I think once you’ve gotten to 10k words, you’ll be in a good place to know if you need to Anki 20k words.
Depends how you want to learn vocabulary, or maybe better to say what words mean, that in some cases differ from knowing how words are used or knowing context related to it. The latter two are purely practical and you learn it by using Japanese and looking at how Japanese people use their language.
My personal approach is to learn initial 2-3k words using SRS, then read until you know ~15k vocabulary, then use SRS again. Because we need practical skills, you will need to use Japanese anyway, be it content, speaking or something else. In the process we can learn a lot passively, primarily when something appears multiple times. This ability to learn passively has diminishing returns, initially everything is unknown and it’s a overflow of what we can learn, but with time amount of unknown words become lower and these words become very rare and specific that sometimes we might not even see it for several years. This is why SRS becomes more important again, and gives us a stable flow of things to learn.
This range can vary depending on what you do. Listening/speaking, for example, is slightly harder, because there is no convenient way to translate unknown words and up to 6k range sometimes can be more fitting. But typing doesn’t differ so much from reading, you just translate everything you don’t know.
This is my personal approach. In cases like when you need to pass JLPT, it’s more advantageous to use SRS and limit vocabulary to something that can actually appear in a test of specific level.
3 comments
12k-15k
I think once you’ve gotten to 10k words, you’ll be in a good place to know if you need to Anki 20k words.
Depends how you want to learn vocabulary, or maybe better to say what words mean, that in some cases differ from knowing how words are used or knowing context related to it. The latter two are purely practical and you learn it by using Japanese and looking at how Japanese people use their language.
My personal approach is to learn initial 2-3k words using SRS, then read until you know ~15k vocabulary, then use SRS again. Because we need practical skills, you will need to use Japanese anyway, be it content, speaking or something else. In the process we can learn a lot passively, primarily when something appears multiple times. This ability to learn passively has diminishing returns, initially everything is unknown and it’s a overflow of what we can learn, but with time amount of unknown words become lower and these words become very rare and specific that sometimes we might not even see it for several years. This is why SRS becomes more important again, and gives us a stable flow of things to learn.
This range can vary depending on what you do. Listening/speaking, for example, is slightly harder, because there is no convenient way to translate unknown words and up to 6k range sometimes can be more fitting. But typing doesn’t differ so much from reading, you just translate everything you don’t know.
This is my personal approach. In cases like when you need to pass JLPT, it’s more advantageous to use SRS and limit vocabulary to something that can actually appear in a test of specific level.