What's your first instinct when you come across a new English word or phrase?

To remember _anything_ you need to interact with it. Listen and look, then speak and write. Listen to it in isolation on pronunciation channels or sites, read the definition, say it out loud, listen to it in sentences, read example sentences, write it in sentences, read the sentences aloud. Having short sessions more often is better than a few long sessions. Advice given to native speakers is: look for excuses to use the new word until you're comfortable with it. Also, there are a million words. Nobody knows all of them, certainly nobody uses all of them. You don't need to know them all either.

I don’t think that most native speakers are trying that hard to remember the meaning of obscure words that they had to look up the definition for. I will look up a word to understand it in the context of what I hearing/reading, but unless it’s a very useful word, I don’t bother trying remember it. I do write down new words that I feel might be useful to me, though. Since you are learning English, don’t stress over obscure words that most people don’t use in real life. Focus on words in everyday use and worry about those obscure words later.

"Watching a movie or web series on Netflix and you come across a new word or phrase in the subtitles?" idk i learned english by basicly knowing \~20% of the words and some general rules and than reading english books or watching english movies, and whenever i met a word i didnt know i just tried to guess it based on context - which honestly worked realy great long term - realy took some thinking but whenever i got the right solution i basicly never forgot it again

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pai8zPTDvZU

It depends if I can guess what the word means based on the context or sentence. If I can't (maybe 20% of the time) then I'll Google the definition and that's about it.

wow, that is not how i would’ve spelled that first guess…

That's not English.

I've never seen that word written out! It's that thing how English freely borrows words from other languages. It's pronounced like "cah-PEESH". It's Italian and used to mean "ok?" or "get it?" I'm in the Midwest. I haven't heard it in real life much at all, mostly in TV shows and movies and typically with Italian-American characters and set in NY. Honestly, if you were to say it around here, it's because you just saw a mafia/crime movie or you want to sound like a gangster, or you in general have a lot of attitude or a very big personality and it's part of your lexicon. I can think of one time I heard it in real life, 25 years ago. It was in jr. high a teacher said it after assigning homework on one of those days when the class was being rowdy and irritating her.

Make a flashcard for it in [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net)

Everyone's so focused on 'capisce' (I mean, I get it 😅) that they aren't really answering your original question. Let me try to rectify that: From my own perspective as a native speaker, my first instinct is to grab the dictionary and thesaurus. Then, if it's something *really* esoteric that I'm not grasping, I'll check for other online resources - like things here on Reddit, or YouTube videos. I'm not sure any of that is earth shattering news or unexpected to anyone. But there it is.

My first instinct (as a native English speaker) is to see if I can figure it out from context, as I’m not really too fussed about knowing the exact definition of every word. If I’m reading a book and see a word I don’t know, as long as I feel I get the gist of what is trying to be conveyed, then that’s good enough for me. However, if I feel I’m missing something by not understanding it, or if it’s a word that crops up a few times and I still don’t entirely know what it means, then I’ll look it up just to give me a better idea of what’s being said if it comes up again later.

Capisce is an Italian word. The way it's being used here is traditional in American culture, however it's being spelled incorrectly. The proper Italian conjugation for Capire for the second person, You, is capisci. However early Italian immigrants to the US were from Southern Italy, which has a regional dialect where the ending vowels are de-stressed or even dropped, so capisci, wound up sounding like "capishe". So people misspell it when trying to recreate the stereotypical Italian-American accent, and accidentally wind up spelling it capisce, which is the third person conjugation.

Figure it out from context. I don't remember if I've ever needed to look something like this up from usage in an English language film.

Well that's Italian, so ...

Ummm Why does it sound like that Oh that right This sounds like that