I wonder why Bunpro N4 [Vocab] deck has so many low frequency usage words

Bunpro
#1

I am 60% in N4 vocabulary and started to notice more and more low frequency words like:
原爆 【げんばく】that is “General Top 9,300” or
喫煙 【きつえん】 that is “General Top 9,400” or
押入れ 【おしいれ】that is “General Top 9,600”.

I wonder what is the reason to have such low frequency words in N4 vocabulary. I have a goal to become more useful in speaking and comprehension and learning top 9000 seems not really useful.

Any recommendation how to approach it? Should I mark such words as Mastered and then maybe come back to them later in N1 stage?
Are such words part of JLTP exam so it was included?

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#2

I wouldn’t mark words as mastered. Because when you start mastering words they’ll be hard to find!

You can sort decks learning order by popularity in deck settings. So you learn the popular words first. When you reach the unpopular stuff you can switch to the next deck and come back when you feel like it?

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Another suggestion is to grab the core 2k/core 4k community decks. But they don’t all have sample sentences. So you might not like them as much. :smiley:

[How is JLPT Level Decided? - #4 by Asher](Why is this word N4?)

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#3

Thank you! It is good suggestion, I sorted now by frequency and going to switch to N3 that has more common words.

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#4

The JLPT lists are based on a test that do not have a speaking section. The vocab for listening is generally a little easier than the reading vocab, but they’re all in one big mix together! Frequency also depends on domain. “General” is just that.

You’re going to run into a lot of non-speaking / infrequent grammar in the grammar decks as well.

Might be a great feature request to get speaking frequency added and sortable. Netflix or Anime might be the closet ones. In lieu of that, some textbooks like Marugoto are much more focused on speaking. Might be worth a shot!

Why So Many Weird Vocab - Thoughts, Theory but Unrelated

Lists are based on past tests. The JLPT started in 1984. Even the Joyo Kanji list has been updated since then! Some words have changed frequency, some were mistakes by early test givers.

I also have a theory that some words might be included that are defined within reading passages. For example すっぽん might be N4 because there was a reading passage included something like “「すっぽん」, a type of 亀”. 亀 / カメ is a word N4 test takers probably know. So you never really needed to know すっぽん, but it got swept up in the list anyway.

#5

Yeah I found a lot of the basic decks have words that seem kind of weird. That’s why I like to use a 2k deck and mine words on the side :+1: