Do you treat proper names like city names, person names etc.. as “normal vocabulary” or do you mostly “ignore” them?

6 comments

1. depends

   if you are reading a book about some town, or you are interested in some particular time or place or person, you may as well learn the proper noun

   if you encounter some proper noun in passing and look it up and won’t probably ever see it again, why waste time on anki reviews with that thing you will never encounter

   you have to use your own judgement on a case-by-case

2. It depends a lot I think

   Major regions are very important, stuff like prefecture names or famous sites
   Very famous names as well, I’d ignore some celebrity names but 坂本龍馬? I’m going to learn that name, same for famous characters like 桃太郎

3. [deleted]

4. Depends whether major place or somewhere less famous/important.

   As a rule of thumb, I just assume anything that I can’t understand is news/novels is a name of a place or person. It is 90% of the time 🤣

   Recently, I have been forced to memorise 大谷翔平 as there seems to be no escaping him.

5. I didn’t bother with them when I was a beginner. Even now, I wouldn’t worry about specific names (of individual people/places/etc.) but I would recommend learning the titles, especially if you plan to live in Japan or study into advanced Japanese.

   So things like, I dunno, the proper nouns for President / Prime Minister, the Diet, Ministry of~, those kinds of words you should probably learn. Do you need to remember Mr. so-and-so, or random city names? Probably not

   I do recommend learning at least the names of the prefectures though

6. Depends.

   仙巌園 is very specific. 園 as a suffix is common and useful. Hyde Park is useful to know if you live in or are going to visit London. Park is useful always.

   薩摩 is useful to recognise if you’re into history or potatoes, but not much otherwise.

   曲水の宴 is described in the article so you shouldn’t even need to look it up.