How much Vocabulary and when to learn it

Japanese Language
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I’m still in my First year of learning Japanese and are more focussed on learning Grammar than vocabulary. When I’ve reached a certain Point of understanding Grammar I would like to learn as much Vocabulary as possible in a year.

What do you think when Grammar wouldn’t be a huge Problem for understanding a Sentence anymore?

  • After Genki 2, Quartett 1 or Quartett 2? Would you add another book?
  • JLPT 4, 3, 2 or 1 (grammar list on Bunpro)?

Have you ever tried to learn 1.000 to 10.000 words in a year? Was ist helpful or do you regret it?

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I’ll answer your question with a lot of questions:

  1. Are you learning by yourself without help from teachers, videos, or courses?
  2. What is your exposure to Japanese at this moment (textbooks, anime, manga, native conversations, social media posts, etc)?
  3. What will be your goal with Japanese in the near future (e.g. After 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years?)

Your goal with Japanese will highly affect this “certain point”, therefore I couldn’t really say anything specific but N3 grammar would be more than enough for casual Japanese-ing. I’m barely using anything more than N3 in my work and daily life.

  1. Why does it has to be 1 year, or any period with that matter?
    Stuffing your brain with a large amount of information in a short amount of time will gives you nothing. Language is a human instinct, you’ll have to let it craw into your brain slowly and steadily, not forcing it with a packing pole. But discipline is also very important so try to keep it as a habit, not a challenge.

Taking this from someone who speedran N2: Vocabulary and Kanji is VERY important. Way more than Grammar IMO. Real Japanese rarely use structures exactly the same as textbook Japanese. The sentence oftenly cut off midway to let the listener understand the implications, particles (は、が、を、に、へ、…) are also often omitted if the usage can be implied. But with written Japanese then its sticks with the grammar rules more. Nonetheless, you can understand a lot with Vocab and Kanji alone, and I mean A LOT, without paying much attention to grammar thanks to the conjunction forms, but grammar alone will make it very hard to do anything.

Think of it like cooking. Vocab is the ingredients, Grammar is the spices. Both are important, but you can’t eat a plate of salt.

I regret not learning Vocab from the start and now I’m suffering.

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Im learning without a teacher. The First Textbook I used was the Series Japanese from Zero and the YouTube Videos of the author. But after vol 3 I needed a Break from learning Grammar. During that time I read (= Translating every single Sentence) my First book (14 weeks). The Reading was exhausting but it also helped me a lot to understand the Sentence structure. Now I’m learning with Genki 1 and Genki 2.

I also listened to lvl 1.1 and 1 of JapanesePod 101.

My Goal is to read Manga/books, watch anime and Play Video games. I will not move to Japan or need it for Work.

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In that case, I would recommend you tackle down the 100+ (don’t remember the exact number) of most common used verbs first. Next move on to the essential grammar to see if you had it covered and slowly building up your vocab from there. (I heard that the 2k anki deck is a great place to start)

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I think understanding grammar and vocabulary should go hand in hand. Learning as much vocabulary, while maybe worth trying, is also kind of a hard goal to achieve because language sticks only if you use them. Therefore, you may try to memorize 10,000 words a year, but you’ll only really remember a small percentage of words that you actually use.

I read in one of your replies, that you would like to be able to read manga, watch anime and play games. In that case, it’s probably worth trying to dive headfirst into the medias you want to understand - within reasonable expectations. Maybe try reading an easy manga (i.e. familiar setting, has furigana) that you have already read in English or your native language, and see how much can you understand, as well as how many new words you can learn. Likewise, re-watch a familiar anime, one which you already know the story and dialogue, this time with Japanese audio and subtitles.

Consuming media in Japanese will help you learn a lot of vocabulary. If the titles you consumer are within similar genres/themes, they should have a lot of overlapping words. Real-life, modern settings (school, university, office settings) should have more ‘everyday’ vocab, but more specific themes/settings (i.e. sports, fantasy setting, historical setting) will have more specialized vocabulary.

I learned a ton of vocab by immersion as I read and listened to Japanese content that was above my level in the past. I follow 1-2 manga titles in Japanese and I can feel my improvement when reading. Although now my grammar and kanji is still weak, and I still need to check dictionary and google often, but I can read and understand way more compared to when I was just starting out.

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For your goals you should start reading ?
Grammar is way less important than not being lost because you do not know the terms, especially if you’re already done most of N5/N4. Take the first material you want to read, extract the text, pass it through a parser tool like jpdb or ichi.moe and… learn.
You will have a lot of common kanji that you haven’t learn yet. You will have a lot of words that you haven’t learn yet. The only way to get to them is to get to them ^^ by reading. For me a lot of stuff became decipherable at the sentence level at around 800/900 kanjis (half of them I haven’t reached on WK yet) and 2.5k words.
Reading is really hard at first but it get easier week after week do not get discouraged !

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I already read my First book with the absolute Beginner Book club. I Had to translate every Word and every Sentence because I understood absolutely nothing.

This or next Weekend I will start my second book with the childrens book club on natively. But I decided Not to translate everything. This time I will read extensively, understand nothing and pick a few random words per Page that I will learn. I decided to do it This way because I had No Time to do anything Else for learning Japanese while I translated the First book.

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Depends on the sentence :).

The curve for grammar learning starts off with it being worthwhile to learn a lot of it, because the basic grammar structures are very frequent; then it starts to tail off because the patterns you learn appear less frequently and are more specialised. The curve for vocabulary is much more “you want to keep learning new words at a steady pace as you go along”, because there are just so many words to learn. The limiting factor there is more what you can reasonably cope with without burning out on srs reviews.

I recommend doing both grammar and vocab in parallel; the weight you apply to them will gradually shift over time to less grammar and more words.

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I can understand your questions because I had them myself, and some of the early false impressions I had were demotivating.

I thought I needed 2k kanji and 10k words and N2 grammar to enjoy Japanese content.

Actually that was not true at all.
A lot of content can be enjoyed with no kanji knowledge, <2k words, and <N4 grammar. And then you just learn more as you go and eventually become able to read harder books and manga.

So, for your goals, I agree with others to learn grammar and vocab together. Since you’re already reading, that’s great, keep going! You will get better faster than you think, so it’s OK if it feels slow now, don’t worry, at some point it gets easier and speeds up. For me the most important thing was to be consistent and spend time reading every day.

Rather than thinking “what level do I need to do x” I wish I would have just focused on where I was and taken the next step. Because some steps take much longer or shorter than you think.

So I would suggest looking at three things

  • what is easy to read (graded readers? Or ABBC? And keep that up daily
  • What is challenging to read? Join clubs at that level and spend a bit of your time focused on this
  • what grammar is next and how do you like to learn it? You can use textbooks or bunpro or learning it with reading on Satori, etc etc. Just choose what fits you now! I did something different at different levels. No need to plan right now what you’ll do for N3 or N2 grammar - decide at the time

I regret making goals like x words or kanji per year. It never helped me. What does help is something like - add 3 words to srs per day, or, read 5 pages per day. Then those daily actions turn into thousands of words learned.

For reference I learn about 1000 words every 8-10 months just by reading and looking up words. It only took about 1000 characters per day of reading to achieve that in the early days. That’s only about 5 pages of most children’s books. If the book is very hard for you, it’s still possible to get closer to this in a reasonable amount of time by rereading: start by rereading the previous 2 pages, then read 1 new page, reread that page. Also, reading very easy stories is a good way to increase time spent reading.

Both easy and challenging reading are helpful. Easy reading helps you get through more volume and reinforces your memory of more words. Challenging material helps you learn new words and grammar, but the volume is low so it doesn’t help with repetition as much

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Thank you all for your Tips. I’m kinda reliefed that no one is recommending learning so many words in such a short time. I’ll continue with Grammar and Reading. I think Reading and writing will be more helpful for me with learning vocabulary than Anki or another srs system. I can’t even use the words that I have learned with WaniKani but not outside of it.

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I dunno man I’ve used Sugar Sculpture (飴細工) thrice in 2 months.

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Agree, better to start using that knowledge alongside wk, no need to add another srs on top. You’ll get so much reinforcement from treading and grammar!

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I didn’t mean that they are words that no one uses. I meant that when I write my own sentences I Stick to words that I’ve already used while doing Grammar exercises. When I try to use words that I only know because I’ve learned them with WaniKani but never seen in my textbooks my brain is getting completely empty.