In the beginning I made attempt to learn some vocabulary, but this was to be pretty useless idea, because Japanese language has no spaces and also use enormous amounts of untypical conjugations and synonyms, sometimes it is written in phonetic form sometimes in kana, so just too much to learn even for minimal understanding. also text is loitered with random letters like yo, ne, ze, n.
basically you need to know phonetic and symbolic version of each word and be capable to extract that known word from pack of complete gibberish.
Instead of bothering with vocabulary I switched to learning grammar while vocabulary was left for a computer to deal with.
it is impossible to read manga without computer assistance anyway, but knowledge of grammar really helps to recover corrupted text or guess its meaning, so i would recommend same approach top others too.
Gradually I learned some words naturally by reading manga. Sometimes I can just guess kanji meaning from surrounding hiragana.
funny enough, I mostly learn various obscure words and just can remember those that are used very often.
lots of time I seem to know the word but I don't know its meaning.
In any case vocabulary is growing by itself while I simply read Japanese manga and do not actively study Japanese.
basically you need to know phonetic and symbolic version of each word and be capable to extract that known word from pack of complete gibberish.
Instead of bothering with vocabulary I switched to learning grammar while vocabulary was left for a computer to deal with.
it is impossible to read manga without computer assistance anyway, but knowledge of grammar really helps to recover corrupted text or guess its meaning, so i would recommend same approach top others too.
Gradually I learned some words naturally by reading manga. Sometimes I can just guess kanji meaning from surrounding hiragana.
funny enough, I mostly learn various obscure words and just can remember those that are used very often.
lots of time I seem to know the word but I don't know its meaning.
In any case vocabulary is growing by itself while I simply read Japanese manga and do not actively study Japanese.