Learning vocabulary with novels

6 comments

1. You certainly could use novels but without a solid foundation, you should expect to look up every single word on a page. For an actual novel, what that means is potentially about a hundred words per page, give or take.

   One major problem with novels, though, is that if you want to become familiar with conversations as opposed to written prose, you won’t necessarily get a lot. It’ll depend on the author, but a novel can cut down dialogue to just the essentials and fill in the rest with narration. Even then, the prose can become a lot more “fancy” than the dialogue, giving you a lot of words that won’t be immediately useful in conversation, if you plan on doing any of that.

   There are graded readers that help newbies learn vocab without just doing rote memorization through Anki reviews. If you don’t want either of those, at least start with slice of life manga. They will show you fairly fleshed out conversations and the words you learn will carry over well into daily life so it’ll be worth it. The visuals will also give you context so that you can begin to learn some words intuitively.

   Also, I do recommend doing Anki, but if you’re not going to do that, it might be beneficial for you to use a dictionary that has custom word list support. Shirabe Jisho for iOS and Yomiwa for Android have this.

2. Even if your grammar knowledge is already advanced, if you lack the vocabulary I would still recommend starting reading with graded readers. They are written in a way that learners are able to understand what’s going on even if they don’t understand every single word. I believe they will help you reaffirming the words you already know while exposing you to new words bit by bit. If you feel like it’s too easy you can always go one level up. Have a look e.g. at the [tadoku graded readers](https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/) or [YomuJP easy non-fiction](https://yomujp.com/).

3. My opinion is if you’re gonna look up every word you come across, you might as well expend that effort on frontloading the most common ones through SRS. Would be a much more efficient use of your time.

4. vocabulary and grammar are both needed, you can’t avoid either

   you don’t need to ask permission to immerse in media, go watch or read things and see how it works, if it’s too hard, pick something easier

   yes you’ll need to memorize the words, or it’ll be an awful slog trying to read anything of significance. yes you can get it by looking it up as you go and reinforcing with more reading and listening, but if you find yourself looking up the same words over and over, you need to do something more reinforcing than that

   ultimately, it’s best to engage all senses, that includes reading, writing, listening, and speaking – using both vocab and grammar in proper context in as many ways as possible

5. I do not see how you could possibly be advanced in grammar and yet know almost no basic vocab – half the grammar is solely uses of various vocab to have specific nuances. How will you know 割に but not 割? Or 我ながら which is a different point than ながら? You will likely not be able to tell what is “grammar” if you know only like 100 words. I think there is over 600 common grammar points you need to know to be at a level sufficient to read novels. That aside – SRS vocab otherwise you will waste your time if you know so little vocab.

6. Honestly, you could go about this a few ways.
   1. Since your grammar knowledge is good enough, you can just download something like yomichan, download novel epubs and use ttsu to read them. Yomichan is a pop-up dictionary that allows you to search up vocab on the fly. Alongside that, you can use a premade vocab deck or start sentence mining

   2. Use graded readers to build up a good understanding of how the vocab is used and then slowly move onto native materials. I recommend using either graded readers or Satori Reader.

   3. Just going full on premade deck, pre-learning a bunch of vocab first, then reading a novel or two. I’d recommend going with the first option though.