.

From the graph, using the innocent novels, the 10,000th most frequent word has frequency of 1/100,000, and the 20,000th word has frequency of 1 in a million. When I looked at the frequency list a while ago, both words seemed "common" and not "rare" to me although I've now forgotten what they were. What I'm certain of is that anybody "native" would know them.

To maintain knowledge of words you know (having long review intervals), you only need to see it a few times a year. To learn a word, maybe you get away with 10 reviews in the first year, and the first few times need to be closely spaced together. Can you read 100,000 words in a month? What about 1,000,000 words in a month? What's the chance that you will see the same word twice in the first week?

Let's see... suppose you want to learn the 10kth most common word, then it's reasonable to try to get at least 1 exposure per month. To guarantee that with 95% chance, you need to read about 300k words, or 5 novels. Consider the novice reader who has a vocabulary of 6000. Maybe he or she can read 10 pages per HOUR. At 1500 pages, it will have to take him 150 hours per month to learn the 10kth most common word by reading - and that's IF seeing it only once or twice in the first month is enough. It's not enough for me.

I know I can't do that. Period. This is why I have 9316 cards in my deck now and I can now read novels at 20-30 pages per hour because I don't get bogged down by so many unknown words (90% vs 95% coverage is a HUGE difference). This means I can improve faster by reading more, which is exactly what you should do. Flashcards enable you to read more, read faster, and understand more. It accelerates your learning.

Plus, now that my N1 cards have long intervals, I don't have to see them very often for retention. If I want to stop Anki'ing, reading 2 books a month would be a fine replacement.

tl;dr: My opinion is:
- long term retention of 20k most frequent words: reading is great!
- understanding the meaning of a word: reading is absolutely necessary.
- initial learning of such a word so you can recognize a rough meaning when you encounter it: reading may be too inefficient

kanon Wrote:I know I can't do that. Period. This is why I have 9316 cards in my deck now and I can now read novels at 20-30 pages per hour because I don't get bogged down by so many unknown words (90% vs 95% coverage is a HUGE difference). This means I can improve faster by reading more, which is exactly what you should do. Flashcards enable you to read more, read faster, and understand more. It accelerates your learning.

20-30 pages per hour is tremendous, at least compared to me. I've done Core 10k plus another 5k words from light novels. I still only read about 10 pages per hour. Though I usually read the sentences aloud in my head. I have to skip that habit if I want to go faster. I also add all unknown words to anki (if I'm using rikasama or yomichan). Any other tips for reading quickly? I think the reading aloud silently is a habit I have to break. I do it also a lot of time in my native language and it slows me down there too. But it helps in remembering the readings.

I can read up to 35 pages an hour or so, depending on the difficulty of the material.

I think it's really just a question of exposure, once you have enough vocabulary and grammar understanding to read slowly with good comprehension. You become a fast reader because your brain learns to process things in chunks, to see whole words rather than individual kanji and whole grammar patterns rather than strings of hiragana. (This happens one's native language too -- fast readers get thrown off by reading things that are in all caps, or don't have punctuation, because they don't fit with their years and years of subconscious pattern-matching experience.)

The pattern you've seen a thousand times already is the pattern that you can read really quickly.

Also: I think it's good to get into the habit of doing some reading with as little dictionary lookup as possible, because being able to get into the flow of a text is a different thing from pausing to look up every new word. I think it made a big difference to my reading speed that I read a bunch of novels with a goal of overall understanding rather than detailed understanding, and reading fast enough to get involved in the story rather than the individual words.

PotbellyPig Wrote:Any other tips for reading quickly?

It may have already been stated but; Don't look every word up you don't know. Part of gaining fluency is learning to guess the meaning of stuff you don't know by the context of what you do know. If you only look up the words that you have seen repeated constantly, you'll increase how many pages you can cover quite quick even if your vocab is about 6-7k words.

vix86 Wrote:

PotbellyPig Wrote:Any other tips for reading quickly?

It may have already been stated but; Don't look every word up you don't know. Part of gaining fluency is learning to guess the meaning of stuff you don't know by the context of what you do know. If you only look up the words that you have seen repeated constantly, you'll increase how many pages you can cover quite quick even if your vocab is about 6-7k words.

Not sure how that is supposed to work if you don't know how to pronounce the word.

egoplant Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:

PotbellyPig Wrote:Any other tips for reading quickly?

It may have already been stated but; Don't look every word up you don't know. Part of gaining fluency is learning to guess the meaning of stuff you don't know by the context of what you do know. If you only look up the words that you have seen repeated constantly, you'll increase how many pages you can cover quite quick even if your vocab is about 6-7k words.

Not sure how that is supposed to work if you don't know how to pronounce the word.

Simple, you don't learn how to pronounce the word. Most of my reading is extensive reading, though I do make time for intensive reading as well (I'm a bit lazy in my execution of both though, so I look things up when doing extensive reading and just ignore things that are too difficult while doing intensive reading), so I've gotten used to brushing over words I don't know as long as they don't irritate me too much (repeating nouns or verbs that are central to the idea the sentence is trying to convey will be looked up nearly every time).

What I've noticed is that I'll eventually understand what the word means, but since I don't know its pronunciation, I just give it the equivalent of a dummy folder in my brain as a place holder. Eventually I'll look it up, but until then, it just gets quiet sound for its pronunciation.
Of course, it can be tempting to use your best guess for the pronunciation, but to me, it feels like this would cause problems when you actually go to learn the word later; because of this, I only take a guess at the pronunciation when looking up the word to ensure that I learn the correct pronunciation (I don't use any fancy software other than a phone dictionary, so it's sometimes easier to look things up by guessing the reading).

Basically, the point is to read without using pronunciations for the words you don't know; as long as the content is otherwise comprehensible, you can form meaning associations with the word without any pronunciation associations; this makes it easier for you to learn the reading later, since you're only focusing on one part of the word.
It's a lot more fun than vocabulary drills, before you go pointing out that lists are more efficient (I do put unknown words into a deck eventually, but I've been using Anki a lot less since finishing Core 2k/6k in order to just read for fun).

egoplant Wrote:Not sure how that is supposed to work if you don't know how to pronounce the word.

Have you been going under the notion that it's necessary to look up every single unknown word as you encounter it in order to learn it?

Also note that pronunciation becomes much less of a problem once you've swept out the majority of the joyo kanji plus some rather common non-joyo kanji by adding the particular words into your recognition deck, as you can guess the reading and lots of times even the rough meaning of unknown words if they are made up of kanji that you know.

That said it still happens - unsure of pronunciation or even having no clue because you've never seen the word before. Well, you just don't read it out loud in your head or something. I've actually got burned a few times guessing It was hilarious when I found out the actual pronunciation of 風情 or 女型 or quite a few other words. Yet I still guess all the time...

In addition, while I've said that reading may not be as efficient that doesn't mean you can't pick up lots of words that way. You absolutely can, especially if you read a lot. The efficiency of learning words by reading goes up as you read more pages per day.

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:

egoplant Wrote:Not sure how that is supposed to work if you don't know how to pronounce the word.

Have you been going under the notion that it's necessary to look up every single unknown word as you encounter it in order to learn it?

I don't know about him but I probably have and I don't think I'm convinced yet that it's "wrong". If I don't look up a word it feels like it just slips away, and I don't even remember seeing it before when I do decide to look it up sometime later... so I feel the need to look almost everything up to even have a chance of remembering.

Savii Wrote:

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:

egoplant Wrote:Not sure how that is supposed to work if you don't know how to pronounce the word.

Have you been going under the notion that it's necessary to look up every single unknown word as you encounter it in order to learn it?

I don't know about him but I probably have and I don't think I'm convinced yet that it's "wrong". If I don't look up a word it feels like it just slips away, and I don't even remember seeing it before when I do decide to look it up sometime later... so I feel the need to look almost everything up to even have a chance of remembering.

It's not that it's wrong to look things up (I do it even when I'm supposed to be doing extensive reading only), just that you don't need to; looking up a lot of words can be really boring and demoralizing and you're still progressing even if you don't look up every word, since practicing how to understand using context is important.

Personally, I've never felt that a word I didn't look up, but could understand through context, slipped away any faster than a word that I looked up without adding it to Anki, though I don't have any solid data to support that (it'd be a pain to test and probably wouldn't give consistent results).