What is the best way to learn vocab?

Japanese
#1

I have been learning Japanese for a few years now, and I have learned most kanji and am almost done with N2 Bunpro grammar, but am still stuck on vocab somehow. I want to try to finish it before upcoming N2 exam in december.

In general, I understand most N2 vocab as long as I can read (kanji helps alot) but in listening I can barely recognize N5/4 vocab. Also I can’t get myself to use the words when am speaking even though I know them on paper.

So what learning method do you guys recommend? WaniKani, Anki, Bunpro, Immersion, …

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#2

I love Bunpro for vocab, but you definitely won’t be able to get through it all by December. You might be better off spamming listening drills N5-N2.

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#3

I it was my case I would do maybe:

  • More listening
  • listening > reading text > listening x 2
  • if i were into cards: yomitan + anki cards for words I know by kanji but not by sound (and fail card until I can answer it in a blink of an eye, and wouldn’t add words context of which i don’t know) but this feels rather like a crutch for some time.
  • Reading everything out loud with good intonation
  • Listening crum function?

Basically think of anything that has to do with sound and try to make connections between sounds and kanji.

Example: I listen a linguistic podcast and hear 〇ろん and I imagine 論. Hearing 〇けい imagine 敬 (from 敬語), ご of course 語. Basically when i have a margine trying to guess kanji used by sound. Not like im doing it all the time and only that, but this is defiantly what is on my radar.

Edit: didn’t catch that you still didn’t finish N2 vocab. I don’t know if it makes sense to rush it, maybe you can upgrade you general comprehension level instead, thus having more chances of passing test by guessing meaning/words?

Plus, if you really know most n2 kanji making them stronger might be the way as well.

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#4

I’m using anki, word review, kanji only. 20 new words per day, setting on 95%
JLPT is in December.
Depends how many words you have left to complete it, I’m on my third month on 20 new words per day and I’m almost done with N2 vocab.
If you have more than 1000 words to work on, it’s gonna be nearly impossible to know them all by December.
On 20 new words per day I’m not sure about the retention rate knowing that I haven’t heard all the words I’m learning in native material yet. But at least when these words comes up in conversation I can grasp the meaning of them better.
I think that there is no secret, best way to learn vocab fast is to brute force them through reviews, and sometimes you can ask chatgpt for better explanation within the context of the sentence. This helped me a lot for synonyms / word redundancy.

You can also try this : if you’re on anki, copy the list of your daily review and paste it in chatgpt, ask him to either generate a few texts that are using the words you are learning today. then read through it. Or generate on short sentence per word.
What I also do is : do a batch of review, gather all failed item, ask chatgpt to generate a short sentence for each failed item. This helped me a lot.

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#5

Btw could use tatoeba.org for native sentences instead.
Yomiwa app is also a great source for a lot of sentences.

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#6

It’s worth mentioning the caveats of Tatoeba (and other projects that use sentences from the Tanaka corpus).

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#7

I really enjoy learning vocab here and using the listening style reviews to train recall for when I’m writing, and then over writing more on my computer/writing self-study sentences/doing the reviews I can passively recall the kanji (I think active kanji recall is one of the things you can build up to after the N2 in Dec since that’s a tight timeline).

I also think doing this in addition to reading is a great way to get more vocab under your belt. The more words you can figure out through context through NHK or NHK easy, or in books or subtitles of anime the more locked in they are in your mind. I find that just looking them up isn’t as effective, unless you take the time to write it down in a practice sentence a couple of times.

Since you also mentioned struggling to recall words you definitely know from N5/4 just through listening, I’d suggest doing the listening reviews going through each lesson for each N level deck, and increasing your listening practice (whether that’s anime, podcasts, etc). Then, I think saying the sample sentence out loud will also help solidify that word in your mind too.

Hope this helps, and good luck!