I’m a bit conflicted. Other than WK I’ve used Memrise for JLPT5-3 Vocab(Should be done by 3 at.the end of the year) And I’m at 1100 words for the WK expansion pack and about 800 words out of 2050 for the Afterlife deck.(Why not) And Anki for a book I’m reading.
I do plan on only doing the expansion after.the two others are finished.(And starting to hate Memrise)
My plan is once I’m done with the JLPT3 deck I’ll start the JLPT2 on Anki.
So I guess where I’m at do ya’ll think starting a 10k deck to be worth it in my case? I reckon I’ll start whe the new years comes if I decide to do it. but…conflicted
I tend to think that the best answer to these kinds of questions is “give it a try and you’ll soon know better than anyone could tell you” (No harm in trying and then quitting after a week or a month if it didn’t seem worthwhile)
What I’d likely do would be to delete/suspend any card that I knew on the first viewing, that way I’d only be practicing what was actually needed to fill out the gaps in my knowledge.
I’ve been holding out on starting additional vocab decks like that until such time as Kitsun.io supports automatically hibernating WK items that you already know, which is on their roadmap.
Personally i’m just immersing right now and adding every common or interesting word i don’t know quickly to my own deck after looking it up (using Yomichan Anki integration).
The danger there is adding every rare word you encounter only once, which would lead to a 30K deck or something, but sometimes i can’t help myself
I do like the idea of learning the 10K most common words by some metric, but this is a good alternative. I quickly got over 200 cards in my own Anki deck.
The advantage is that the vocab is tailored to what is common and interesting to me, for example video game terms. Also, curating and building your own deck helps you build a connection to it.
I agree with @Saimin here. If you have the time available to create your own deck with cards relating to things you like, you will have much more success with remembering them. Although if you find the process of creating cards tedious, going though a deck like the 10k won’t hurt at all. All in all with it being a free resource worst case scenario you don’t like it and drop it after a week.
Personally, I’m not a fan of memorizing vocab lists. However, adding words from the book you’re reading in Anki has been working really great for me, as it adds additional context. Luckily I have the word lists of the books I’m reading, because I would be too lazy to make the cards myself (and it has the frequency).
I want to let the medium I’m interested in dictate my vocab study. Since 10k list is based on newspaper frequency, that’s not really an area I’m interested in anyway.
The Real Japanese Podcast
Learn Japanese with Noriko
Nihongo Switch (this one speaks super slow)
Nあ~ Casual Nihongo (Kansai-ben can be hard)
Teppei and Noriko also recently started a joint podcast, which sounded very simple. Personally I attribute a lot what I’ve learned to Teppei. Started with the normal Teppei’s podcast with understanding maybe 50% in the beginning, but nowadays I’d say 99%, so It’s definitely just a matter of enduring and practice .
You have to prioritize though. The 10K, the most frequent 2500 Kanji and reading and adding every word you don’t know are all worth doing, but you can’t do all of this at the same time.
Maybe it would be good to constantly learn a little bit of the 10K (say 5 cards a day), while adding your own vocab from immersion.
Bryan here from the Netherlands ( former Alkan/Piano nut )
I see you’re actually serious into Japanese Language now? Good !
I’m just starting my journey on WaniKani.
Bryaaaaaaaaaaaan! Hisashiburi da yo!
Yes, i’m super serious. I’m studying as much as i can, and basically only allowing myself to play games in Japanese
Let’s continue this via DM. [Discord redacted].
Ganbarou ne!
You seem to be doing a looot of SRS. IMO you should cut out on the SRS and spend more time reading, watching, or actively using the language. But idk I think anymore than one SRS is just boring and a good way to burnout. It’s highly individual though. Still, I would think about maybe sticking to one or two SRS and dropping the rest.
I’d highly recommend trying out Japanese with Noriko. I’ve been listening to it for the last month or so and found it helpful. She’s also a lot less annoying than Teppei, and in particular doesn’t add obnoxious background music or spend the first minute of every episode singing badly. Don’t worry if you don’t understand much at first- just keep going and you’ll gradually understand more and more.
And that’s sure not the first time I’ve recognized a word in something after studying it elsewhere. Studying vocab definitely helps comprehension.
I ran into the same thing when listening to the Learn Japanese from Small Talk Podcast. They used the word かきごおり, and I was kinda shocked to hear that in the wild. I figured it would something I wouldn’t end up hearing for quite a while.
I still don’t understand a ton else, but I understood shaved ice, so I felt like a winner for about 5 seconds!
Doing my own decks now but considering WKEP or 10k too. I haven’t used the 10k deck much and can’t speak for Anki, but the Kitsun 10k deck has ~20,000 card values + audio/sentences which is too much to dive into randomly. I will probably use it with filter tags and what I want/need to focus on rather than just starting it from the beginning. I will probably custom hibernate cards even further then work backwards time permitting. Some JLPT deck quality is pretty random but 10k is much more polished. I think it’s worth investing some time organizing a strategy to get the most out of it.
I recall reading from @jprspereira on the Kitsun thread there are ~1855 unique words in the WKEP deck compared to the 10K (assuming Hinekidori’s list) but I don’t know how that number was determined. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any filter tags that actually separate the two lists at the moment but it’s been talked about.
@polv had a nice breakdown showing the amount of overlap between decks if interested.
This tag value exists in 10k deck (by individual level or whole WK set) if you weren’t aware. I don’t think you need to hold off if you want to get started.
Yeah, it’s kind of amazing how often I notice words that I previously learned on WK. Just this morning I noticed 珍しい while listening to Noriko (and here I thought that the high levels on WK had rare words that never came up in practice).
(No harm in trying and then quitting after a week or a month if it didn’t seem worthwhile)
