Thanks, some helpful responses.

it sounds like youre taking on readings that are too difficult. you really shouldn't ever be be struggling too much other than maybe learning the first 1000 words (I see you have over 2000 known words).

I would advise to go straight to reading in LingQ and look up words that you don't know. Do this until you're at C1/C2. Choose texts with difficulty that leaves you with no more than 10% yellow words (compared to total word count) once you finish the text. Really this should probably be closer to 5% once you get further along (B1/B2). Do this for a few months and if you feel that it's too easy then find slightly harder texts. The mistake that a lot of beginners make is to read too difficult of texts and try to "study" it, break it down, and memorize. This is the classroom and memorization approach, and I would avoid that at all cost. Doing that approach is really just wasting a lot of time. You should be focusing more on total words read instead of known words. Try to get to 500k words read as soon as you can. You will know lots of words by then. If you want to go back and study later once you reach B2/C1 then that's a much better time for it, and you'll have a strong base of experience to draw from (e.g. "oh that's why they say it that way")

For the first month, I'd try to read at least 20k words. Then increase by 10k each month until you are reading 100k per month. At this point you'll have over 500k words read in 9 months. In the process you'll probably have learned 15-20k words. Then keep going until you've read 3M words. Don't forget to have fun.

PS, to give a broad description of the goal: massive amounts of reading of material that isn't too difficult rather than slow reading of difficult material. You should pick material that is easy enough that you can read a 2000-word text in less than 30 mins. If it takes you 1-2 hours then you've just wasted 1-2 hours of your time.

It depends on what you want to do. If you know most of the words in the text, you can do extensive reading outside of LingQ. If, however, there are many unknowns and you CAN'T get the gist of the story without looking up words, pull it into LingQ and look up words. It's not worth struggling on texts too hard for you without the aid of a dictionary. That's why the research papers talk about for extensive reading you should only have a few unknown words per page at a maximum (less than 2% is what they generally say).

Personally, at the beginner level, where I am with Italian at the moment, I do intensive reading, lingQing all new words, then reread (while listening) to the text afterwards, twice. I often have to click on several words because I've already forgotten them, but that's fine. Just make sure you have 'don't autoplay TTS when playing audio' turned on. After that, I can listen to the audio and remember the gist of the podcast/story/lesson and let my brain do its work.

Do this one:

2) Break down the chapter in LingQ, then afterward read it again.

Read it first in LingQ. As you read you can always try to ascertain the meaning in context in LingQ (and you should always be trying to do this). However, if it's not clear, then you can easily look up a word or phrase. I think struggling through it outside of LingQ is not an efficient use of time. If you don't know it, look it up. Also don't let yourself struggle too much trying to get the meaning in context. If it's not readily apparent, look it up.

That's not to say even in LingQ that it might not still be a struggle looking a lot of things up, but I think doing it outside of LingQ would be like hitting your head against a wall.

I also would personally read in sentence mode where you can get a rough translation for the entire sentence if you need it. I think it helps to notice the patterns of how certain words go together to derive a meaning.

You can read again if you desire. If I did I'd probably read it again exactly as I did the first time, but hopefully starting to understand things better and less look ups. Or you can try as Asad suggests, just reading through the 2nd time without looking anything up.

1. You should read the book on LingQ by looking up words. Do not worry if the reading speed is slow and not every sentence makes perfect sense to you. Keep reading by looking up words. This is called intensive reading.

2. Read the same book on your kindle device again. But read it extensively. This time you are not looking up words just doing normal reading still if you do not know the meaning of certain words keep reading.

I think you do not have to repeat it several times until you get the gist. It can be a very laborious and energy-draining exercise in retrospect.

Just import the chapter into LingQ , read it by looking up words then read it extensively without looking up words. In the end, it is the quantity that will help with your language acquisition process.