I was doing a N5 listening practice video, and came across the verb 並ぶ
I’ve finished the N5 vocab deck and haven’t come across this word. Looking it up on Bunpro it shows a N4, but on Jisho.org it’s listed as N5. Is this a mistake or are they just taken from different lists?
There’s a lot of different lists out there based on different past tests, official practice material, and textbooks for learners.
If I’m not mistaken N5 itself was made just looking at what beginner books taught you.
Knowing a few N4 words at N5 doesn’t hurt. It’s a step towards being higher than N5 and there’s no guarantee you won’t see them at the test anyways since they do use words past expectations here and there.
If you are in dire need of N5 asap to be admitted to a specific language learning school I understand wanting to focus on that, but if you’re in no rush and your longer term goal is just “become conversational, be able to watch anime, read manga” then don’t worry about it at all. A lot of the most common words are “N1” or not even in the JLPT levels at all.
俺 is marked N1 which is one of the most common pronouns and the 444th most common word in the jpdb media occurency list. You wouldn’t wait until you’d learned many thousands of words before learning this if your goal is to learn Japanese.
Don’t worry about it, 並ぶ is very useful and one of the 1000th most used words so you can just learn it now.
No official JLPT word-lists exist, so each party tries te make their own N-lists based on available JLPT resources. That’s why some variation exists between them.
I feel like thats a word that probably would only incidentally show up on the N5 as part of a longer reading section but wouldn’t be the focus of any questions, right? N5 is like “what’s cooking called” “how do you say shoe”
I don’t think it’s inconceivable that that verb could show up in a reading section for N5. I’m pretty sure I had at least seen it before Writing N5. I certainly wouldn’t worry about the kanji if my only goal was to pass N5, though.
There’s no authentic, bonafide JLPT list or word-to-level correlation. The Japan Foundation does not publish what they test for at each level. All the different test prep/resources just make an approximation based off past tests.
Additionally, the internet is replete with Japanese learning material that is just some layer or frontend built on top of JMDict data. I would say the lion’s share of bilingual English/Japanese material online is based on JMDict. Jisho is just the most popular of these (I think). JMDict is by no means authoritative.
On a more fundamental level, the issue is inherently subjective. I was shocked to learn なし wasn’t an N5 word, when it was one of the very first words I learned on a ‘survival Japanese’ level. That is to say, how any one person would rank the most basic to most advanced word will probably depend on why/how they’re learning Japanese. Living in the country, business person/office Japanese, perennial anime watcher, etc etc.
Besides the good points that have already been made in this thread by others, I would like to also mention that word lists or estimates for required vocabulary size for JLPT levels tend to be focused on the amount needed to reasonably pass the test, not to know literally every word. Some questions on the test are over the specified level intentionally as well.
I would estimate (very unscientifically and just based on my experience and intuition) that the actual vocabulary needed to have near 100% vocab coverage for each JLPT level is probably closer to double the standard estimates (I would guess my vocabulary was at around or over 20,000 words when I took the N1, and there was only one word I didn’t know - not that you need to study to that amount to pass the test!). However, it is not reasonable to tell a beginner to just learn 3-5k ‘common’ words, let alone work out how that might realistically happen, so the standard is slightly more concentrated lists of more reasonable sizes.
Ah thanks for all the insights everyone! The word in question was quite important to understand the answer to the question. It was question one in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyx7uVQyx5M
Basically to get the month of November in the birthday question, I need to know the verb so I could understand that four “1’s” were stood in a row.
That seems more like a question about 4つ to me. Whether they’re stood in a row or not, there’s only one date there with four ones in it
And that date is 1/1/2011! … or was it 2/11/2101!?
Ah of course! What a silly oversight on my end haha. I was just going off the youtubers explanation of how you arrive at the answer.
Reading the answer in Japanese I would have got 11/11 I think but my listening is still really weak (hence watching these videos)
I think I get so hung up trying to puzzle out the words im not familiar with I seem to miss the ones I am familiar with currently.
i most certainly do that, especially for listening. i get caught up on trying to puzzle out one word that i cant quite remember and proceed to miss the entire rest of the sentence.
praying i manage to avoid that on JLPT, cant exactly ask the recording to please repeat itself
Yes, I’ve noticed this too with two of my Go-To resources. It’s not keeping me away at night, but …
