I’ve been working through the first Kirby novel, and am running into a few words here and there that I understand with context, and a few that I don’t understand without using a dictionary. I’m using ToriiSRS and it has an option to put in custom vocab cards, do people have any advice for how to pick which vocabulary to add to a deck if it’s not already there and which to skip? (ie, would I skip the words I can understand with context and add the ones I didn’t, or…?)
I feel like this could go in a lot of directions if the discussion gets into things like sentence cards and i+1, but from a broad beginner perspective I think it’s better to focus on common words that are reused. It’s pretty common to see words or kanji that are only used once in a specific body of text and those should probably be put off until later. IIRC Torii used the 10k as a base, so you might find that a lot of words commonly used in your book are also in Torii, but not until much later. I’m not sure if/how Torii can handle bumping up words or manually adding them to reviews.
Getting back to frequency… If you use a site like jpdb.io for lookups they have some frequency information in the corner. I don’t know if they detail the methodology for those numbers, but from what I’ve seen lower = more frequent. Also, I just really like this site.
Examples:
https://jpdb.io/search?q=乾杯&lang=english#a
https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1579110/今日/きょう?lang=english#a
This site also happens to have some nice tools for specific works so check the novel search feature for some interesting stats. They have 3 Kirby books listed here with each having around 50% of words being used only once.
Of course, of the three Kirby books listed on the site, the one I came across is the hardest ^^;
That makes sense to me, thank you for the advice! I’ll probably only add a word if it’s used more than once/semi-frequently or I wonder how I didn’t know it before, in that case. I’m pretty new to learning outside a classroom setting, so I feel my vocabulary is lagging behind because classroom settings aren’t the best for learning vocab, in my opinion.
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