I saw in a video recently that one of the three most important steps to learning a language is to memorize one thousand of the most important words to you in your life in the target language, so you don’t get bogged down with unnecessary words or things that will confuse you, however, does this method work quite the same in Japanese? I’m sure that for a language structured more closely to (in my case) English, learning important words and then stringing them into sentences may not work the same way. For example, (and I used Google Translate for this so it may be wrong) for the words “is” “that” “a” and “cat” you get “wa” “a” “sore ka” and “neko”, but combine them together and you get “sore wa nekodesu ka”. Now, where did that come from? I can still understand what it means, but for learning new vocabulary would the method of memorizing a thousand of the most important words in your every day life in Japanese really be that effective considering the differences in sentence structure and vocabulary?
3 comments
Basically you are asking if something like the Core 2k is a SRS (Spaced Repetition System) with Anki (or other system) to learn the most common 1000 (in your case) words is a good idea. It is. Though it is only a foundation, but how you pick those words and whether or not they are useful to you will be debatable. You will need to learn grammar to understand the language’s structure and to comprehend sentences.
From experience, 8k words is good for general comprehension and 20k is able to comprehend pretty much anything with context. Even elementary school kids know more than 5k words – and many of those words are informational words which are critical to understanding the world around you. A limited set of words means you will often have difficulty describing things, but you can still be understood and interact will a limited vocab. “Book lending place” as library and so on.
what you’re asking is just vocabulary vs grammar. you should learn both at the same time, there’s really no meaning in learning only vocab and not know how they should be used in a sentence, the same way it must be pretty annoying to learn grammar and being unable to recall basic day-to-day vocab to build a basic sentence
I sincerely advise you to thoroughly go through the sidebar and read about the methods and suggested materials.
Don’t worry about the “how” in the beginning phase, just start with a widely accepted textbook and/or a online guide like Tae Kim. Beginner material won’t come and teach you unnecessary words and whatever else; everything you learn from it will be fundamental.