I was reading some old posts in these forums and found that the roughly 6,000 vocab words taught on Wanikani are not the top 6,000 - it seems they are more random, and were mainly chosen to help you remember whichever kanji you’re currently learning. I also read somewhere that if you wanna get really good at reading japanese, your vocab needs to be in the tens of thousands lol.
In any case, it seems that there’s a ton of vocab not covered on Wanikani. It would be nice if they covered more. What do you use to learn vocab not taught on Wanikani? Is there anything remotely similar to what Wanikani does that teaches you more vocab?
honestly, i just look up words that i don’t know, and i keep doing it again and again. sometimes knowing the kanji lets me get a vibe and i’ll not look up a word. sometimes i get anxious about needing to look up the same word again and again. sometimes it sucks that i’ve forgotten how to read a kanji that i’ve already “burned” with WK.
i don’t think that i want to mine a big anki deck; for me reviewing flashcards is a stepping stone to greater comfort and ability to engage with Japanese, not the main activity i wanna be doing longterm.
Immersion. It’s great to use WK in general and it gives you a decent ground, but to truly increase your vocab range, you need to immerse. That could be through listening to podcasts, playing video games, reading books and etc..
that is in my opinion the best way to get more vocab under your belt, and generally just get you used to reading Japanese and exposing yourself to native content.
As an example, I’m currently playing Persona 5 Royal in Japanese, and it’s only been 6 hours into the game and I’ve already mined around ~1000 words that I’ve never seen before (or encountered before, but never learnt), but it’s super crucial to learn them so that they actually remain in your active recall when you want to practice speaking!
So what do you do when you encounter a new word in the game? How do you look it up, just google translate, or? Do you write it down somewhere? Do you make flashcards?
Okay so, this might be a LOT to explain, but I’ll try my best!
Firstly, for mining we need something called Yomitan, Yomitan is an open-source extension for the browser which enables on-demand lookups for words, so for example if I go on NHK-news and there’s a kanji/word I don’t recognize or know, I can look it up by pressing shift and a pop-up with the dictionary meaning and other additions show up! (here’s an example with a screenshot)
Now the people who created this also made it possible to link the extension to Anki (which is an app for SRS/memory based learning)_ and create flashcards for these words.
This is an example of the word I looked up in anki though it has my personal configuration for flashcards on it so it may look different than others!
This way, we can easily lookup any word and get it’s meaning, mine the word and make it a flashcard, and easily review when we want to. The setup process might take a while, but the site I linked has a very thorough installation guide and honestly having yomitan as it is even if you don’t want to mine words is a life saver (espeically when reading a Light novel and there’s a lot of confusing/niche words)
For games specifically I use a software called GameSentenceMiner which hooks the text from the game into the web and then I can simply do the method I explained earlier and mine it to my Anki card deck
Ooohh I see, so you play the game on your PC, then? Most of the games I play are on actual consoles, so this might not work for me haha. I might need to manually look up the words each time, which is probably super time consuming.
For a browser extension, I have rikaikun, which I really like so far, but I’ll definitely look up Yomitan!
Also it seems like Anki is definitely the go-to for this haha. I should really get started with it.
I mean, it is, but also why not just give it a try and see how you feel about it?
for example, what i’ve found is that i generally would prefer to have the lookup method and the input method be separate, even though for me this usually means holding a book in one hand and my phone in the other on the train, for example. if i don’t know a word, i have some options and generally none of them are as good as “already knowing the word”, but unfortunately that option isn’t available to me until i go through some process of “not knowing a word” many times
Yeah I definitely will give it a try soon! I want to find beginner-friendly games to play as well as children’s books and such. For the time being I downloaded Anki and created a New Vocab deck and I plan to add new words to it, starting from the Genki 1 textbook. Hopefully soon I can expand enough to start reading more native content!
Btw, for Anki, how do you input new words that use Kanji when they have both a reading in hiragana and a translation into english? Do you put both the reading and the translation in the back of the card?
Yeah so I don’t know how this would fare in console because I absolutely use a pc for all of these, but nevertheless it’s always good to have this noted down for the future perhaps!
For lookups I like jisho.org a lot. If I know the reading (from furigana for example) I just type it in.
To research unknown kanji I love kankan.pt as you can type in known kanji and build unknown ones from that.
I also second jpdb.org for vocabulary for books, and their SRS if you like.
