Nayr's Core5000 deck (Frequency Dictionary of Japanese)

(2016-05-02, 4:19 pm)rainmaninjapan Wrote: I'm not sure core 10k is a good idea, since so much of it is news oriented words. I did about 3000 of it, and it wanted me to learn words like 爪楊枝 (toothpick) and 人参 (carrot). Even if you learned all of core 10k, you would still not know half the unique words in the book I'm reading. 6000 morphemes, and Core 10k only covers around 3000 of them, and if you did Core 10k you also learned 7141 words you didn't need (many of which you won't need for the foreseeable future... like 爪楊枝). If you're using a frequency list (or any list of words, like a list of words in a book or set of books by using cb's Japanese Text Analyzer) you can use Epwing2Anki to mass make vocabulary cards (and even automatically add example sentences from various dictionaries) tailored to what you are reading.

Or you can use Yomichan and add cards for things you're looking up as you go. Or Rikaisama.

Thanks for the suggestions - I already use Epwing2Anki and Rikaisama. I should have been specific - right now I'm not learning the entire Core10k, just the subset of Core 10k that is in the VDRJ's top 10k most frequent words. Plus I'm excluding the words I've learnt already from Core 5000. So it comes up to just 2.8k words, with some more that weren't matched perfectly between VDRJ and Core 10k.

The benefit of learning the VDRJ's top words is that they aren't based on a newspaper corpus (like Core 10k is), but instead on general material, so the coverage is significantly more useful. The VDRJ also penalises words that are narrowly distributed across genres, so you end up learning more of the general, widely used words.

I encourage others to give the VDRJ a try, if they're looking for a frequency list. You can use Epwing2Anki to generate cards from the VDRJ list, as @rainmaninjapan said. Personally I'm using the VDRJ list sorted by the Ur1 score, which equally weights books, the Yahoo! Chiebukuro forums, and specialised texts. You can choose other rankings more suitable for JLPT learners or students studying in Japan.