Hey guys! So, just like the title said, I just finished the core 2.3k deck and am currently a bit lost on how I should continue with increasing my vocabulary.
A bit of background first: I started studying japanese about 4 months ago and my plan is to take N2 exam next year. Now I know this sounds a bit ambitious, but I don’t really have a choice since I really want to go on a university exchange in my third year and I am required to have N2 by the middle of my second year. I’ve been studying for about 3+ hours every day so I think I have been doing a good enough progress on that front (or at least I hope so). I will also be going to a 3 week intense language course in Japan this summer and on other holidays I’ll trey to study even more hours per day, so I hope that helps.
So the crux of the issue is what kind of deck would you recommend me to pass the N2? I know I am supposed to know about 6000 words and by my calculations, if I continue with my 15 new words/day I should have arround 7300 words by next December which should give me a decent margin of error for forgotten words/words that are not on the “list” of the exam. Should I go with the core 6k or 10k in future, basically continue what I have been doing. Would core 6k +1000 words from 10k be good enough for the N2? Or should I maybe get the Tango N5-4-3-2-1 decks? There’s probably quite a lot of words that already know there, but I am sure I can just bury them and do what I don’t know from them (though that would be slightly annoying). So what do you think would be the best ?
Now , to streamline the process, time to alleviate some concerns I’ve seen mentioned pretty often on this sub to people with similar situations :
\- Yes I know mining would probably be the best choice long term, but sadly I just don’t have the time to spend to make 15 cards per day and I would be pretty afraid that the words I chose would not be in the N2 list. (I know there’s no definite list of words, but I am sure there’s some words that are likelier than others to appear on the exam).
\-Don’t worry, I know that it takes a lot more to pass the N2 than to know a long list of words. I admit I may have spent a bit of too much of a my active study time procentage to Anki (arround 60-65%), but I attribute that to the beginner difficulty and I hope to go down to 50% or lower from now on. After all core 2.3k is pretty hard, it has arround 1200 individual kanji + I couldn’t really use the context of the example sentences at first due to a lack of vocabulary/grammar knowledge. But that slowly changed, now I am finding it a lot easier to learn/ memorise new words cause I can make a lot more connections between words and can finally devote more time to grammar and reading (I already get a lot of listening practice due to leisure activities so that probably is not a problem).
Thank you in advance for your advice!
