Hi everyone, after ~2 months of learning and ~900/1000 words “learned” (I’m still in the process of learning some of them) through Anki and WaniKani I finally downloaded Migaku and started rewatching the first season of Karakai jouzu no Takagi-san, it took me an hour to watch the first ten minutes (mainly because I was still setting up my Anki deck and playing around the card type) but I absolutely loved it, I managed to mine 37 cards out of it (a lot of those were either onomatopoeia like fufufu, haha, etc…, some were more “audio description” of card, I don’t know how to phrase it in English sorry haha, like 笑い声, etc…)
I felt like I could mine way more words but I was a bit scarred that this would be overwhelming in the future, have some people experienced the same thing? If so, what did you do?
9 comments
how many words do you feel comfortable, 1, 2, 3 , 50 etc…..
just dont be one of those anki warriors where you have 10k cards after a week.
having fun is the most important part!
but imo, it is not really time efficient to do vocab mining. it will also get overhwleming quickly as you worried
wanikani (and naturally learning words through immersion/just watching anime) is completely sufficient for most people imo
wanikani covers basically all of n2 and most of n1 anyway so it is really only after you are quite sufficient in japanese that you will need to mine your own words to supplement wanikani
It comes down to preference. I’m that worried about the cards because with only a 20-minute episode you can mine 100 words or 5. So do as you feel comfortable and make your own Anki deck to review them 💪
Yeah those first few thousand words are going to be painful for sure. Definitely the worst part of the immersion learning experience for me. I recommend skipping onomatopoeia and rare words completely and just focus on getting the most common nouns, verbs, and adjectives for now. Do so at whatever pace you can sustain. If it gets to be overwhelming, you can just stop adding new cards until you stabilize your reviews.
I would get a frequency list like JPDB and only mine words under 5k. Imo mining words like 血痕 is less useful than words like 難しい at your current stage.
If you are serious about learning Japanese and are not superhuman, the best advice I have for you is to be patient and realize this is a marathon. Don’t sprint. Learning even two new words every day consistently for a year while reviewing old words regularly is better than trying to learn 100 new words a day for a week, burning out, and “getting back into Japanese” again next year. Same amount of time, same amount of words, but as you can guess the results are wildly different.
So, don’t bother adding more than, say, 7-10 words a day. If you can keep that up for, say, three years, that’s still in the neighborhood of 10,000 words.
Might get downvoted for this, but I wouldn’t mine until you get around 3k vocabulary or even 4k….
Immerse 24/7 if you can? Absolutely. But mining the sentences you find are going to be a bad idea as you’re not going to find many i+1 sentences I think. I would just mine straight out of a N5-N3 JLPT focused vocabulary book that has many example sentences on how that’s used. Get your vocab to 3-4k+, then you should be able to find some more i+1s in the wild.
The easy answer is however much you can while still maintaining an interest in learning. I started after about 4k words and have mined every word I’ve come across.
But at 1000 words, if you jump into native content, the amount of new stuff will be completely overwhelming if you mine everything, so I would recommend immersing while mining for a set time (like 1 hour) and aim to get a target number of cards from that, and then don’t mine after you hit that point.
I know people say you need 1000-3000 words before you start mining but 1000 is a bit rough. Luckily ur watching one of the easiest anime so I think it’s fine. Use https://jpdb.io to find the easiest anime to you might like. Try to finish at least 2k words before you get really into mining imo.
Anyway the answer is just whatever you think will be relevant, mine it. I know some people use frequency dictionaries and be like anything under 6k or 10k. I think you should have a rough idea like mining anything under 10k is good. But if there is a word that beyond 10k and is used often, maybe like some sci-fi word you would find in an anime you should add it.
Personally I kinda skip all of this by mining by frequency. This means that my anki cards are sorted by frequency such that I will always see the most frequent first and least frequent last, allowing me to add anything. I’m not sure if it works with ur workflow but here (just in case):
https://github.com/MarvNC/JP-Resources