I’ve been unconsciously acquiring Japanese for years when I watched anime, and in the past couple months I’ve finally started to take it seriously and actually learn the language.
But here’s the interesting thing: while I already know a lot of more intermediate words like 求める, 憧れる, 怪しい, at the same time, I realized that I know barely any vocabulary. I don’t know the names of basically any food, I don’t know the names of the months, I don’t know the right way to say the time, there are just so many simple things that I skipped over. My grammar and sentence structure is decent, and I’m able to comprehend a good amount of what I hear. I can understand 80% of what’s being said in an easier to comprehend anime. But I also know barely any basic vocabulary.
In your opinion, what would be the fastest/best way to just learn a lot of basic vocab that beginners would be learning? Should I even learn them right now? Or should I try to pick them up once I’m at a more advanced level?
5 comments
You could just use an Anki deck that follows a textbook. I know there are decks for Genki as well as for Marugoto. Probably for the other popular ones as well.
You also might want to just take a language course to also get Grammar down as well as some basic real world sentences like “I am X drom Y and my favorite hobby is Z” instead of just the omae wa mo shindeiru 😀
I like renshuu.org for this, makes it easy to just add early vocab lists of all sorts into your study and better than Anki at this level IMO
How did you learn these words? If you learned them from anime, then just add those words. Almost ever anime, at least the ones I have seen well use months, days, and basic vocab, which is where I learned most of my words.
If you want a more direct way, just download a basic 1000 word deck and run through that, should only take a couple of months and do that while watching.
If you only watched anime and did not have much of an other input, I would recommend spending some time (even just a week) on basic grammar and texts, because you may realize you may misunderstand many things which may be good to be tackled right away.
I tell you so just because when I started, I had lot of grinded hours on japanese content, but a lot of things that I picked up were slightly misleading and hindered my understanding for the first few months or so. Still I did not know any kanji as I’m european so I had to start from the very very beginning on that side, and I think starting from and consolidating the very basics has proven really useful on the long run.
In my opinion, the best approach is to learn words you encounter, selecting those which fall within a certain frequency range. The range itself should be adjusted depending on your known vocabulary. It’s all about the probability of encountering words again, and very rare words would be almost useless.
That’s what I do as well. I add every single unknown word to Anki, but learn only the most important ones, typically 30 words a day. Sometimes I learn rare words simply because I like them, but that’s more of an exception.