JLPT or themed vocabulary

I’m thinking about new ways how to learn vocabulary that will be actually useful; do you think it’s better to create my own word lists based on a certain theme, such as food, clothing etc. or to learn the words by JLPT? Find an N4 Anki deck and use that.

Thank you so much!

I guess it depends on whether you’re planning to do the JLPT test or not.

1 Like

I’ll say that vocab for JLPT 5 to 3 is quite basic and should be learned early on. You can also learn most frequents words like IKnow.

Personally, the best way I found to learn useful words is just to add those I encounter in my daily readings. They are quite easy to remember (I have an actual context to help) and tend to reappear quite often.

Personally, I tried out the 10k deck and immediately realised that learning a tonne of words with absolutely no context whatsoever was going to be very difficult.

If you’re planning on taking the JLPT, then a deck of JLPT vocabulary is probably a good option, particularly for learning the simpler words that everybody “ought” to know, but otherwise I’d second Kalas’ suggestion and just create flashcards for words you actually encounter. Learning a word after seeing it in context is about 1000x easier.

If there’s a subject that particularly interests you, or you want to learn words likely to be useful for visiting Japan or something similar, then a themed deck could be an alternative as it would have some natural interest.

I’m not, so I guess I’ll only do N5 and N4 deck, since I know most of the words already

Thanks, I checked out the iKnow site and it’s pretty good! Better than memrise, I think.
I write down words I encounter, from readings, anime etc., but many of them seem unuseful to me, but I write down a lot of them anyway, “just in case”, you know what I mean … then when I actually want to say something, I don’t have the needed vocabulary

yeah, it’s hard without a context. I was thinking about finding a deck with example sentences.

I usually encounter words that I can’t use in everyday life, at least I feel like that. I was thinking about playing Animal Crossing, hopefully I can pick up some useful words from there. Then I usually watch anime, movies, read books or articles, watch Japanese Ammo with Misa videos (she uses awesome vocab words, useful and daily).

I would go with context mainly, as that beats SRS in the long run.

I use this routine to find +1 sentences in the lines of my favorite shows and get some extra content for any given word.

I started with the Core 10K deck (mostly because the audio sample and the kanji break down) with all cards suspended and activate them one by one as I encounter a new word in any context. If it’s not in this deck I will create a card using a line from the subs of my shows.

If I’m not able to find a sample sentence here (with around 100,000 sentences now) I get that the word I’m looking it’s not that common so I won’t make much effort to learn it (some WK words fall into this category too :sweat_smile: ) until I encounter it again.

The same goes for reading; it’ a terrific way to anchor any word, as you’ll encounter words much more often than what was supposed according to the SRS intervals either in WK or Anki.

SRS will give you the head start… but immersion will really fix it in the end.:muscle:

Thank you! I’ll check that out :slight_smile:

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.