I want to share a method that I am currently trying out to learn new english words that maybe can also be applied to the japanese language (why I say 'maybe' will be clear at the end of this post).

The tools needed are: a paper dictionary (because it will speed the process up) and google translator.

Method:
-Open the dictionary and for every page look for words you do not know.
-When you find one, go on google translator and input the word.
-Download both the unknown word and your native language pronunciation audio files.
-Name the 2 files in a way that they will be sorted sequentially (word and translation) if you use the order function of your operating system.
-Repeat it for all unknown words.
-Merge all audio files into one (maybe you can divide for letters here).
-Just listen to the audio file now!

I think that for english words it is an interesting method.
The problem with japanese is obvious (you do not know the kanji), but maybe it can be still beneficial for some kind of learners.

What do you think?

Picking random words from a dictionary to make a vocab list without context doesn't sound very effective, to be honest.

Max.89
I was thinking of doing something similar to this, but more like with the lists/materials I'm currently working on (which are more relevant to me). It's a lot of work though.

If you're not using some sort of frequency list and just doing random unknown words from a dictionary, then you must be aiming for learning quite a large amount of words to make it worthwhile. Such a process for each word seems very time consuming in the long run.

I would personally say that nothing beats a lot of time spent simply reading for your situation.

I already know most of the common words because I have been studying english for years.
I put words like: accrue, aspersion, gritty, whimsical, pesky ecc...
These are quite rare words that does not appear in texts too frequently.
My main problem is to find these rare words that are worth learning.
In my opinion, mere reading after a certain point is not so efficient anymore.

Of course, I will not insert too technical words which I do not even known in my native language or useless words.
I estimated that I will be able to finish a 400 pages dictionary (about 50000 words) inside 2 months by studying 7 pages per day (about 30 minutes).
If it turns out well I will try to implement this also for the japanese language in which I am still not fluent.

Coincidentally I had pretty much the same idea a few days ago, except I was planning to apply it to the entire core series and use an automated voice synthesizer for the English definitions (manually grabbing audio from Google Translate doesn't sound very attractive to me). I wasn't planning on using it as a primary study method but rather as a way of reinforcing memory. I'm not sure whether it will be effective but I'd sure like to try. If I manage to build a setup for creating such an audio file I'll post it here.

By the way, my hypothetical setup as described above would be a lot harder to do for other first languages than English as well as for words without ready-made core6k audio files, so it might not be really suitable if you want to use it for "rare" words. Though it might be doable with Google's API... I'll look into that as well.

Max.89 Wrote:I already know most of the common words because I have been studying english for years.
I put words like: accrue, aspersion, gritty, whimsical, pesky ecc...
These are quite rare words that does not appear in texts too frequently.
My main problem is to find these rare words that are worth learning.
In my opinion, mere reading after a certain point is not so efficient anymore.

If you're concerned about words like that you're obviously quite comfortable with English already. Why you want to go through all that trouble just to acquire rare (but not that much) vocab that you may very well never encounter is anyone's guess.

I'm stumped with first 2 but know the meaning for rest of your examples and I've never in my life looked them up in a dictionary (thats a lie since I've just done that to make sure I'm not making a fool of myself). So I'd say at your level you don't need that dictionary but rather more immersion and varied media that will expose you to such vocab. Going the other way is counterproductive at this point (estimates put English at around 200k words now, there is no way in hell you can guess what obscure vocab will be more useful to you), if its repeated enough with different contexts you'll get it eventually (or look it up), if you didn't by now it means you didn't encounter it enough.