What is the best way to learn vocab?

8 comments

1. Reading/Listening

   Anki is only there to get you to the point of being able to recognize them in those two.

2. You should create your own Anki deck using the words from media you consume. Common words will constantly reappear in context, making it much easier to remember them. It is also much easier to remember the words if you find them yourself. It’s not that rare for me to remember the context and specific scene that I saw a word used in if I create a card for it. Anki is extremely powerful, but mainly as a supplement to your immersion and active study. It shouldn’t be the only way you learn the language past the beginner stage.

3. Reading novels is my only way of learning vocab because novels tend to repeat the same set of words throughout each book, especially more so by amateur writers on syosetu, and the variety of words and grammar usages is unparalleled to any other media. I don’t do anki or any memorization practice. But I am a native Cantonese speaker so it’s much easier to start reading novels early on after learning the major basic grammar.

4. Anki + immersion is the best that I think anyone knows so far. The specific type of immersion which seems to grow vocab most is **reading**. For reading you have many options, depends on what you are into.

   I didn’t use an off-the-shelf anki deck, instead making my own. This helps me read things I wanna read.

5. If you’re only “parotting words,” they aren’t going to stick*. You need context for the words. People will say “reading, watching, etc.” so you can get that context, but it’s likely anything you’re remotely interested in will be too far above your comprehension level for awhile. If you SRS n+1 sentences, then it’s more like real engagement with the language, but with the benefits for long-term retention from SRSing. There are n+1 decks floating around, and [jpdb.io](https://jpdb.io) also has a very nifty feature where you can have it search for n+1 sentences as it keeps track of your known words. So it will only give you isolated words when it has no other choice. You can also add frequency lists into your collection so you get the most bang for the buck, in terms of each word opening up more applicable contexts for future words.

   * You need or can do isolated words when (1) let’s say you have all the conjugation patterns down in a Romance language, now you can do isolated verbs – a specific example of the general point that you can do it when you’re at an advanced enough level in a language where you don’t need the context in front of you, because it’s all in your head – in languages that don’t have noun declension this can usually apply to nouns for everyone – (2) you’ve just started out, and there’s literally no possible sentence context that could do anything but confuse you more.

   I think a huge part of the reason it’s easier for a Spanish speaker to learn Portuguese, or a French speaker to learn Spanish, is because the problem of finding n+1 contexts for new terms is relatively trivial – it’s just naturally going to happen a lot. When crossing a gap like English – Japanese in either direction, it really helps to pay special attention to it in the beginning.

6. You can learn vocab with anki. But really I think anki is the best way to *review* vocab that you’ve encountered elsewhere already.

   > I really love practical application

   Go immerse. Find something you want to read or watch and read or watch it.

7. I recommend not using prebuilt decks at all…I started creating my own anki cards by playing games in 100% Japanese from the first month of learning…it was tough at first but it really worked for me. I feel like with premade decks they would be harder to memorize as you have no context where that word would be used etc.

   Also, after you start creating your cards from your own reading and listening, give anki about six months and then ask yourself if anki is worth it again :)…some people still don’t find it useful, but most people can’t argue with the results 😉

8. Pre-made Anki decks and reading. You can simply do the normal textbook progression and you’ll be n3 in a year.