Just wondering if there’s a frequency list out there that for words in hiragana/katakana only. This should be approx 80% of the language by frequency (obviously could vary depending on sources etc.)
And yes I know Kanji is better, but I know about 3k chinese characters already so firstly if I don’t know the meaning of a word I can have a fairly good guess. Secondly, I have a habit of reading the Kanji *in* chinese, so I need to ‘think’ in hiragana first so I can ‘imprint’ the pronunciation onto the kanji.
And lastly, the hiragana/katakana would allow me to make some useful mnemonics (this already worked a treat in chinese, so wanting to bring it over to Japanese).
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
3 comments
Honestly, the frequency list kinda sucks for a lot of things cause it’s based on newspapers, and it’s hardly 80% due to there being many niche words that may or may not apply to you. You would be much better off studying words pertaining to a goal. Either a textbook vocab, JLPT, or something like that. They’re much more useful to get reading than 2k.
pick a premade deck a modify it yourself
The only way to look at Japanese and hear it is lots of listening practice. I don’t know Chinese but I managed to learn to read for meaning well enough to ignore the readings. Weird experience, it eventually worked out okay.
Reading kana doesn’t help very much because we only have a foreign guess at what Japanese sounds like. This doesn’t match reality very well: Japanese is fast and melodic and has complicated gut-sense rules about vowel modification and devoicing.
2k is a good start, but the Japanese vocabulary curve is unusually flat. That many words would get you to 80% coverage in many languages but not here.