I was browsing decks, and I was surprised to see that there wasn’t any centered around food (specifically, eating out and reading menus.) I’m mostly looking for a bunch of vocab so that I can read a menu while in Japan, but some helpful sentences/grammar points would be great too!
Does anyone have any suggestions or homemade decks on this topic? I’d love to study them!
Not on Bunpro, but this Anki deck is fun to use (it has pretty pictures, and every card has a rather extensive explanation about the food item in question).
“Japanese and kitchen” and “Groceries”, but not a restaurant one precisely.
I understand grammar would be hard to choose but vocab is doable.
Some words i’ve noticed aren’t considered JLPT though.
Someone who knows Japanese at a decent level can pass JLPT with ease without studying for it specifically. Someone who studied to just barely pass N1 isn’t necessarily a high level of conversational and cultural vocabulary. Only 1/3rd of my vocabulary is considered a JLPT word, if I forget everything outside of that I would struggle so much I don’t think I’d be able to properly pay attention to entertainment or even hold a conversation anymore.
If your goal is to pass JLPT for visa etc, food items is a bad priority. If you just want to learn conversational Japanese and enjoy being in Japan, culturally relevant food items is a pretty good thing to look into. The average tourist is better off knowing everyday language and what different foods are than how to do business or bank transactions or read scientific essays. They will learn all of those eventually if they keep engaging with the language on a broad spectrum in high volume either way, but most likely won’t need it.
Besides the good answers already offered, I want to add that the variety of words than can show up on menus is extremely large and can differ by regions, chains, and what sort of food you are eating. Some words are naturally much more common than others though. Still, a general deck ordered by frequency in media will not necessarily be that efficient as a way to cover the hundreds (or thousands) of possible menu items you can reasonably come across.
From the perspective of vocab learning I would suggest trying two things:
Some practical considerations if you are coming here as a tourist:
I do actually like the idea of creating some more food/menu item decks. It is definitely something I would have used when I first moved to Japan and didn’t understand much of anything.
That’s exactly what I was warning about but didn’t want to develop 'cause wasn’t the debate here xD
If you use bunpro solely based on JLPT classified words, you won’t ever see “udon” or “ramen”.
Or even, city names etc.
So, if someone were to make a deck, they would probably use JLPT words to make the progress show up in Dashboard.
Though, you can also see your number of words on your profile and in your progress bar.
thank you all so much!!
I’m working on my JPLT grade passively, but hoping to beef up my restaurant/menu vocab for the upcoming trip, since my friends are very excited about eating out!
I’ll do my best to add items that are commonly found on menus rather than niche specific ones - Stuff like the kanji for “noodles”, or kanji for different cuts of meat.
I know they also want to go to bakeries and cafes, so I’ll try to add some stuff that would help there too!
I’ll definitely make my own (super rough) deck and go from there… but I think a properly made deck would help a lot of people! If anyone makes one, please let me know!
I tried doing this for the trip we took in June-July, using the anki deck linked above. I found it had mixed results.
Going through the deck was actually more useful as an introduction to vast variety of different Japanese dishes, especially those with no US equivalent. So I learned about things like meronpan and mitarashi dango and tsukemen that I didn’t really know about before. I loved it for that!
But the vocabulary itself didn’t end up being very useful. Every place we went to had either an english menu or pictures. The few that didn’t had menus so loaded up with unrecognized Kanji that there was no way to dig through it. That’s because there are so many different terms for ingredients that you probably can’t efficiently learn through an SRS method - or at least, I couldn’t. For example, there are easily a hundred different terms for specific types of fish or molluscs or what have you, and SRS isn’t a great tool for memorizing halibut vs. mackerel vs. bream vs. trout vs… There’s no context, no sentences you can use to anchor the term - it’s just brute force memorization.
After reading this thread the other week I started working on a deck based around the idea of individual units for food/restaurant types. With an initial unit that helps interact with staff for things like ordering and paying.
I will send it for review at some point so that it can be shared with all, unless someone beats me to publishing another one first. Anyone can feel free to shoot me a message with suggestions or feedback 