Yeah, I’m the same way. I generally just assume that if I encounter a word once, I’m probably gonna encounter it again. For those few occasions where I’m wrong… eh, I’ll take it. Worst case I now know what a ghost orchid is called in Japanese, best case I see the exact same metaphor again and remember what it means.
Though if I’m being entirely honest lately I haven’t bothered making flash cards at all. I just encounter words repeatedly, some stick, some don’t, and I’ll see where I end up. It’s not efficient, but it works for me for the time being.
Yeah, I read a lot of media that I haven’t bothered making flash cards for, haha, mostly because my vocab is still so low, if I made flash cards for every word I didn’t know across all media I read, I would get completely buried in SRS reviews. So I could read super slowly (and probably limit myself to one genre/series for a while) while slowly adding flash cards every day, or I could read wildly across a bunch of genres without SRS-ing most of the words I encounter, therefore having to waste more time looking words up, but getting to read more. And I have chosen the second option .
Right now, I’m SRS-ing words from pro-wrestling media, and that’s it. Nothing from any manga I’m reading, or any other books. It means my manga reading skill is advancing much slower, since I forget a lot more words, but my ability to understand pro-wrestling stuff is going up a lot, and that’s my main priority, so I’m happy with that. I’ll eventually start SRS-ing words from manga when my other sources of flash cards slow down, but I’m holding off for now because I don’t want to overwhelm myself.
OP, I hope this is one of the main takeaways from this thread: “It’s not efficient, but it works for me”. I don’t think a single one of us has a perfectly optimized study method. The main thing is just finding something that works for you, and that you’re able to keep up. It often helps to do things efficiently, because it means that you can see results from your efforts earlier, but the best thing you can do is finding something that works for you, and doing anything is better than doing nothing.
It’s easy to get paralyzed by indecision, or second-guess your methods because there might be a better one, but as long as you find something that you can keep doing, you’ll make progress. And if all else fails, you could literally just start reading, haha, and use a dictionary!
I have a deck where I add Genki vocab as I go along (both JP->EN and EN->JP) and more recently I downloaded the core 2.3k deck which I’m also working through (that one’s only JP->EN though).
Learning vocab on WK, even if it wasn’t for the … interesting ordering, somehow doesn’t work for me to really make it stick (at least not the meaning), so I usually add words even when I’ve seen them on WK before.
For now I get vocabulary from Wanikani, Minna no Nigongo and JPLT lists. Previously I had anki deck for Minna no Nihongo, but then I switched to Kanshudo, they have quite convenient decks and SRS.
I still use Anki, but for voiced decks and Kanji by grade level.
I’m just gonna pop in and say I’m satisfied with using Anki, I’ve only been using it for 26 days tho. I’m studying a 1k deck based on the most frequent words in slice-of-life anime and Japanese dramas, learning 10 new words every day and doing the SRS reviews for the previous ones. In two more months I’ll have finished the deck and I’ll start sentence mining, so I’m aiming for a version of what fallynleaf calls the hybrid approach. I currently spend about 40-60 minutes a day using Anki, so I guess it would be a bad option if I didn’t genuinely enjoy SRS as a study method. Since it’s free and not that hard to set up I think you should give it a try and judge for yourself:)
Koohi.cafe and whatever books/manga I’m reading. The site tells me how many times each word appears in the book, so I know which of the words I come across will be worth learning. Better to srs the word that appears 7 times than the one that appears just once, right?
That’s probably true, but could take a very long time, maybe years. For example, just looking at the stats of the VN I’m playing, theres 718906 words total, and 25349 unique words of which 7865 (31%) are used only once. It’s quite surprising in books it’s almost always about 40% words that are used once, even in a long series it ends about 30%. Had to up the frequency threshold where I put in Anki for that one . Learning all the obscure words feels like it will last forever…
I have no regrets in reaching lvl 60 in two years without studying vocabulary and just learning basic grammar. When I moved to Genki 2, AIAIJ, and Tobira, it was very rare to see some new vocabulary. Now that I’m reading native material, I find lost of new vocabulary but usually I already know the kanji. For example, today I just learnt 改悪: so it reinforces the already known kanji; sometimes I can guess the vocabulary meaning using the kanji; and it is easier to remember the vocabulary since it uses a familiar kanji. Regarding kana-only vocabulary that is essential, I think most people already know it when they join WK. For those who dislike stopping the reading flow to look up words, finishing WK as soon as possible seems to be a good strategy.
I started to make vocabulary lists and that didn’t work too well so I gave that up and tried to read a lot.
It didn’t work like I was expecting either because by just looking up words one time I forget them soon after.
Recently I started to use Anki to learn for the Kanken because there is a lot of vocabulary to memorize.
It works well in a way but I found that I can’t activate what I learned with SRS if I don’t happen to come across the word in real life and for almost 95% of the vocabulary I study now that means basically never. Never or so late that I forget it again.
To find out about that limitation felt really frustrating and I found reading also doesn’t help a lot with this problem because I need to hear the word spoken by somebody before I “trust” it enough to use it.
The latest strategy is to write down the Audio from a movie and that really works well for me.
I listen to the phrase several times, check the dictionary if I don’t understand the meaning and write down the script. By doing so I don’t need to write down the meaning at all because I know what the movie is about when I look at the film. Actually I can really recommend that method and I realized that I started to use a lot of the phrases I learned so far already in real life. That’s why I have to make another selection of input material next time It sounds a bit strange that I started to talk like a soldier and at the same time use a lot of refined compound verbs…
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I knew next to no Japanese when I started WK and I’m certainly not the only one. tofugu’s own guide, which was google search result #1 when I googled “learn Japanese” recommends starting with WK right away after learning the Kana.
In the past year, I finished out 3 decks (Genki1+2, Minna 1 and Minna 2 with duplicates removed, roughly 2500 words total). With that under my belt, I’ve tried to move onto something that integrates native content more.
I do kitsun’s large 10k deck (with known words from previous decks hibernated) at 15words / day. But I’m also trying to read more native content (either from physical books or satori reader), for that I have an “encounters” deck for new words I see. That deck is ad-hoc so I just clear out the lessons weekly.
For adding these new cards, my process is something like
Check if new word spotted is in 10k
2a. If yes > bump to top of 10k lesson queue so it will start getting SRS’d today or tomorrow
2b. If no > add to encounters deck
Kitsun has really nice auto card generation for a definition with audio, I go an extra step and quickly grab a sentence from tatoeba.org to go with the auto generated card.
Same experience here. I started WK concurrently with learning Japanese as a whole.
Since the topic of whether learning vocab alongside WK at all is important has come up – yeah, I very much think it’s preferable. Unless someone really doesn’t have the time to balance everything, and is sure they’re comfortable waiting to really get into applying the language for a year or (probably) more, some basic vocab (and grammar, though that hasn’t really been disputed) will do wonders. Even one’s results in kanji should be better if they push themselves enough elsewhere to be able to better read, for the sake of reinforcing things, keeping the burned ones in use, etc.
More to the point, I suppose OP can settle this for themselves by looking at their expectations. You can’t expect to get totally fluent in Japanese without dumping loads of time into it, absolutely, but you can start having practical results in a much shorter time if you put your attention elsewhere. I won’t pretend stopping to look up loads of things and still not getting a lot of it wasn’t arduous at first, but I was on some level reading manga after a few months, and there are levels of Japanese at which I’m borderline comfortable by now. But I’m set to not finish WK for several months, and if I had to spend all of that time just preparing to start actually using the knowledge at all? I wonder if I’d stick with it at all, then. You can monofocus kanji for some peace of mind, but you’re never truly “ready enough” for the real thing without struggling through it for 1000s of hours, and if you desire enough to really start using the language, you’ll find the pressure to learn more words coming from within as soon as it looks like it’s in your grasp at all. At least, I did.
I used to create the sets of vocabulary on Quizlet, depending on if I am learning something for JLTP or just by the category. It has a really great system of memorization and forms of the tests.
Hmm honestly just can’t decide which one to chose haha. I just want to go through N5 and N4 vocab asap and build a solid foundation. Right now I’m unfortunately lacking some basic vocab despite being lvl 17 here, so I really need to do that.
I don’t really mind whether it’s web based or a program to download, I’m just curious which one is (in your opinion) better to study vocab when it comes to features, content etc
If you just want to go through the N5 and N4 vocab, it won’t matter much honestly. Both have the possibility to use an N5 and N4 wordlist, both let you type in answers with some tolerance for typos. Kitsun might have some more detailed info depending on the deck you use, and will work on every device.
I personally used Torii and liked it just fine. Kitsun does let you search its dictionary and add words as flashcards from there for sentence mining, which is nice. But for the basics, it doesn’t really matter which you pick.
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It sounds a bit strange that I started to talk like a soldier and at the same time use a lot of refined compound verbs…