How can I expand my vocabulary?

7 comments

1. For learning and immersing casual speak, shows like terrace house are really good – you can get the browser extension language reactor to enable Japanese subs and also it can be used to translate YouTube videos… but before you get to that you’ll probably want to get into learning kanji with an anki deck and go through the genki textbooks. Those are the resources that I like the most. Good luck, it’s super rewarding!

2. My advice is to not only focus on JLPT’s vocabulary but try to read as much as you can anything you like. News web easy NHK, novels suited to you level, etc…

   It’s a constant challenge, I know ~20k words but every 4/5 pages I have to check something.

   Keep pushing 🤝🏼

3. Japanese Twitter and YouTube comments will teach you a load of slang and rude words, along with informal language in general.

4. Anywhere.

   I used Duolingo for that for a long time because it focuses on sentences and having that context helps me remember the words better.

   Once I was past that stage (and I didn’t learn all the words Duo tries to teach you, I ended up getting stuck actually.) I moved on to media and just looked up all the words I didn’t know in games and TV.

   You’ve been at this for 3 months so I’d stick to learning via apps like Duolingo and Memrise…. try both.

5. Just read, man. There’s no other way around it. Read anything and everything you want to in Japanese. Imo, visual novels are really good for reading (buy one or pirate it then search how to setup visual novels with Textractor and a texthooker).

   When you come across a sentence, use Yomichan or Jisho to search every word and grammar point up and try and formulate an understanding of the sentence. If it makes sense to you and you understand the sentence, move on. If not, take about 30 seconds to piece the sentence together, and if you still don’t understand, move onto the next sentence. Check out Refold’s guide on intensive immersion for more clarification on how to go about reading.

6. There’s a N5 Vocabulary deck for Anki. It would be a good start, probably.

7. I started using hello talk. I’ve found it hard to find people to maintain decent conversation with but at the moment I have a language partner who is incredibly understanding of my terrible command of the language.

   I’ll read what I can, then translate his response. When it comes to my response if I don’t know how to say what I want then I’ll just go and look it up.

   I also follow alot of Japanese people on social media, it helps I’m big into some of the music scenes over there so there’s a multitude of musicians and bands to connect with, but it’s the same principle. I’ll read what I can in their posts and look up the rest. Maybe it’s slow and not the most efficient but I find it fun!