Hi folks,
I’ve been studying for the JLPT N2 but since the exam is over I’m ready to set a different study focus. Recently I’ve realized that my vocabulary is seriously lacking in certain areas (eg. food, science) & I’d like to change that. Do you have any advice or specific resources for broadening your vocabulary across a wider range of topics? Native media like websites, books, magazines would be best, of course, but I’ll take textbooks too. And if you have specific strategies that have worked for you, I’d appreciate if you shared those too!
7 comments
Have you read Read Real Japanese: Essays? I highly recommend it along with digging through NHK’s website. If you’re in Japan, the morning news shows are quite good and cover a wide variety of newsworthy topics.
Japanese has a lot of these op-ed style pieces and they appear quite frequently on the N1 as well with questions asking to contrast and compare two authors views on the same topic.
for me, I just play games or watch anime with various genre, from detective, biology, court to how to drift a car.
Once you’ve hit N2 a lot of 入門 resources become very accessible. Stuff aimed at children using basic vocabulary interspersed with topical specific vocab. Stuff aimed at native speakers with no experience in the area. It feeds you vocabulary out of the palm of its hand. I can’t point you at any specifics right now, but ‘[topic you want to explore]入門’ in youtube usually gets some good results. Plus lots of Japanese subtitles these days so you can look up words.
I also search topic specific words on twitter and the tweets that come up are usually laden with field related vocab. Good to learn how things fit together in context and expand your vocab further.
東大tv has a lot of good stuff but these shorts are a good entry point:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6EBMvEIvyjwXqHweygHsO_rvZ5zzicAa
Jaxas public facing page is good too
https://fanfun.jaxa.jp/
Beyond that, google up the museum of (thing you’re interested in), lots have online material/video tours
Youtube is a great resource. Just look up native channels of the topics you like in Japanese. Sounds obvious, but yeah. Japanese content at real life speaking speeds. Food prep, Japanese mukbang channels, tech channels, science channels, etc. How much in depth do you want to go though, that’s up to you and where your interests lie.
I like Nakata University: [https://www.youtube.com/c/NKTofficial/featured](https://www.youtube.com/c/NKTofficial/featured) He covers a wide range of topics. Sushi Ramen Riku [https://www.youtube.com/c/SUSHIRAMEN-Riku1](https://www.youtube.com/c/SUSHIRAMEN-Riku1) He does silly science project stuff. For food I watch 大食い content. Maybe use these as a starting point of going down the rabbit hole of Japanese native youtube content. Lol.
wikipedia is an easy one i think lol
Shirabe Jisho app has premade flash cards and stuff u can use to extend ur vocabulary. Plus, I read manga on a Japanese website called Zebracks ぜブラック. I’m pretty sure it’s official, and it lets u read one chapter a day. One thing I want to point out is when reading or listening to Japanese. You have to learn the contractions speakers use because it can completely throw you off when trying to translate in ur head. Just search up Japanese contractions list.