Ooooooo! Please make a post about your process of learning 3000 vocab words.
Don’t get discouraged. You’re learning more than you think you are.
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So first off, needing to look up vocabulary words is something that you will need to get used to. I stopped counting my recorded vocabulary after like 14000 words as of a year ago and I still come across plenty of words I don’t know depending on what I read. The key part of that sentence is “depending on what I read”. You mentioned that you have been watching stuff, but I didn’t catch what, exactly. I would first make sure that whatever you’re watching is something that will use very simple vocab so you can get a good basis. There is nothing wrong with watching more complicated stuff, but it will require more mental resilience and it sounds like you don’t like swimming in an ocean of unknown words. That’s fine.
I think the general plan you have will also achieve that idea of giving you a basis to work with, but there is a bit of a misunderstanding you may have. You can learn 3000 words, but you may very well only see 500 of those words in the next couple weeks of what you read or watch if youre unlucky.
If you really want to get the most out of “understanding how japanese is spoken” you will learn vocabulary words entirely from one or two shows or texts. Like lets say you want to watch or read kimetsu no yaiba since apparently thats real popular. You would learn words that are really common in that specific show/manga to ensure that 100% of the words youre learning will be words you will come across. This is the most efficient way to make vocab less of a problem.
Overall, you have two ends of a spectrum. On one end, theres easy and convenient where you have people learning in a classroom or something taking weeks to learn hiragana and covering like one grammar point per class to move at a nice speed everyone can keep up with. On the other, you have the people who go all out and are ok with ambiguity and just want to learn as fast as possible even if it means frustration and head banging at times. In the end, you need to do what will keep you going. Context is important for acquiring vocab but you don’t need to worry about it as much at the start. Just beware that learning from a list means that youll have a lot of words that will go unused for awhile and won’t help with what you may be doing.
Now for my personal experience. At about level 30 in wk, I started adding words from a core vocab deck. I added maybe 1500 from that and then I had like 3000 words done on wanikani. By the time I was level 45 I had about 6000 words under my belt and had been getting pretty heavy into reading. Looking back, those words I had learned from lists did help me overall and made reading easier. They were not, however, the best use of my time. Learning words as I came across them was definitely more efficient, but it was also more frustrating. Sacrifice sanity for efficiency as much as you are willing, but dont feel like you need to do something just because it’s the most efficient way. I would, however, get in the habit of making good mnemonics, using srs tools, and getting over any dislike of not knowing a buncha words in a sentence.
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What do you think the content of that quote is supposed to prove?
The following excerpt is from Teaching by Principles by H. Douglas Brown:
Extensive Reading
Elley (2001), Day and Bamford (1998), and Krashen (1993) all made the case that extensive reading (free voluntary reading) […] is a key to student gains in reading ability, linguistic competence, vocabulary, spelling and writing.
P.360
So just like last time I’ve provided a different source which says differently.
Source and proof please.
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Last time you gave a source it literally argued the opposite. Now you are linking to a book, which I won’t have access to.
My source is that the literature reviews in all of the papers on incidental learning I’ve read have presented it as such. The 2018 paper you linked last time indicated it when talking about known results. The 2008 paper the other person linked is what I quoted this time. The 1998 paper indicated as such with both its findings and the literature overview. The one tracking Japanese to English students (Waring and Takaki, 2003) also argued this.
I’ve yet to see one argue differently, and one would think at least one of these authors would mention their opinions and the literature review at the beginning of a paper. So what you are arguing is that all of the most cited papers in the field are lying when reviewing past work.
Same book, chapter 22, p. 436:
2: Help students to learn vocabulary in context.
The best internalisation of vocabulary comes from encounters (comprehension or production) with words within the context of surrounding discourse. Data from linguistic corpora can provide real-world actual language that has been printed or spoken. Rather than isolating words and/or focusing on dictionary definitions, learners can benefit from attending to vocabulary within a communicative framework in which items appear. Students will then associate new words with a meaningful context to which they apply.
So there you have it. Don’t necessarily believe people who say otherwise, it’s just kind of a thing people say online a lot and people just kind of expect it to be true.
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My source is that the literature reviews in all of the papers on incidental learning I’ve read have presented it as such.
Just to be clear, what are you saying exactly, because all you’ve done is quote an article. I want to make sure. Express clearly your position about learning vocabulary from authentic contexts.
What I am precisely claiming is this: incidental learning of vocabulary through reading is less efficient than rote memorization. By less efficient, I mean that for the time invested, there will be less new vocabulary words gained at a recall level from reading than from traditional rote memorization.
I am on my phone right now, and don’t have time to give a full argument. The gist is:
The literature reviews in that 2018 paper you listed last time, the 2008 paper I linked now (and was linked by someone else last thread), the 2003 Waring and Takaki paper, and the 1998 Horst paper all seem to be some of the most highly cited papers in incidental vocabulary acquisition I can find, and they all have similar readings of the body of work.
Furthermore, the results of their work also seem to reinforce this. Vocabulary recall rates were under 10% for all of them (when not using multiple choice) after a (variable) short period of time. Two were under 5%. These were all words introduced frequently over 10-40k word texts with less than what should be 200 new words (exact amounts vary by study).
Unless the literature reviews for all of these are intentionally misrepresenting the field, are still getting very heavily cited, and there really are several papers out there with different results, this seems like the natural conclusion to arrive at.
All that being said, I make no arguments about reading being more or less helpful for learning language patterns, or reviewing what one already knows.
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I think that what you lack with rote memorization is quality of knowledge about the word. When you really dive into things, it’s not just as simple as remembering a word. 猫 means cat, sure. But what happens when the definition for 同格, 平等, 同等, 対等, 互角, 均等, etc. all are defined as equality. This happens a lot with verbs too. Acquiring a word and truly knowing it is not something that you can get through just rote memorization 100% of the time. Especially with some fancier verbs, you need both a monolingual dictionary and exposure to the word too really get it. Now, at a lower level you really don’t need to worry about this, but I thought I should just make that very clear for anyone who may be misinterpreting what you’re saying. Theres more to it than just recall level.
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I could if you really want me to!! I was also thinking about making a thread comparing my experience with Japanese so far compared to the first foreign language I studied (yeah it has been veryyyy different so far lol 
) and asking other people about their experiences too
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Yes, and that’s where extensive reading comes in, according to their source:
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To add on to the discussion of incidental vocab learning (IVL), if you can, having text read aloud to you while you read text appears to be more effective than just reading alone. This is just one study, but ESL students being exposed to new words twice with text read to them retained things more readily than students who were exposed to the same words four times without them being read aloud.
(Source: “Incidental Vocabulary Learning in SLA: Effects of frequency, aural enhancement, and working memory” by Jonathan Malone, 2018)
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Exactly, which is used for a very important transition when it comes to the quality of your vocabulary. I just didn’t want people to misinterpret what he was saying as meaning that rote memorization will help you know words better than reading will. They really attack two different stages of learning a word. Consequently, I’m a big fan of floflo where I can memorize a bunch of words on a list and then soon after see them in the text I’m reading.
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Yeah. Similarly, there is a very slight boost for reading along with audio with word retention as well (IIRC the old paper I linked was primarily about this). So video games and visual novels with VA may be good places to try.
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Yeah, it feels like the disconnect here is what is being emphasized, “efficiency” or “depth of knowledge.”
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Yeah thats what it seems like.
For OP, honestly I feel like depth of knowledge is not too important. Just getting a general understanding of the words will be fine if you’re only a couple months into your studies. Besides, plenty of early words really don’t have too much depth to them (e.g. 人、学校、本).
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You just explained my entire thought process (though in a much more organized fashion) over what I’ve been experiencing recently!! I really do think there’s a divide between beginners who want to get a handle on the fundamental grammar & vocabulary first vs. those who just dive right in! Obviously it isn’t wrong to practice listening/reading to your target language, but shouldn’t be what you focus on at first.
There’s a quote I have heard before about language learning that basically said something like this: “When you’re learning a language, you have to see it as it is - an alive, dynamic being. It’s like the body, with every language having its own skeleton, muscles, skin, etc.” It continues on but I remember it basically saying that you can’t “build the body” without the skeleton first (i.e the foundation of the language!). I think that’s a brilliant way to look at it lol, even though it’s a bit gross. But yeah, that’s how I like to look at
Unless you consider things like the fact that 本 can also be もと, or a counter for long thing objects, etc. as a part of the depth of knowledge about it. But if you just mean the word ほん, yeah, it’s not a difficult one to learn.
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Yeah, I think “gaining a deeper understanding” of vocabulary becomes more important later on as the words you study become more and more complex and nuanced. I always loved studying nouns since to me, they are the easiest thing to learn in any language (i.e, a duck will always just be a duck in every language, just with a different way of saying it.) Verbs and adverbs especially in my opinion can be very difficult to get a hang of later on, as they don’t always have the most direct translation (“ちょっと” has the basic meaning of “little” or “a bit” but can be used in a much wider range of situations than that)
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Aww you’re welcome!!! I was really hoping I wasn’t going to make anyone else have an existential crisis over their learning processes/methods like I just did lmao
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Though, animals might not be the best example of that, because you can categorize them at many different levels, resulting in different languages having different common use words for things that might all fall under one word in another language.
For instance, this is a duck, right?
And this is a duck, right?
But the first one is アヒル in Japanese and the second one is カモ. At least in the most common usages of the words.
Not a huge deal or anything, just made me think of that. I think technically they can both be called カモ, but it’s just that アヒル is specifically domesticated ducks.
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