[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i1lNJPY-4Q) talks about a method of learning languages that closely mimics how people learn languages naturally, and the first step is to learn 1000 or so really basic words and move up from there.
Is there a good list of such words for Japanese? I can find lists of 100 or so but that’s not nearly enough.
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[https://www.kanshudo.com/collections/routledge](https://www.kanshudo.com/collections/routledge) refers to a frequency list of the top 1,000 words so you can use just the first one thousand.
Anki decks like core2k or tango N5 would get you over that hurdle. Also give jpdb.io a look, it has too many useful features to count
Make a list from your textbook
Tango n5 + n4 or the anacreon 2.3k decks do exactly this
Kids learn their first language by being immersed in it full time. It takes them roughly 5 years to get decently conversational. That’s ~14 * 365 * 5 = 25,550 hours of immersion. It’s not immersion in any kind of carefully selected content, it’s not based on any frequency lists, nothing like that. The language they are immersed in depends on two things:
1. the world around them
2. their and their parents’ own interests
THAT would be mimicking how people learn languages “naturally”. You, walking around in Japan all day, constantly pointing at thing and asking people “what’s that?” and “why is that?”, watching cartoons in Japanese, reading stories in Japanese, and in general following your interests and living your life. In Japanese.
Everything else we do is not that. Everything else is a hack to try and speed up that process, rather than mimic it. Obviously, this includes what you’re asking for. Kids aren’t memorizing words off a frequency list.
And I have some bad news: the science I’ve seen suggests that the hacks don’t work, and that progress in language learning is a function of the volume of comprehensible input, and not much else. Not gonna tell you what to do, but if you were to accept this premise, then it follows that you might as well have that input consist of things you’re interested in and enjoy, rather than things off a list some stranger put together. If it doesn’t matter either way, then why would you bore yourself to death with a frequency list, instead of pursuing a personal interest?
First 1k of: [https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2141233552](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2141233552)
or you can use [https://jpdb.io/new-deck-from-top-vocabulary](https://jpdb.io) and make a deck of the most 1k common words
I’ve been enjoying this deck: https://refold.la/japanese/deck/
It’s specifically the 1000 most common words from slice of life media, which overlaps much more with what media I consume and want to consume than frequency lists based on newspapers or something
The more words I study, the more I start to suspect that frequency lists have limitations that weren’t apparent to me when I started
* It’s understandable that lists were mined from frequency using printed text, but I suspect that if your goal is to talk to your mother in law, her speaking frequency is different than the top 1000 words from manga or newspapers.
* If your goal (like mine) was to understand tickets, maps, signs and menus, it was unusually hard for me to find such a list.
* It’s somewhat easier to find lists of lists of common words (without frequency) for topics, like “most common words from video game menus”, but it’s just a hand compiled list. It would be kind of neat to see “out of the topic I care about, like cookbooks, what are the 1000 most common words”.
I don’t know the answer to these, I”m still looking myself, but it seems like this is an area that’s ripe for disruption in the study space. Some kind of list generation system that was tailored to the learner’s topics of interest and separates spoken frequency from printed frequency.
I guess a frequency list would be the best. Even if you try n5 and n4 decks, there’ll be lots of words that aren’t common in there. However, they’re still useful for learning and getting used to, and understanding the kanji that are in those words though. In this way, seemingly obscure words can still be useful. It’s good to check the kanji though to make sure it’s not one that is only used for that single word. I wouldn’t waste time learning many of those at the beginning. I recommend the Kanji God addon for Anki if only for the “search kanji” feature.
Sometime next year I’m going to share an Anki deck I’ve been working on that will help people looking for this. I’m collecting tons of recordings from native stuff and will compile what were the most useful and frequent words I came across.
I’d look at the JLPT vocab lists
jpdb.io has a frequency list for words and kanji. However, that’s only for things in its db which are mostly novels, light novels, web novels, visual novels and anime. I think It has some newspapers too. So if you want to understand those, it’s good. Might not be so good for daily life in japan