Re: Lists of Japanese verbs?

[BoxedLunch]

Lately I've been trying to increase my Japanese vocab by learning translations from lists of most common English verbs (like this). That is, I'll find any words I don't know the Japanese equivalent(s) for and look up their translations in my Japanese dictionary. But I swear at least half the new words I learn with this method are suru verbs that I've rarely seen or heard anywhere else. I'll still continue learning those, since I'm sure it's of some use, but does anyone know of some good lists for Japanese verbs, from most common to least common? I haven't really been able to find any outside of 100-or-so lists of super-common verbs I already know (tsukau, hashiru, iku, etc.).

 

[nekojita]

I'd be very careful with learning by translating from lists of common English verbs - you don't necessarily know that the Japanese word you're coming up with is the best/most common. And in many cases there are multiple possibles (open = あく、あける、ひらく), or Japanese verbs which cover a wide range of possible meanings (かける is probably most infamous here)

A lot of 'common word' lists for Japanese are actually based on newspapers - so that will be heavily slanted towards a certain type of vocab. There used to be a word list floating around the internet which was based off novels, as well.

 

[BoxedLunch]

Oh, I'm always careful about stuff like that, don't worry. I make sure to check and double-check multiple definitions and ambiguity, and I already know about transitive/intransitive, potential, passive, etc., so I won't get caught up in that. Any list would be helpful. If the words are used in newspapers and novels, they must be common enough to be worth learning.

 

[nekojita]

Depends how much you enjoy reading the economics section of the newspaper.

I think this was the one I was thinking of. But most of these automatically generated lists have some rubbish in (parsers are not 100% accurate). Still, you could strip the verbs out of it and ignore any that were obviously errors.

Or you could just use JLPT word lists.

 

[FinancialWar]

There are total of around 1800 verbs considered "common" by edict and 1100 verbs required JLPTN1