How to study Vocab

[bwferdi]

Hello,
for a long time, I just used Wanikani to study voab, but that wasnt enough. Now I am also doing the vocab decks from Bunpro. Currently nearly finished N4. But I am not sure if the decks teach all the necessary JLPT level vocab. How are you guys studying vocab? Is wanikani and bunpro enough?

[Gacee]

Depends on what your goals are! I’m of the opinion that the bunpro vocab decks are pretty good, but vocabulary doesn’t exist in a vacuum and you need to know where you want to end up using those words.

If your goal is passing a specific JLPT level, there are other resources out there that are focused towards JLPT vocabulary that would be a good addition to your studying with Bunpro.

If your goal is to expand your vocabulary as quickly as possible, there are the Core decks that people have made for Anki that (I believe) aim to include the most commonly used words in Japanese.

If your goal is to consume a specific type of media, you can honestly just consume that media and make vocab decks out of words that you don’t know! There are also resources people have made for popular J media where they’ve made flashcard decks for popular manga and video games and the like, which you could search for.

[Warrie]

I finished Wanikani in a year (which was quite an intense tempo) but quickly realised I already forgot quite a lot of vocab and Kanji after doing so. So I used the Kanji Study app to redo all the Kanji and I use Iknow for the vocab. Both are great apps. Cool thing is that it gets easier and easier to learn new vocab.

Anki wasn’t my thing - I watched Youtube tutorials, read the faq but I was still utterly confused on how to use it.

[zerohbeat]

I think that Wanikani and Bunpro decks are agreat as they are a fast pre-made way to start cramming (studying? lol) vocab. Though over time there must be some way to re-inforce learned vocab eg by reading more ( + / or speaking + listening)

Probably Bunpro + WaniKani is enough for the most part… as in there will be some words / kanji that are not included in the lists.

I try to read more than doing daily reviews.
Personally, I use Renshuu and Anki for vocab / kanji study and just do daily reviews for a few minutes. There are times where I spend 1hour plus reviewing but rarely. Anki is for words / kanji that I see in manga and light novels. That way hopefully I am learning vocab that is useful for me hehe…

In the past, I would print worksheets from Renshuu and write the kanji a couple of times. From time to time I also go through my notebooks and make notes on scrap paper.

Edit: Regarding Anki. It can be an amazing tool. I knew how I wanted to use it and it still took me 2+ months of experimenting and figuring it out. As I make my own cards, it can be quite time consuming hehe

[imsamuka]

For vocab I only use jpdb, read more about it here:

Am I doing enough?

And I thought it was just a worse Jisho and a media difficulty database; jpdb.io doesn’t advertise itself very well on the front page. It can’t export Anki decks, but it can import them. Well, for anyone that’s curious about it and don’t want to wait until I possibly make a better post someday, I recommend: Create an account Add a Prebuilt deck or import a Anki deck Start a review to see how they work Read the settings page - there’s tons of settings to match your tastes Read the FAQ Paste …

It doesn’t have any JLPT-specific decks, but you can get lists online, clean the text and create a new deck from it instantly.

You can add learning book decks like genki or the global frequency deck as well, although this last functionality is a little limited if you’re not a patreon. But you can work around it by adding a bunch of decks and learning from them on global frequency order as well.

[wct]

I’m using Bunpro Vocab to ‘fill in the gaps’ of WK vocab. Of course, WK is not intended as a vocab platform, and primarily uses vocab to support the learning of the kanji; but that leaves a lot of gaps to fill!

I am not specifically studying for any JLPT exams, but I do find the organization of BP vocab into JLPT levels is helpful in a couple of ways:

1. It’s ‘graded’ in the sense of a ‘graded reader’, meaning that I can get a general sense of what ‘level’ I’m at, and thus study things appropriate to that level. Indeed some actual graded readers will describe their ‘grades’ partially in terms of JLPT levels, which is a useful reference point.
2. The Bunpro team have put in efforts to have their example sentences also relatively ‘graded’ in the sense that if you’re using the Cloze-style input for grammar (which I personally find very helpful, IMHO) and you’re answering a review for an N4 vocab, then the sentence will generally use context-words limited to N5, N4, and sometimes in N3 (like a preview of what’s to come, I suppose).
3. I believe it is the case (though I’m not 100% certain) that this ‘relative grading’ is also used with the grammar points. I mean, I’m certain that the example sentences for an N4 grammar point will typically not use grammar from say N2 or N1. But I also think they’ve put in effort to only include vocab from the same relative levels as well. Again, not 100% sure on that, though. (If they haven’t done it already, I’m pretty sure that is their ultimate intention to do so, though.)

So, whether or not their JLPT vocab includes all vocab associated with each specific level, I’m not sure. Personally, that’s not a pressing issue for me. For me all that matters is that I’m learning vocabs in a kind of graded-order, from simplest and most common to more and more sophisticated.

This is in contrast to some of the vocab on WaniKani, which is sometimes forced to introduce rare or advanced vocab earlier, in order to help teach and reinforce different readings for common kanji. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it can give one a kind of confused sense of which vocabs are really the fundamental ones that will be needed on a more regular basis.

The other thing Bunpro vocab helped me with is getting me over the hump of beginning to actually read stuff on my own. Having studied all of the N5 and N4 vocab – in other words, having filled in those considerable gaps in vocab at the N5 and N4 levels – I realized, “Hey, I’ve already got the grammar; and now I’ve got the vocab. There should be nothing stopping me from reading graded readers at the N5 and N4 levels!” And that’s what I finally did!

Also, if there are any specific words that are not in the JLPT decks that you want to learn, then you can search for them using the Vocab Search page, and in most cases they will have them available to manually add to your Reviews. The only thing is that they’ll be limited to the basic ‘see Japanese, answer in English’ style of input. Which is fine, though not as good as full Cloze support with example sentences (and audio!) that I prefer. But it’s better than not having it available at all.

[I-k-d]

I personally think bunpro is pretty good for vocab, I like how theres different settings you can pick for, and it saves having to pay a seperate subscription fee. I absolutly have to type in the words to remember them, and I was struggling to find another vocab app that allowed you to do that. The main problem I’ve had for the vocab decks is them adding too many words to them

Like for example, you might be studying for N5, but theres an extra 300 words from higher levels. If you have limited time you might not get through all the vocab, and then when you sit the test you might find you know the word for ophthalmologist, but not box. (true story )

But other than the deck sorting being a bit funky, I really like bunpro’s vocab system, I just find an external list of whatever JLPT level I’m studying for and add the words in manually, which is slower, but less frustrating overall.

Edit: oh and also sometimes the example sentances for Cloze have weird highlighted words that isn’t written as one of the english translations for that word.
Example: 通う

As you can see ‘warm’ is highlighted. The english sentance matches the Japanese one in meaning, but I probably wouldn’t guess 通う from that english sentance(since im lazy and usually only look at the blue word). It’s literal translation would be ‘circulating blood’ which I might be able to guess if that was in english? but yeah if the word has lots of weird example sentances I use the translate setting instead.

[I-k-d]

I agreeee

[wct]

@I-k-d

As you can see ‘warm’ is highlighted. The english sentance matches the Japanese one in meaning, but I probably wouldn’t guess 通う from that english sentance(since im lazy and usually only look at the blue word). It’s literal translation would be ‘circulating blood’ which I might be able to guess if that was in english? but yeah if the word has lots of weird example sentances I use the translate setting instead.

That’s true. Technically, vocab is still in Beta, and indeed there are quite a few examples of bugs/typos in highlighting, audio (mostly the auto-generated audio; though sometimes the native-speaker audio doesn’t exactly match the Cloze text/answer), and some other quirks here and there.

I use the little Bug Report button to make quick bug reports on these discrepancies whenever I find them (usually), most often during review sessions. So, if you do find such discrepancies, may I suggest that you could use the Bug Report button as an outlet to relieve that feeling of frustration/annoyance/whatever? Just a thought!

Generally, the BP team are quite good at following through on such reports. And, I expect that by the time Vocab emerges from Beta, it will be much more polished. (Partly with the help of such bug reports! )

[wct]

@I-k-d

The main problem I’ve had for the vocab decks is them adding too many words to them

Like for example, you might be studying for N5, but theres an extra 300 words from higher levels.

I have this problem in general also! And that’s one other thing that having the BP vocab organized by JLPT levels has helped me with, too, which I forgot to mention in my earlier comment:

4. By following the official Bunpro Vocab Decks in JLPT order, I’ve been able to curb my over-enthusiasm to add every word I come across into my Review stack. (Granted, I still do add too many extra words to my reviews, I’m just saying that it’s far less of a problem than with other platforms I’ve tried.)
   In particular, I’m currently on level N3, and when I come across a word that I have an urge to add, I first check if it’s listed as an N2 or N1 word on BP. If it is, then I usually just leave it for later, since I know that eventually I will pick it up once I advance to the N2 and N1 decks. I don’t have to add it ‘in case I forget later’, like I’m ‘collecting’ words to study, which is usually the ‘rationale’ (or, more accurately, ‘rationalization’) that tends to convince me to add extra words to my already too-big review stack.