As the title says. I did an intensive 2 year masters degree, one academic year was pure Japanese, so I passed N3 within about 9 months from 0. I always struggled with vocab. I made anki decks throughout my course for everything; vocab, grammar and kanji – the kanji in particular worked really well. I’ve since been using wanikani as it offers more structure than my Anki decks did. The only way I seem to be able to learn vocab is through kanji, which has been fine until I started to focus specifically on N2 vocab that I haven’t really seen before.
I have been doing practice N2 tests and usually score pretty well, but I pretty much infer meaning from my kanji ability. In the event an unfamiliar kanji comes up, or I don’t know how to interpret the meaning of two familiar kanji together, I struggle.
I’m taking the N2 this December just to see where I’m at since I took a break from studying to focus on work but need something to motivate me to study. Fully expecting to fail but want to make progress nonetheless.
Any tips for retaining vocab would be really helpful, it honestly just falls out of my brain.
3 comments
Most of my N2 “study” comes from consuming raw native material, whether it is reading LNs in Japanese or watching anime without subs. A thing that you cannot shortcut with mere study of N2 materials or doing practice tests is EXPERIENCE with handling native material. Higher level vocabulary is inherently more difficult to review because if you don’t see them that often outside of study, they’re going to slip out of your brain at some point. The only way to really keep the ball rolling is a lot of exposure to native material and you’re more likely to remember the word when associated with a book you read or a show you watched rather than your association with it merely being the review book.
For vocab I do anki and just play games in japanese but for a little bit of an explanation. I just translate part of a sentence or a full sentence then move on. Seems to work better than just studying that one word and for kanji I do the same thing except when I play the game I read the paragraph with furigana then back again with the kanji
i use an anki deck for vocab and i also play games and take words i don’t know, throw them onto my notes app with a definition, and then put those words on an anki deck later on when i’m done with the game session.
word on front of card and then translation/reading/audio/definition on the back of the card