How do you learn vocabulary?

6 comments

1. By reading japanese books, comics, websites, and games.

2. I wrote this copypasta/collection of links for one of the discord servers but anyway here goes:

   First Read This: https://refold.la/simplified/stage-1/a/vocabulary

   Then Read This: https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-2/a/basic-sentence-mining

   For Anki Advice read https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-1/a/anki-setup and https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-1/c/srs-best-practices

   Recommended tool: Yomichan

   Learn more here: https://learnjapanese.moe/yomichan/

   How to easy sentence mine with yomichan: https://animecards.site/yomichansetup/

   —–

   They are all useful links and guides that I feel are helpful for people trying to figure out how to “learn words”

3. You are overthinking this. Pick any of the popular Anki decks (Core, Tango, Genki, …) and learn your first ~2000 words from there. I would suggest to do 10-15 new words/day, so this is going to take a while. You can worry about making your own cards afterwards or when you get tired of learning from a fixed list. Once you get there, don’t worry about learning “wrong words”. If the same word keeps showing up in the media you consume, then clearly it is relevant to you and you should learn it. If not then not. That is the whole reason behind making your own flashcards.

   If you want a recommendation for a beginner deck, I would use the [Core 2.3](https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/docs/coredeck/) if your goal is to consume popular media (anime, light novels, etc) or the regular Core 2k otherwise. But other beginner decks will do, too. It’s all very basic words.

4. I would recommend looking at some textbooks, maybe [Genki](https://www.tofugu.com/reviews/genki-textbook/). It would definitely help with the reading (kanji) side of things (and writing if you use the accompanying workbook).

   For listening comprehension, grammar and vocabulary nuances, and much more, I think [JapanesePod101](https://www.thejapanguy.com/japanesepod101-review/) is a great option. Each lesson, you’ll be introduced to vocabulary specific to the lesson’s theme/topic, which will help you in building vocabulary for use depending on the situation.

   Apart from those, consuming Japanese media such as TV (variety, news, anime) and texts (news, blogs, manga) can help you become familiar with Japanese in context, outside of textbooks.

   Keep in mind that if you only watch anime or read manga, you might end up with some bad habits in regards to the vocabulary used in them.

5. reading

6. I would recommend taking a look at [LivaKivi’s guide to learning Japanese](https://youtu.be/KygsjMUj_C0), and in particular the part about [learning vocabulary with Anki](https://youtu.be/husCWKdxiRI). It’s a very good guide, even if a little on the longer side.

   In the [sentence mining](https://youtu.be/QBcQJESGQvc) entry of LivaKivi’s series, he talks about the process of harvesting new vocab words from YouTube videos and anime, and turning them into Anki cards. If this mode of learning sounds like something you might be interested in, I would also recommend taking a look at some of the articles in [this guide](https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/table-of-contents.html), which is more in-depth and up-to-date. It gives instructions for Linux, but I am fairly certain that you can get the same setup working on Mac, Windows or BSD. The TLDR of it is:

   1. Anki is great, but needs some setup
   1. With Yomichan, you can lookup the definition of any Japanese word you see on a webpage and save it into an Anki deck.
   1. The combination of anki, yomichan, and a thing called mpvacious lets you do the same, but with youtube videos and anime, provided you can find content with Japanese subtitles.