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Vocabulary resources?

milkmanjack

後輩
20 Sep 2011
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So I posted here probably a year and a half ago... maybe two years ago? It's been awhile, and I've been learning Japanese on and off ever since in my spare time.

Right now, I'm at the point where my knowledge of the grammar is good enough that I can read Japanese alright. But if I had to guess, I'd say I probably only know about 300 words. Though I probably would only be able to recall out of hand maybe 50. If I read it, I'd remember what it is.

So my question right now is, what's a good resource for learning vocabulary?

My primary method of learning vocabulary has been reading a sentence in a piece of media (manga, book, video game) and looking up the word. I had the idea to compile flashcards of all of the new vocabulary I see while reading something new (book, manga, game). But usually it ends up being about 300 flash cards in about 45 minutes of game play. At least for the wordier ones.

So I was curious. Are there any really good resources for learning vocabulary? Preferably the more commonly used words in the language? Books, movies, shows, programs? I've seen some books dedicated to vocabulary, but most of them have pretty shady reviews.

The way I'm using definitely works, but it's pretty exhausting and begins to grind your nerves just reading a sentence and inscribing each new word into a flashcard with its meaning and associated kanji and such.

edit: seems to be some good answers to this in this post. this post may be redundant.
 
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anything is a good resource, But before I could recommend you something like a casual reading or something, do you have a text book or something? because if you're feeling lost maybe you have no direction to go, and a textbook wil probably guide you through many interesting situations , "meeting people", "going to the restaurant" , "at the dinner" ,"at the movies", going to the beach, and so on.

anyway, as generic as my comment might look, give it a try
 
do you have a text book or something?
I used Ultimate Japanese at first, but I found that the way the lessons are cut up to be a bit problematic. Every lesson introduces 20 to 40 words on average. Each successive lesson uses more words from the previous lesson. This basically makes it so you have to memorize those 20 to 40 words before moving on too far. By the time I realized this, I was already 16 lessons in. It was basically impossible for me to continue because I had something like 480 words I needed to know and I had only memorized maybe 50 of them. So I kinda gave up on that one.

I used Tae Kim's after that. A friend showed it to me. I read the entire first half of it. Taught me a lot of important stuff that Ultimate Japanese did. I forget why I stopped using that one.

After those two resources, I used the Handbook of Verbs to learn about a bunch of sentence structures used with verbs. Probably helped me the most.

I have Genki I, but I really do not like the lessons. Plus I found out I had to buy the answer key separate, which was only in Japanese, so I gave up on that one.

because if you're feeling lost maybe you have no direction to go, and a textbook wil probably guide you through many interesting situations , "meeting people", "going to the restaurant" , "at the dinner" ,"at the movies", going to the beach, and so on.
Not a bad idea. I guess I could start at Lesson 1 in Ultimate Japanese and just learn the 40 words per lesson before moving on.

Though honestly, I'd rather just keep reading books and playing games and doing manual vocabulary lookup than that.
 
This is going to sound snarky and mean, but it's a serious question:

If I asked your friends if they think you have ADD, would they say yes?
 
At the start, the only way to learn vocabulary is to... learn vocabulary. Flashcards work. Better than basic flashcards are spaced repetition software programs (Spaced repetition - Wikipedia) like Anki (Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcards). (Technically you can do spaced repetition with paper flashcards too, but I wouldn't have the patience to keep sorting them into separate boxes.)
If you are averse to using flashcards in any form, you could consider something like Iversen's Word list method (Word lists) or going with L-R (listening-reading) techniques (http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!L-R/! L-R the most important passages.htm )

If you stick to learning materials (textbooks, graded readers, etc.) then with just 1000 word you'll be able to start picking up words in context from reading. With a few thousand words and some easy manga you can pick up word in context from simply reading those. It takes quite a few thousand words to start picking up words in context from simply reading books.

Also, I'm ADD and passed JLPT N1 and can read novels in Japanese for pleasure. It's harder, but if you persist at it you can get there. A flip side of ADD that many people don't know about is that while we find it hard to concentrate on a task, once we -are- engaged in a task we sometimes 'hyper-focus' - become so absorbed in the task that we don't notice what's going on around us. (This happens to me regularly with reading fiction, in English or Japanese). If you can find learning methods that let you engage that hyper-focus, you'll learn a ton during that time.
 
Memrise is a nice, free flash card app. It has a (limited) dictionary connected to it so for a lot of words you can just input the hiragana and it will fill in the rest. I prefer to have it test me in both pronunciation of the word (hiragana) as well as English meaning of the word.

I'm putting in the words from the homework I'm assigned each week. It already has flash card sets like the different counters and such, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
 
Flashcards work. Better than basic flashcards are spaced repetition software programs (Spaced repetition - Wikipedia) like Anki (Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcards). (Technically you can do spaced repetition with paper flashcards too, but I wouldn't have the patience to keep sorting them into separate boxes.)

Yeah, seems to be the consensus. Flashcards accompanied with reading actual Japanese. So I'll probably just keep doing that.

Also, I'm ADD and passed JLPT N1 and can read novels in Japanese for pleasure. It's harder, but if you persist at it you can get there. A flip side of ADD that many people don't know about is that while we find it hard to concentrate on a task, once we -are- engaged in a task we sometimes 'hyper-focus' - become so absorbed in the task that we don't notice what's going on around us. (This happens to me regularly with reading fiction, in English or Japanese). If you can find learning methods that let you engage that hyper-focus, you'll learn a ton during that time.

Yeah, I don't actually know if I am ADD. Never seen a doctor about it. It's just something that I've been accused of in the past since I tend to start a lot of projects (programming, web design, game development, video editing, photo editing, producing music, etc... I have a lot of hobbies) that I don't finish the majority of. So I don't now if that makes me ADD, just easily disinterested, lazy, or what.

As a side note, I've never been accused of having ADD at school or work. Just when it comes to my hobbies.
 
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Memrise is a nice, free flash card app. It has a (limited) dictionary connected to it so for a lot of words you can just input the hiragana and it will fill in the rest. I prefer to have it test me in both pronunciation of the word (hiragana) as well as English meaning of the word.

I'm putting in the words from the homework I'm assigned each week. It already has flash card sets like the different counters and such, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

I will check this out. I've been looking for a good alternative to Anki for the iOS, since it's like $25.
 
The reason I asked about your attention span is that I get the impression you're always in a hurry to get to the next thing and that vocabulary items are just pebbles in your path. You look them up to help you get through whatever it is you're on at the moment, but once past them they're of no further immediate use or interest and just don't stick. Also, you had essentially the same problem almost three years ago. You're obviously intelligent, so it isn't a matter of lack of smarts.

I agree with the above advice about SRS flash cards (I use StickyStudy). I don't think they should be approached as a magical cure, though, given your long(ish) history of not making vocabulary retention a part of your studies. If you have the determination to set a goal, focus on the cards, and diligently slog your way through them then I believe you will see some positive results.

What I think may hamper you more than anything else is that your studies are passive in nature. Everything centers around understanding Japanese that is already there. Vocabulary retention and recall is greatly enhanced by active tasks...creating your own Japanese, be it written or oral. Try working more of that into your studies and I believe you will notice an increase in your vocabulary.

Another technique is to adopt Japanese words into your mind's internal dialogue, using them in English sentenced to replace the English words. It is silly as hell, but very effective because after you do it enough your brain starts to treat the words like synonyms for the English words rather than as foreign words and you won't have to struggle to recall them.
 
I'm actually very surprised, so far through this journey the easiet part of learning Japanese is learning new words and the hard part is the grammar. Hard in the sense of it actually takes more than 1 day to understand how the grammar works but for memorizing words, you can try it one day and know it the next and they stick with you. For some reason I can easily recall 500 words in japanese but as soon as it's to remember something about grammar, I stumble and forget but quickly remember after a while.

I found the best way for learning vocabulary is through Anki, that program is just so amazing. There is a mobile IOS app called "Japanese" and it's pretty much based off playing activities and learning the vocabulary along with it, although I don't use it anymore much I got to level 10 which seriously takes a while since you really have to memorize all the words and continuously play each game, but you can check it out.
 
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