What kind of material do you recommend to expand vocabulary?

4 comments

1. Textbooks?

2. Generally reading is faster than listening/watching, but nothing can beat SRS. Also it depends on how you read, because it’s a scale from ignoring unknown words to spending like 15-30s trying to memorize each unknown word. All that affects how fast you can learn, but usually 1 hour of reading results in learning ~15 words.

   Another question is what genre you use and what you want to achieve. If you want to pass N1, but read fantasy books, you are doing it very hard way, because words like swords appear in tens of times more often than words like office. So you learn outside of JLPT vocabulary first and it’s actually possible to learn for a year, improve a lot, but have absolutely the same JLPT score, simply because you was learning things outside of test range.

3. Pretty much whatever you enjoy

4. I can recommand you to take the vocabulary of JLPT N5, arount 600 words, very useful. That can help you to read. And once your done, continue with the voc of N4.

   Or you can download Anki and search for some deck about manga/animé vocabulary. More quickly by this way 🙂 if you learn 15 words per day, you will be really good in less than one year !