When I was training to become an ESL teacher, they told me to discourage dictionary use because the students should learn to understand the word from context. I thought that was a terrible fucking idea. To demonstrate why, I'm going to translate a paragraph from a book in French, replacing with asterisks any word that I didn't know off the top of my head:

"The glorification of the cloister has been a major theme of monastic spirituality and literature in the 12th century. The two most remarkable ****** of this devotion are School of the Cloister by the Benedictine Peter of Celle, died in 1182; and the De claustro animae (The Cloister of the Soul) by the ******* Augustinian Hugh of Fouilloy, near to Corbie, died in 1174. Peter of Celle insisted on the ******* of the cloister, which are the tranquility of the soul (quies), and the ****** done entirely in the place of devotion (otium)."^*

Awesome. Can you tell from context what any of that means?

^* Le Goff, Jacques, Héros et merveilles du Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 105-06.