1000 most common words

3 comments

1. >a way that seems interesting to me. 1000 most common words

   thats generally where most people start. i mean after learning the kana theres not much else to do other than learning the most common words. have you tried googling a japanese word frequency list

2. yeah people do this with pre-made anki decks

   or a textbook will contain mostly very common words (genki has some (in)famous exceptions such as 経済)

   it’s a more common strategy to learn the common words first than to learn the esoteric words first

   but we all are gonna know some weird words that we thought were funny or whatever

3. I think that the strategy have some limits.

   For example the website jpdb have the option to create custom deck with the to xxxx words in their database. While those words are the most frequent, you would find that a lot of them are actually what websites like bunpro consider a grammar point. So while you can understand some with the basic translation, many would benefit from a deeper explanation

   Second problem could be that even if you know the top 1000 words, you do not have much vocabulary to speak about a specific subject.

   Also the difference between learning Italian and Japanese is that there is more similarities with other European languages than in Japanese.

   While books might not be perfect, they often have some sort of structure, teaching words in a certain order so you can create dialogue related to some topics from the start. And you might need a mix of less common words too.

   No idea what book you used, but I guess it did not try to teach you a 1000 katakana word before even touching on grammar or hirakana/kanji words, or maybe it’s just not the book you should use.