So, after hearing mention of jpdb.io multiple times on this forum, I decided to check it out myself in hopes of using it as a supplemental vocabulary resource, since I’m aware that WK is more for teaching kanji than vocabulary. I just now signed up, and hoo boy, it seems to have a lot more going on than I initially thought. Just scrolling through all the settings for the website made my head spin, lol.
I’m not familiar with the art of sentence/word mining from media, so I guess a decent starting point might be just picking a pre-made deck and going from there? I’m not looking to watch any specific anime or read any specific book, I’m just looking for some general “good foundation” vocabulary studies to start. Maybe one of the textbook decks would work? Those tend to cover a broad range of everyday real-life vocabulary, right?
Also, do any jpdb users here bother with the Patreon perks? I don’t even have a Patreon account and I don’t know if I want to bother creating one just to make a one-time $5 pledge, but the WK integration in itself sounds like it might be worth it. I like to avoid redundancy when feasible, and avoiding repeating words and kanji that I’ve already learned on WK sounds nice.
Any other tips or insights (like suggested setting configurations, etc.) are appreciated too, of course.
I don’t use jpdb for actual study myself, but I think under “learn” there should be a “New deck from top vocabulary “ thingy. I think if you’re a patreon you could also filter the top vocabulary to only be from one sort of media? E.g. if you’re really into novels learning the Top 1000 most frequent words in novels might be good. Personally I wouldn’t go past the 2000 most common words.
Afterwards maybe just study the frequently occurring words within some book/anime/… you want to consume in preparation?
Their discord is super active, I’m sure lots of people there would be willing to help if you can’t find it here.
Hi, I am a JPDB user. I started rather recently (few months back) and I love it. For me, it’s just an SRS tool like Anki. In my perception, I learn faster with JPDB than with Anki. This might be different for other people but it works really well for me.
One of the benefits of JPDB is that it teaches the vocabulary that you actually need. You can make for example top 3k most common words in anime deck and just SRS these. Also, you can go and learn vocab specific for a certain show. For example, you can SRS words that make 95% of the words in the show which will generally cut down the amount of words to learn in half. Furthermore, JPDB is a single system so it knows which words you know across decks which is something you don’t get with anki.
I’m pretty sure that works with Anki in multiple ways. For me it does using Yomichan, it checks whether the word exists in any of your decks. With browse you can also search across all decks.
I’ve been a jpdb user since March; it’s completely replaced Anki and mostly replaced WK as my main SRS. It’s, as you point out, a powerful tool with a lot of settings, but its default way of doing everything is much better than other SRSs that I’ve tried.
The textbook decks are not a bad place to start and certainly will give you a lot of common everyday vocabulary, albeit with some words that are probably only relevant to exchange students. You can also create a deck from the highest-frequency words, e.g. the top 1,000 or top 3,000 or whatever. This is drawn from the media on jpdb, so it has a bias towards words you’ll find in media and away from words like 郵便局 which rarely appear in media but would be useful for everyday life in Japan. Either way, you’ll mostly be learning all-round common words.
I use it like this: only vocab, no kanji. Still using WK (heavily modded with scripts) for kanji currently, but that might change after the expected jpdb kanji rework is released. I have ~10 decks for books or shows I plan on watching/reading soon. I flit between either learning from one deck by its frequency order (if it’s the thing I’m going to read next) or from all my decks (if I just want to pick up common vocab). I don’t susped vocabulary outside of a certain frequency, but many people do so that they can focus on more-common words. I’m on Normal SRS interval lengths, with the “Initial short term learning period” (which adds an extra review for new/failed cards after 10 minutes) turned on.
I do make a lot of use of Patreon features: I subscribed to Patreon for the WK integration, but now also use the deck-specific coverage settings, the ability to make top vocab decks for a particular medium, etc. Let me know if you have any specific questions.
I’m pretty sure that works with Anki in multiple ways. For me it does using Yomichan, it checks whether the word exists in any of your decks. With browse you can also search across all decks.
I guess, but I don’t feel like hacking stuff on top of Anki. JPDB has really high quality cards and built-in decks so I just stick with it plus all the other stuff on top of it.
Just scrolling through all the settings for the website made my head spin, lol.
Yeah that’s just how it is haha. You can join our Discord here if you have any questions about them.
I guess a decent starting point might be just picking a pre-made deck and going from there?
In the end it doesn’t really matter because each deck allows you to learn its words by frequency (either deck frequency or global frequency) so I’d say go for what you want to read in the future (or now)!
Also, jpdb allows you to create a deck from the top X words (up to 30,000 if you’re a patron) which is very useful for filling in gaps of words you don’t know.
Also, do any jpdb users here bother with the Patreon perks?
I’m a Patreon user and I’d say it’s absolutely worth it! If you utilise everything jpdb has to offer, it is a very powerful tool for efficiently learning words.
the WK integration in itself sounds like it might be worth it
Yeah, the developer of the website (who we call Kou) makes the transition from other environments as easy a possible, including Anki!
Any other tips or insights (like suggested setting configurations, etc.) are appreciated too, of course.
Once again I recommend chatting with us on Discord, everyone has a unique view as to how you can optimise your use of jpdb. I wrote a guide a while back which might be helpful too.
If you click the grey arrow button next to the three options does it scroll them up to show you never-forget (with blacklist probably dropping off the bottom)? IME it often doesn’t show you all the options at once.
I feel like being able to use the pre-made decks as preparation for working through that specific book/whatever is maybe the most useful part of the site, but that might just be the way I’m using it given where I am right now. OTOH the selection of decks is very light-novel heavy, which is great if that’s what you want to read and a bit limiting if you mostly read other stuff.
I did see the explanation, it says that setting as known basically just sets it as completed, while blacklisting it makes it as if it wasn’t there in the first place. I don’t know how that would interact with seeing the kanji in vocabulary cards.
Basically blacklisting is things you don’t want to learn, not that you already know.
How does that actually work in the end? Idk.
I was mostly surprised since it’s a thing in vocabulary cards, so I figured it would be in kanji cards, too. But I’ll just set them as easy when they come up in review.
I’ve been using ‘blacklist’ with vocab for “this looks like it’s a misparse” or “all the example sentences are bogus” and similar things. In theory I might come back to them at some point in future, so having that list be separate and short helps. The other significant place it makes a difference is in things like “known words %” stats on decks – a word in your “already known” pile counts as “known” for those; but a blacklisted word is as if it wasn’t in the deck at all. So if there’s a 5000 word deck and you’ve blacklisted 1000 of those and know none of the rest, it will show up as “4000 words, you know 0%”; but if you’d marked those 1000 words as never-forget it would be “5000 words, you know 20%”.
Unfortunately the site has no UI for “bulk move cards from blacklist to never-forget”, so it’s important to classify the way you want from the beginning
