Absolutely feel free to add anything missing that you find to be missing. There are some words that fell through the cracks (one example would be 「わたし」 written without kanji). I figure starting with a nearly-complete list is easy enough to add a few words here and there.
Three purposes:
- To know the best words to learn for a volume. For example, if you don’t know 吐く, it might be a good one to look up before reading, so you’ll know it when you see it.
The idea here is that by looking up a word before you encounter it, your brain will be predisposed to recognize that word when you encounter it.
But this doesn’t work if you look up every word before reading, because you won’t remember them all. Thus, prioritization based on frequency.
- To know the worst words to learn in a volume. For example, 覚悟 appears only one time in the whole volume.
If there are 800 words you don’t know yet in the material you’re about to start reading, you want to learn the ones that show up the most because you’ll be seeing those the most.
This can be done by pre-learning the most frequently used words before you start reading.
Or, it may be creating flash cards as you read, but only picking the highest-frequency words to create cards for.
Another option is to ignore frequency lists altogether and just trust you’ll learn the most common words naturally as you go. (Pre-learning helps with this, but isn’t necessary.) The younger you are, the better this method works.
There’s no right method and wrong method here, just different ways one may try to optimize their learning.
- Tracking how many words one knows in a manga (or book, or anime, etc).
Using ルリドラゴン as an example, while it has around 800 unique words, since many words are used multiple times it actually has about 2,800 words total (give or take a hundred). Based on my frequency tracking, the unique words I know account for nearly 2,300 of these words, meaning I know roughly 82% of the words in the volume.
When you are first starting out reading, this number doesn’t mean much because everything you try to read you’ll probably not know enough words for. And grammar will be more important to focus on.
But later on, if you start reading lots, it can be useful to know whether the manga (or book or otherwise) you want to read is one where you know 90% of the words or 60% of the words.
Somewhat.
With these caveats:
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It requires buying a digital copy that you can remove DRM protection from, for your own personal use.
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It requires having a PC or laptop where you can install and run Mokuro.
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The automated process of reading an image and extracting text from it (optical character recognition, or OCR) is not perfect, especially if the digital manga has small resolution pages or sections with small print.
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Individual lines on a page may be out of order. (I do have a script to work around this, but it can take upwards of 20 minutes of
manual labormoving a mouse per volume.)
- Sharing the output with others is legally murky territory.
When do we get the sequel manga, ルリキリン?
Absolutely.
There is also a secret here for early readers.
A manga or book that may be boring for you in your native language may actually be interesting to read in Japanese.
The reason is that simply being able to understand something in Japanese for the first time makes the experience more exciting. There are probably dopamine hits all over the place as you’re slowly recognizing words and grammar and eventually understanding a whole sentence without looking anything up.
Of course, there are limits. Some people love graded readers and others find them boring.
This is why I like using frequency lists to track what percentage of total words in a manga I know. It gamifies the vocabulary acquisition process.
As you’ve realized, the only wrong method is the one where you want to learn but are not learning.
In some respects, you’re further along in 13 months than I was in 20 years of off-and-on learning (including two years of Japanese class in high school).
if I had the whole day everyday to study Japanese, I think I wouldn’t mind, but I’m at a point in my life where I choose to only use 15min to one hour a day on Japanese, so in my case doesn’t really make sense to use that time struggling to translate 3 sentences, I’d rather get more solid foundations in grammar and kanji
Sending you down a rabbit hole like that
).