Recommendations on vocabulary?

Hello everyone!
Currently I’m going through the JLPT N5 vocab as well as wanikani. I plan on getting “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar”. I was wondering if this is a good vocab set to be going through. Are there any other sets you guys go through or recommend? Also, is there anything else I should be studying besides wanikani, grammar, and vocab?

There’s some pretty good info here

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Well, a grammar dictionary is better for grammar :slight_smile: .

I have used this series (from N3 to N1) which I would recommend to Japanese learners.
It is structured from N5 to N1. There is also example sentences for most of the vocab. There are audio available to download for those example sentences, too.

https://www.ask-books.com/jp/hajimete-jlpt/

Depends, I guess. It’s definitely a good place to start. Why are you learning Japanese? Do you want to read books/watch anime? Do you want to move to Japan? The kind of vocab you’ll want to learn will depend on what you want to do with it.

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Assuming you want to be generally competent at Japanese…

I encourage rather than trying to tackle a vocab list that someone else made, to make your own. My personal recommendation is anything with a Japanese dictionary and auto add function… (i.e Houhou or Kitsun.io) It pays off. This way you know why every word is in the list, the past experience of encountering the word reinforces its learning and you learn at your pace as words find you.

Perhaps you were trying to read a children’s story and did not know a particular word, so you looked it up and added it to your list. So when you see it come review time you might say to yourself “oh! I remember that one”. Likewise when you converse with Japanese people they may say a word that you do not know. This is a perfect opportunity to practice asking what something means (because you will be doing that a lot), and add it to your list. Perhaps a N5 or N4 list is perfect in the beginning, but as you gain enough proficiency to actually hold a conversation or read simple text, your personally curated vocab list will become an irreplaceable component of your learning method.

At least…

That’s what works for me!
It may be blasphemy here to admit but that worked so much better for me than WK that I basically just stopped using WK for months in order to focus on my own vocab since I was learning so much more.

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This is not blasphemy. WK is focused mainly on kanji. You are talking vocab.

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Ok Awesome, thank you! This really helps. My ultimate goal is just being able to read and listen to shows/podcasts with relative ease.