence make sense without it?
If yes, keep reading. Stopping at every unknown word destroys reading speed and is the main reason learners find reading practice exhausting: N3 reading speed.
Mark them, finish the passage, look up three at the end.
Use a monolingual dictionary eventually
Around N3, start checking words in a Japanese-Japanese dictionary as well. The definitions are in simple Japanese, they teach you the distinctions between near-synonyms that translation flattens, and they are excellent reading practice in themselves.
Not before you are ready - at N5 it is frustrating rather than useful.
Feed what you look up into your list
A word looked up and closed is a word you will look up again next week. A word looked up and captured, with its example sentence, is one you will know: building a personal word list.