For example, if I am talking about receiving something, and want to make a card for a word like “receive” or “get”, how would I know which word is the most important to learn first? うける, とる, and もらう all seem to be able to have that meaning (among other things). I assume there are subtle little differences between all of them and when to use them that will naturally just get learned over time through experience, but
what I am specifically asking is how to know when to make cards for these kinds of words and which to prioritize when I am looking to learn a particular English word in Japanese. If I am looking to learn the word “receive”, do I just write down all of the top results in a dictionary, such as Jisho.org? I just feel as if that would be very overwhelming to do for every word…you know…every other time I want to learn a new word having to make 3 new cards for the one word. There must be some way to figure out which to study now and which to just study later, right?
Since each word has its own unique kanji, I don’t want to lump it all into one card…that’d be far too overwhelming to take in + again, they all have slightly different meanings but are all commonly used, so I don’t view it as a very good idea.
This has been the #1 thing making me metaphorically pull my hair out for a while now that I can’t quite seem to get. There have been so many cases of me using a word, then only to find out later “oh, actually THIS word is better for this situation, and that word you just used, despite being in a dictionary and being one of the higher results, isn’t used very often/is more commonly used for THIS meaning of it”.
Anyone got any advice for me? Any advice is appreciated.
5 comments
In the beginning, trust a pre-made beginner vocab list, after that make your flashcards from reading/listening to actual Japanese with proper context, not based on isolated dictionary lookups.
Cure Dolly has a whole video about もらう and てもらう
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CESFJaFp8FI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CESFJaFp8FI)
I suggest trying to understand the grammar – because its not which word is which that confuses you – it is how they are used.
Dont think about words like this. How would a Japanese person know what 違う means in english? Should they learn it as “wrong” or “different” or “incorrect”?
They’re all completely different words in English, only with the same Japanese word. Japanese and English don’t translate well, thats all, you need to see better explanations and sentences which use the word
When starting to learn vocab, don’t be too worried if you can’t see the differences between words that seem to be defined very similarly in English. Just learn the given meanings (use a pre-made list of common words). As you start reading and listening later, you’ll come across these words in context and you can study them in more detail then. Often the context will clarify many of the nuances for you.
Just quickly learn a whole load of basic words (about 1000) to start with – even if you don’t fully understand the nuances of some of them, and then start reading.
As a starting point, you could search them by use frequency and prioritize learning the most commonly used one.