**Context:** I’m looking to put together my own Anki deck since I’ll be travelling to Japan for vacation next year and want to have the necessary vocabulary to conversate with locals, not necessarily just JLPT vocabulary words. Some of the JLPT lists I’ve seen have # of nouns = # of adjectives, which I think is a bit too many adjectives? I still will be drawing vocabulary from JLPT lists though, just not loading entire lists into Anki.
What should someone reasonably aim for to have a good balance of word types for conversation? Maybe something like 50% nouns, 35% verbs, 15% adjectives? Feel free to also add percentages for adverbs and other types of words I can’t quite recall at this moment, thank you!
3 comments
Just learn words roughly by frequency and you will naturally pick up a good balance.
Edit: Alright, here is the ratio you will get if you learn words by frequency: The breakdown of the Core 6K (most frequent 6,000 words from newspapers) is 53% nouns, 31% verbs/verbal nouns, 15% adj/adv, 1% auxiliary words and pronouns.
which percentage do you use in your native language?
exactly
[Your question is a really good example of an X-Y problem](https://xyproblem.info/) – Japanese doesn’t even have the same parts of speech as English does, and I would be surprised if anyone good says that they’re good because they optimized that ratio.
Here’s something closer to solving the problem you have.
First: you need to define what kinds of conversations you intend to have. “A reasonably intelligent conversation about any topic of general interest, say at B1 level or so,” is still a really big goal for one year. Narrowing your focus will make this more reasonable.
Next you need to understand what people say during those kinds of conversations. A conversation in which you don’t understand other people is pretty pointless, and saying things that you don’t understand is even worse. You’re going to need a *lot* of listening practice. A thousand hours sounds doable, you still have a year, and if that’s focused in a narrow domain you might be able to squeeze some usable skill out of it.
Next, you need confidence and speaking skill. There’s a bit of a debate between early and late practice of speaking, but with only a year I don’t think that debate is worth having: practice early. Look into chorusing.
If you absolutely study your butt off for a year, like six hours a day, I don’t think it’s impossible.
But… I’m not sure that’s your goal, or an amount of time you can commit.