Why is it that even though I’m looking at N5 and N4 vocab list, some words that seem higher level can be found in the list? Like when you see the words, you’d ask yourself, who would ever talk about these in the JLPT exam for N5, N4 or N3?
Words like
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OBGYN – how is OBGYN even a common word?
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Antibiotic
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IV Drop
And then vocabulary that are so specific that you’d wonder how they chose them.
1960年代 – why do they have to put 1960? Did something important happen that time that they expect 1960 will show up?
アジア研究 – So Asian Studies. Asia and study/research. Why include this in the vocabulary when you just combine two different words? And Asian Studies is too specific to warrant a place in the vocab list for N4
What about these words that just got the ‘o’ or ‘go’ in the beginning? Shouldn’t these just be the same words, so they don’t add up in count? It gives a false sense of knowing more words when they’re just the same word.
お祈り
お湯
What about all the loanwords from English? Some of them are so directly just in katakana form, like there would be no change in meaning even. Should I even count that as a word I know in Japanese?
A word like manshon is understandable to be included, as it doesn’t directly mean the same mansion in Japanese. But for words like ka-do, tsuin, inta-netto, fairu etc., there’s no other meaning.
My main concern is, I have a goal of knowing or be familiarized with at least 4500 words to prepare for N3, but by using the Bunpro vocab decks, I feel like some of these words are fillers. The deck summary will report I’ve studied 4500 words in the end, but it might actually just be 3500 words that are actually new, important, non-repeating and not just direct English adaptations. So what do I do? Do I end up adding the vocab from N2 as well to offset this other vocabs? Or do I use a different vocabulary list?