Best approach for learning specific vocab while reading

Japanese Language Reading
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Hi!

Recently i´ve begun playing Ace Attorney and it´s really the first thing i´m reading that wasn´t specifically designed for foreigners in some way.

So far so good, i´m making solid progress. It´s fun albeit challenging. The one thing i´m struggling with however is how to approach the unknown vocabulary. Until now i have been doing this:

  • look up words that have unknown kanji, but don´t add them to anki
  • look up words that have known kanji (or hiragana-only) and add them to anki

I do this for every unknown word i encounter, which is rather time-consuming, so i´m looking for some advice from you guys! What is your approach?

I can think of the following:

  1. look up everyone and everything and add it to anki (my current method)
    → very thorough, but slow and possibly painful
  2. look up everything important, but don´t add anything to anki
    → to keep a good pace, a manageable workload and just hope that you will eventually learn everything through immersion
  3. only add the most important and frequent words (like legal stuff in ace) to anki
    → seems like a good mixture BUT since these specific words are already so frequently used in whatever you are reading, you pretty much learn them anyway, right?

Thanks for reading~

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I am not saying my approach is good but I like to look up almost everything and I write it down in document. I never review it though. Maybe if the same word comes up a bit later I check my notes to remember it.

I don’t think it’s worth it SRSing random words. And common words I remember just by encountering them over and over.

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A balance that works for me is to look up everything I need to, add them to word lists, and then only once I’ve looked them up multiple times (which I can tell because they’re in a word list already) do I put them in another list that I periodically export to Anki. I use the app “takoboto” on my phone and I like it a lot for this functionality specifically.

For me that balance works because it’s not intrusive in the moment, since I just need to look it up, plunk it in a list and move on, but I do still get the peace of mind that comes from feeling like I’ll review it down the line.

I think doing that has especially helped me a lot over time at identifying which parts of a sentence I do or don’t know - at first I would have trouble splitting up lots of sentences I knew so little, whereas now I can pretty much immediately recognize which words in a sentence I haven’t seen before, with pretty good accuracy.
I also like that I can have a word list for every type of place I might come across a word, so I can have a little bit of context about where I saw it before. And any word I study feels like it has a slight story to it, since I know I personally came across it a couple of places.

It does mean a lot of looking stuff up and a lot of anki though. I probably over-look stuff up and rely on the dictionary too much just because I like adding to those word lists.
But part of the fun is figuring out what kind of a system works best for you! As I’m sure there’s as many systems as there are learners.

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Saying this as someone who hates flashcards (WaniKani is the only remotely flashcard like thing I’ve ever been able to use). I personally go with option 2 when I read. Sometimes if I’m really struggling and really motivated, I’ll look up everything I don’t know, but that’s decreased a lot as my reading’s gotten better and I’m able to figure more things out from context.

I think since you like flashcards and are reading something with niche vocab, I would say go with route 3. That helps you get your niche vocab without slowing you down to much. An important aspect of reading practice, imo, is getting reading to be something smooth and near effortless. It will never be that way if you stop and look up every single word every single time you read something. You’d be surprised how much you can pick up just from context when reading.

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I just did #2 when I played as a newbie. And I still remember the majority of the lawyering terms from it to this day.

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@d-hermit
Hey, that´s an interesting approach! So did you just stop using SRS then after finishing WaniKani?

Huh, so making word lists seems to be rather popular. I didn´t think about that. Will definitely check out takoboto!

Yeah, now that every answer so far recommended against looking up every single thing, this might be a better approach. Only “problem”: Even at this moment, 3 days after last playing, i still remember the frequent words like 法廷 without having learned the unknown kanji. Thus making extra anki entries feels a bit overkill for the most part. Though it would probably help me remember them even long after playing law-related games, so there is that…

Thanks for your answers, i guess i will tone down the SRS crazyness a bunch as i still want to finish WK this year and pending between several SRSs a lot isn´t all that comfortable. I´ll definitely look into “just” making word lists for a quick look-up as well. Are there tools that can do that automatically for me?

edit: Another advantage: I get to play more Ace Attorney and also more frequently! Reason: I stop playing if i have to many apprentice items in anki. So cutting that load in a fraction will perhaps help my “reading flow”?

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Yes, I never used anki and just tried kitsun for a few days. WK worked for me because they provide all the content. Now I don’t feel like building my own deck out of words that may not be common enough.

I thought about doing 10K core vocab but I expect to know a large part of it. Besides, I am pretty good at remembering vocab when I see/hear it in context. For example, I learned a lot of vocab by watching vtuber streams.

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