Ridiculous words in N5 deck

[simias]

I’m now 75% through that N5 deck and I have to agree that adding that non-N5 vocab feels like a mistake. When you’re not actually following genki it really sticks out and makes it a bit more difficult to go through it.

Since I’m just using this N5 deck for extra practice in order to review easy vocab (my real level should be somewhere around N4 and N3 right now) I set the default starting SRS level high to avoid pointless repetitions of trivial words, but for instance in today’s batch of new words I got あの and 改札 back-to-back. The former is obviously a completely trivial word (53rd most common word by frequency according to JPDB), the latter is a word I’ve never encountered before and that jisho lists at N2 (17,633rd most common word by frequency according to JPDB).

I don’t want to treat these two entries the same way in my studies, so it’s a bit awkward to have them in the same N5 deck.

[imsamuka]

@simias

I want to learn the top ~5k words using premade decks and then I switch to just consuming content and learn the rest organically through just using the language.

It’s actually possible to do this with only ~5k words? I started with the same goal, but so far at ~2k this only feels like a dream yet, I’m fairly skeptical of that…

[CursedKitsune]

I know people who have become okay at Japanese (N1+) without using vocab flashcards at all. It is 100% possible but flashcards are a very solid insurance policy and speed booster. I have stopped adding vocab twice in the past, once at 5k words and then again at 8k words. I think you just have to decide between the pain of SRS or the pain of forgetting things faster.

[CursedKitsune]

@simias

改札

You will see this word in every single train station in Japan. Probably should be N4 or N3 but this is another case of there being a disconnect between learning Japanese for media and learning Japanese for living. The earlier JLPT levels are especially “living in Japan” focused (hence the inclusion of some keigo in N4) so I can easily see this being in the lower levels. JPDB frequency is only useful for entertainment media and even then it is heavily leaning towards kinda young adult stuff.

[imsamuka]

@jrmr50

The faster I learn, the quicker I forget.

[simias]

@imsamuka

It’s actually possible to do this with only ~5k words? I started with the same goal, but so far at ~2k this only feels like a dream yet, I’m fairly skeptical of that…

It’s hard to evaluate the size of my vocabulary but I’m probably around or slightly above the 5k mark at the moment (I just checked and I actually have 5100 vocabulary entries learned in WaniKani, although that’s a bit all over the place in terms of how many useful words I learned there). At this point and with my Bunpro N3 grammar I can read manga and videogames with the help of a dictionary. I definitely find myself looking things up all the time but often more to double-check.

If I get tired and decide to just push through dialogue without looking things up I can usually understand the general discussion even if I miss some details. Of course it varies a lot depending on the topic and writing style.

It’s definitely not comfortable, effortless reading yet but it’s also not “oh my god it’s just a wall of moonrunes” either. Note that this is for your average videogame or “shounen” manga, where the total vocabulary size is often quite limited, I tried briefly reading a light novel that was still rather overwhelming.

Also the 5k number is fairly arbitrary and meaningless, since I know around 1600 kanji I can guess the meaning of a ton of words when I read them even though I technically never encountered them before. Like just now I encountered the word 廃業 in the game I’m playing, not a hugely common word I think and one I never encountered before, but I knew the kanji and in context it was easy to understand what it was about.

@CursedKitsune

Probably should be N4 or N3 but this is another case of there being a disconnect between learning Japanese for media and learning Japanese for living. The earlier JLPT levels are especially “living in Japan” focused (hence the inclusion of some keigo in N4) so I can easily see this being in the lower levels.

There are only 1100 entries in the N5 deck, I think if you live in Japan you’ll see a lot more than 1100 common words every day so it’s kind of moot. N5 should really be for the ultra-basic vocab that at this point shouldn’t be specialized for anything at all. We’re talking stuff like する、いる、食べる、思う、道、後、おはよう and things like that. A word like 改札 really sticks out IMO.

And of course any measure of frequency will be biased by the corpus it uses and shouldn’t be trusted blindly, but if it’s top 18k in JPDB I find it very hard to believe that it could end up being top 1k in any other reasonably generic corpus.

[danielface]

眼科 surprised me a little when I first encountered it too. Or, there were N4 words that seemed more applicable to my day-to-day life.

That said, I remembered reading online that the JLPT kind of exists to slot foreigners into various levels of society so I took it as a tell and a learning exercise.

[simias]

@danielface

That said, I remembered reading online that the JLPT kind of exists to slot foreigners into various levels of society so I took it as a tell and a learning exercise.

While there’s a lot to be said about the practical usefulness of the JLPT, in this particular instance it’s unrelated because I don’t think that 眼科 is JLPT N5 anywhere but on Bunpro. It’s just because, apparently, it’s a word used in Genki I so they decided to cram it in there. Jisho has 眼科 at N1 and 改札 at N2.

[simias]

During my reviews I just stumbled upon an other funny example: the N5 deck contains 抗生物質 (antibiotic) but 物質 (substance) alone is… in the N3 vocab deck.

[MikkaT]

may I ask you some questions about Anki?
What SRS setting do you use? It seems every site and youtuber recommends highly different settings and I’m still not happy with the ones I tried. I would like it to have closer to the WaniKani or Bunpro levels if possible.

And how can I start reviews if I could still do more lessons? It always shows me how many reviews I have, but I can’t start them without doing the daily lessons.

And last is there no way to just flip trough the cards without actually studying?
I wanted to flip casually through a kana only deck in the evening to improve my kana reading spead (especially katakana) but it seems there is no way just to go through the cards without doing lessons. So what do you do if you got a lot of new stuff that you want to learn before beeing quized about?

[IcyIceBear]

I’m not the best person to ask about the settings, like what intervals to use. I messed around with that for a while and finally settled on one. Still trying it out. It does take weeks to get a feel for what settings you like, are you giving them enough time? Because it doesnt affect reviews already in queue, just the new ones. I did add multiple learning steps though to make sure I knew it before passing it to “know” so it wont get stuck in that lowease hell.

Go to your deck options and choose reviews before new. This setting wont let you learn new cards until the review queue is empty

Old before new

There is! on both desktop and mobile. I can show you desktop right now, but the mobile way would be the same path to get there. Browse>top right Preview
if you want to view them as front and back make sure you have “back only” unchecked. In the sceenshot I have it checked because I was previewing stylisticts. Previewing them wont affect your reviews.

Previews

[Edo9]

I will admit that Bunpro does have some specific and difficult vocabulary. My custom Anki decks are at more than a thousand words taken from just Bunrpo and I have already gone through a core 6000 deck in the past.

Still, even if it’s a hard word it’s better to know it than not to know it. And it’s better to be exposed to it even if you aren’t planning on learning it anytime soon. The whole N5-N1 system is so flawed and only works for JLPT and those who are so structured they can’t function any other way. That whole system falls apart when you actually try to use Japanese and immerse in it. I’ve never once had a conversation with a Japanese person and was like, “I don’t know that word, it’s not at my level yet” Instead I ask and they explain no matter how hard the word is. You can’t ask TV shows, videogames and people to speak at N5 level for you. That only exists in learning book and apps.

Language isn’t like math, it’s a mess of ever changing words, dialects, and rules that get broken all the time. I forget words in English and Spanish rules and grammar all the time, although age might have to do something with that. Exposure to difficult words creates connections that make it easier to identify them later on. Just my take from years of doing this.

[MikkaT]

Thank you so much!!
Preview is exactly what I was looking for. I did not know you could go from card to card there. I think that will work perfectly on a tablet or smartphone to read casually.
And the review before lessons setting solves that problem as well.
At the moment the vocab decks at Bunpro work pretty well for me but it is great to be able to use Anki for mining vocabs and kana.

[Noxsora]

眼eye ball, 科 science. The meaning is straightfoward. And I already know 科 is か from 科学 and 教科書。just need to learn 眼 is かん and read the ‘nuance’ hint instead of the one for one translation.

I 100% agree JLPT deck should include JLPT vocab. If it’s a word from Genki put it in Genki.

I use Jalup Anki (the iOS app is now named “Nihongo Lessons”) for vocab.

[acyanto]

I just didn’t add those words. The possibility of those words showing up on the test is near 0. Also even if they do it’ll barely affect your grade because they’ll only account for a few marks. It’s better to learn 10 common useful words than spend the same amount of time and energy on a rare word that you will barely use.

[simias]

I found another amusing incongruity: 気分 is in the N4 deck, but 気分が悪い is in N5.

[jrmr50]

That makes me feel sick! It’s really ruined my mood!

[Edo9]

Saw this today in Shin Misato, made me think of this thread, lol. Quick, shield your eyes if you’re only at N5.

[SnowTale934]

@rdennison7

I personally use anki. It’s a huge pain in the butt to set up

Not anymore, since the update a few months back. You can just enable FSRS and leave the rest at pretty much default settings. It’s awesome.

[simias]

I concur, FSRS is really a game changer for Anki IMO. No more tinkering with more-or-less obscure SRS parameters and meta-gaming the ease factor to get decent review intervals.

It’s still a bit of a pain to setup though, for instance the official Android app in the store doesn’t support FSRS (you have to side-load the alpha version from github) and you still need to muck about with the deck settings to get it all working correctly since it still defaults to SM2 and you have to manually tell it to train on the review data.

But once it’s set, it’s really good.