Vocabulary building?

What do you guys do for building your vocabulary specifically? I'm pretty decent with the grammar rules, I think now the only thing left is to just grind a ton of vocabulary words.

Do you just read news articles and stuff? Or used spaced repetition or something? Are there any sites for this type of thing? Most ones I see are for grammar rules and how to say specific sentences. I want one that actually builds vocabulary. My favorite site for this right now is japanese recall.. it sort of made me realize I need to actually use Anki and stuff instead of just dilly daddling. I guess I could build a deck myself, rather than using some site, but I'm too lazy and I'm afraid I'd add the cards wrong or something. Are there even any other sites like that out there?

Do new REAL sites ever get made or do they just make crappy wordpress blogs nowadays? What do people here use/do? I like people's opinions. It's funner getting people's support on a forum than actually spending my time studying.

Read a lot, listen a lot, look up things that stand out as important or interesting and you want to know more about, and don't be afraid to follow whatever path that leads you down. Also, if you were to do some drills in Anki with a pre-made deck you wouldn't be hurting yourself, although you may get bored. You could always just stick things that are giving you problems (can't remember readings, can't remember meanings, they're both kind of fuzzy and you can't remember either, etc.) into the deck. What I'm doing right now with a few words is setting them as appointments in Outlook that come up every weekday. I think it's working OK, although they aren't the kinds of words you're likely to come across all that often (耕す, 煮沸, 踝, 瘡蓋,... I think that's it).

Then again, it's hard to really answer this without knowing your level (or your interests). There are basic words that come up so often you can get them without even trying if you expose yourself to the language enough. Others require slightly more effort, and this is graded until you get to "almost never see it and really have to drill it to remember it" (人口に膾炙している, for instance, probably falls in this category).

This doesn't exactly fit your subject, but I'll just toss this at ya. I"m planning to just write flash cards (on index cards) with the gana, kana on one side, and the roumaji, eigo(if any), on the other. First, just the basic vowels, then the particles & combos, then some basic words/phrases, then some sentences, etc, so on.

Thanks for responding!
Well I don't know if outlook or paper flashcards are really what I had in mind. I mean I like Anki, I'm willing to use it, I don't think I'd get bored. I'm lazy, but I'm willing to study, I just hate having to look stuff up every day.

The problem with Anki is most people recommend "premade decks" or whatever. I find these to be a little.. irritating. Firstly you gain much by adding the card yourself, just like taking notes in class helps reinforce what you are learning. Secondly the premade decks are too large and start you with Kanji that you might not even know, I would rather start at the beginning (of the kyouiku Kanji) and learn them by commonness and stuff. Premade decks treat you like a rat in an experiment, you just keep getting the answer wrong until you finally learn that the answer is X. The only thing you gain from this is that you know how to answer the card correctly, I don't think it really helps you learn the word very well. Thirdly, am I just supposed to trust that the guy who made that deck added the cards correctly? And not hearing example sentences beforehand means that you are just memorizing some English meaning out of context, you really can only learn a word if you know how to use it in context! I've seen a lot of poorly made decks, that's all...

So, the best method would be, get a giant vocab list with no translations, and painstakingly, every single day, look up some more words from that list, add them to your deck, make sure you know how they are used by researching some example sentences.. etc. That would take forever. Also I'd probably screw up a translation every now and then. Japanese recall (japaneserecall.com.. incidentally), sort of simplified that by doing all of that lookup/usage stuff beforehand, and presenting it to you in order. So you are still adding the cards yourself, it just doesn't take an hour a day each time.. more like a few minutes.
Anyway I was really just wondering if there were any other sites like that, I like to see all my options before picking one. I can't imagine that site is the only one that has thought to do this... though if it is I'm just gonna use that from now on, it's not like I have any complaints with it, just kind of curious if there are any other ones, or to see if you guys recommend spaced repetition at all? I definitely haven't been doing this as long as some of you I'm sure. Sorry for the wall of text.

i went to that site, japanese recall, and.......... it's interesting. i kinda like it. i agree with with you about what you said about premade anki decks.

They have that referal news post that says you can refer people and get a free month.. so i thought i'd register and get what your referal link. you'd think you'd just be able to type the person's name in to refer them, but no.. gotta get some link. might as well give you a free month. you did refer me by posting this after all.. and i'm a nice guy like that.

I already registered and did the first day actually, but i can register again and just do the first day again, no big deal.

So Coreth, are you just starting out? How many kanji do you know? How many words do you know? How advanced is your understanding of grammar? How much listening/reading are you doing?

The point about words in isolation is valid. Ways around this are to load sentences with the words you want to learn in them, but make sure the rest of the sentence isn't too new or too far out of reach. That way you can get the word, the kanji (if there are any), the reading (again, if it's a kanji word), and the usage (or at least one of them). You can also get a feel for how the word is used by reading and listening a lot. You're going to have to do that anyway, because I find any sort of flashcard review is a bit detached from reality. Watching TV shows or movies puts you closer to reality. Having Japanese friends to hang out with puts you in right in the middle of it.

Having the 1945 (as far as I'm aware it's still this number) Joyo kanji is almost essential in learning new vocabulary. If you don't know them and their readings already, you'll be doing lots of looking up of words. I'd suggest learning them if you don't want to be looking stuff up every day. It's going to take a while if you're starting from scratch, though.

Glenn said:

Having the 1945 (as far as I'm aware it's still this number) Joyo kanji is almost essential in learning new vocabulary.

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They've added another 200 or so I think. Yippee! More kanji!

I knew they were going to. I just haven't heard whether it's gone into effect yet. So it's official now?

Peama said:

They have that referal news post that says you can refer people and get a free month.. so i thought i'd register and get what your referal link. you'd think you'd just be able to type the person's name in to refer them, but no.. gotta get some link. might as well give you a free month. you did refer me by posting this after all.. and i'm a nice guy like that.

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Oh snap, sorry for taking so long to reply.. yeah japaneserecall.com/register.php?referrer=Coreth is my referral link!

Glenn said:

So Coreth, are you just starting out? How many kanji do you know? How many words do you know? How advanced is your understanding of grammar? How much listening/reading are you doing?

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I know 192 kanji, and I learn the stroke orders and stuff as well, so I really do know them!

I usually tend to memorize the stroke orders and nothing else.. then just learn vocabulary that use Kanji that I know. Do you even need readings at all? I mean I know all the readings for.. 学 for instance without even needing to memorize them. I know so many words that use that Kanji that I can spout out tons of readings for it. You never know what reading a word is gonna use beforehand.. like that one uses がく a lot but then it's also まな in one word and がっ in another.

Or how about 生, that one is しょう, せい, は, い, う I mean come on, I know all the words that use those different readings, so what use is it memorizing them for the Kanji seperately. I just recalled those off the top of my head, and I didn't even put the readings on my flashcard for that kanji at all. Even if I had known how to pronounce a word because of the reading, I would have to look it up anyway because I wouldn't know what it meant, so the reading wouldn't have helped one bit.

I think it's more valuable to just learn words rather than try to memorize readings for a Kanji beforehand. It doesn't help! I tend to memorize stroke orders, and then I treat the readings as part of vocabulary words. Anyway that's what japanese recall makes you learn too so that's why I like it so much.

As for words I know about 2,000 or so. I know all the grammar rules. I do a lot of listening, maybe not as much reading as I should, but oh well. Still not even close to fluency though..

Oh and yeah there's 2,136 jouyou kanji now. Takes effect in 2012 in schools I think.

Glenn said:

I knew they were going to. I just haven't heard whether it's gone into effect yet. So it's official now?

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Well, I'm just going by Wikipedia which says the list was revised on 30 November 2010.

I used to watch a TV program (but the same would go with movies/anime/news items) that I like. I would listen to it first, the second time I would write down all the words that I didn't know and I would find the meaning of them, and then I would watch it again.

@Coreth ,

Alright, now I have an idea of where you are. I'll suggest this to you, if you're going to focus on the kanji and not worry about readings, you should learn their meanings and writings, and really not worry about readings. I don't know where you got ひにち from, but I'm pretty sure I've never come across it. I'm sure it's out there, but if I saw 日日, I'd read it ひび (although more likely than not it would be written 日々).

You clearly need to learn about the types of readings and rules for euphonic change (音便) as well. Check out this post to get you started. A more detailed explanation can be found at Wikipedia's page on kanji. That page also has information on the construction of the characers, and the six types of kanji (六書 (りくしょ)).

The readings you can leave alone until you actually start reading, and comics with ふりがな are good for that (although they can be creative at times...). Now, there are times when you just have to know the word to know how to read it, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to learn the readings. For one thing, an educated guess is usually better than a blind one, and for another, once you know about the 音符 system guessing readings of characters you've yet to see becomes immensely easier (although this can possibly be picked up on intuitively just by reading). But like I said, if you're going to leave readings to the side for now, leave them to the side. It'll become a lot clearer when you start to focus on them.

Man, you take a little time working on a post, and everything changes from when you started.

eeky said:

Well, I'm just going by Wikipedia which says the list was revised on 30 November 2010.

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Ah. I never remember seeing a fixed date, and to be honest with you I was never all that concerned, because I already know them (or if I don't, there aren't many new ones I have to learn). Although it'll be nice to see kanji words written in kanji more often, instead of that mixed writing nonsense (like 迂回 being written う回).

Glenn said:

Man, you take a little time working on a post, and everything changes from when you started.

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>.< yeah sorry I edited it a lot too.
Anyway hinichi isn't so obscure, I've seen it on news sites and stuff. It means "date" or so. Or more like "How many days on the calendar do you want" when referring to booking a hotel room, or something. And it is read like that.

My 生 example in my edit is much better though! That one has all kinds of readings, no way I'd know if it was しょうまれる or うまれる. If there's some formula for determining the reading then whatever, but I'd have to learn the word anyway, so why not just learn the word and forgo the reading completely. It's frivilous study time is what I think. Maybe one day, when I'm as advanced as you, I'll come back and memorize readings for fun, but until then I think I'll just skip them like you said.

I don't suppose you have any examples at hand, do you? I've always seen "date" written 日付 (ひづけ) as far as I'm aware.

Glenn said:

I knew they were going to. I just haven't heard whether it's gone into effect yet. So it's official now?

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As eeky-san and Coreth-san wrote, the new Joyo kanji was announced officially by the Cabinet on 30th November, 2010. It has already started being used among media or in the documents of the Government, and is scheduled to be taught in schools from April, 2012.

Glenn said:

I don't suppose you have any examples at hand, do you? I've always seen "date" written 日付 (ひづけ) as far as I'm aware.

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ご希望の日にちをお願いいたします (Gokibou no hinichi wo onegai itashimasu)
Could you tell me how many days you would like?

日にちが迫っている (Hinichi ga sematte iru)
The day is fast approaching.

It's usually written with the second kanji just as にち, but in dictionaries it's 日日. Like I said though, it's less of a "day" word and more of a "date on the calendar" type of word.

Interesting. Well, I still don't recall having come across it. Did you get that out of a dictionary? At least the first one is pretty formal. Maybe it's just because I've never made a reservation? Or maybe my memory just sucks. haha

At any rate, I think that's one you don't have to worry about, especially if it's given the use-hiragana-to-disambiguate-the-meaning treatment.

Toritoribe said:

As eeky-san wrote, the new Joyo kanji was announced officially by the Cabinet on 30th November, 2010. It has already started being used among media or in the documents of the Government, and is scheduled to be taught in schools from April, 2012.

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I see. Well then, apparently 窶斃 didn't make the list.

Glenn said:

Interesting. Well, I still don't recall having come across it. Did you get that out of a dictionary? At least the first one is pretty formal. Maybe it's just because I've never made a reservation? Or maybe my memory just sucks. haha

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Those are the example sentence Japanese Recall gives, though they stole them out of the kenkyusha electronic edition. So they are out of a dictionary.

I've come across it before, it's not the commonest of words, but it's still a word. I'm not just gonna skip it because it's obscure. I've seen it used in manga and stuff but mostly on news sites when they talk about the date something happened.

Well I guess I'll have to pay more attention, then. And of course this will probably be one of those situations where now that I'm aware of it I'll be hearing it all over the place.

Glenn said:

Well I guess I'll have to pay more attention, then. And of course this will probably be one of those situations where now that I'm aware of it I'll be hearing it all over the place.

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Yep.. that's what always happens lol.