How many Anki vocab cards until you decided your vocab learning is "complete"?

Language learning is for a lifetime but when I say complete I mean until you were comfortable with EG. reading books with "minimal" (in your opinion) use of a dictionary and without adding any more vocab Anki cards.

Or, you reach a point where the time you spent ENJOYING the book etc is greater than the time you spent studying it (EG. figuring out readings, grammar, looking up the dictionary, translating the sentence into English or not in your head). At what point did you decide "I did it" when it comes to vocab?

My opinion so far:
2000: A good milestone but it's the bare minimum. You need more. Books will eat you alive.
6000: A good time to stop and start reading. Or a good time to gain momentum and continue vocab drilling. You're not fully comfortable yet and will still be using the dictionary arguably too often. So don't get too confident.
10000: Congratulations. You can actually enjoy the book now. You still need the dictionary occassionally but it's not annoying anymore. You might even look forward to it for once.
10000+: ???
15000: ???
20000: ???

Reaching 6000 was nice but my first significant boost of confidence was about 8000 and I predict my "I did it!" point would be probably around 12000. 10000 would be the point where I would be confident telling other people that I know my vocab and 12000 would be the point where I read books without getting annoyed/tired.

I probably have been through around 28k cards myself, started reading a bit back around the 10k mark. I can't remember words very well just by osmosis since I'm not a heavy reader. Native level vocabulary more or less.... always trying to expand active repertoire though, which is what really matters later on.

The numbers aren't important, just keep learning the vocabulary you encounter/look up in your studies.

I lost my deck like 2 times lol. I have no idea how much vocab I know but it's way more than the number of cards I have which 8000 something right now. your anki deck only means so much. i think native stuff is more important. i've read 80 something japanese novels so far... and i've watched a lot of japanese talk/variety and i focus on understanding 100% almost if the show's interesting enough...


I'm sorta glad I lost my decks because i was "anking" incorrectly as much as i read stuff on ajatt or here about not adding too much etc etc. plus some of the cards were completely useless as in three's no point anking them because they're so easy and common. so i don't have to waste my time doing those cards or deleting them or suspending them.

I agree FORGET ABOUT THE NUMBERS.

I dunno, I think number benchmarks are important, too, even if they're only a rough guide. When I was an early beginner, I lived off of looking at those numbers and keeping them in mind as a goal. "Okay, as long as I reach this number..."

Of course, at 7500+ words right now, and I've learned that you're never going to be content reaching a certain milestone because there's always so much more to cover on the other side. Well, if you're serious about mastery.

But looking at those numbers can really give you some motivation. It's better to have a solid goal to reach for than some nebulous idea about what it will take. Or, at least it was for me.

And above all, facing the reality of how many words you're going to actually need to learn is something that should be done early on, so the information needs to be prominent and accessible. For a couple months there, I was under the delusional impression that the iKnow descriptions for vocabulary milestones were correct.

!--Read at your own risk, highly misleading--!

"iknow.jp Wrote:1K words: Mastering these 1,000 items and sentences will give you the vocabulary and sentence patterns to function in most everyday situations.

2K words: Mastering all the items in the Core 1000 and Core 2000 will give you a very strong foundation in Japanese. Not only will you understand dialogue in most basic situations, you’ll also start to develop skills for reading on your own.

3K words: Mastering all 3,000 items and sentences of the Japanese Core 1000, 2000, and 3000 will put you in a position to start reading Japanese without the assistance of dictionaries.

4K words: Mastering all 4,000 items and sentences of the Japanese Core 1000, 2000, 3000, and 4000 will allow you to function independently in most contexts.

5K words: The Core 5000 is designed for advanced students of Japanese who are confident in their speaking and reading skills, but who want to dive deeper into Japanese literature.

6K words: Students who master all 6,000 words in the Japanese Core category will be well on their way to mastering Japanese!

That caused me to set my goals low and get off to a pretty slow start whereas I probably would have been a little bit more ambitious if I had had a better idea and thus would be father along now.

I agree with the OP, btw, at least for the 2k and 6k marks (can't wait to reach that 10k! I'm ready to actually enjoy the book now :lol: )

I've got a vocabulary of roughly 20000 and still meet new words on almost every page in a book I pick up. I'm also not the type who just continues reading even if I don't understand something, so I'd say reading is still a slow process even at 20000 if you want to learn all the new words you come across, which I do.

Really ? You look it up right then and there ? I take pictures so I look it up later when ideal like learning more vocabulary. Sometimes stuff happens i lose the photos but im not bothered at all bc i Can read other books and take pictures and i run into know words everday from other sources. There's nothing wrong with not knowing every word on the page whether it's the reading or meaning because that's how it is english unless u like reading only at a c retain level or below your level. It comes down to how much you care and if what yOu can't read is important to the story

[Zgarbas]

there's nothing wrong with now knowing every word as long as you don't mind being fully literate, yeah.

I like being literate. I think my goal is around 25-30k words.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Really ? You look it up right then and there ? I take pictures so I look it up later when ideal like learning more vocabulary. Sometimes stuff happens i lose the photos but im not bothered at all bc i Can read other books and take pictures and i run into know words everday from other sources. There's nothing wrong with not knowing every word on the page whether it's the reading or meaning because that's how it is english unless u like reading only at a c retain level or below your level. It comes down to how much you care and if what yOu can't read is important to the story

Well I only have to highlight it on my Kindle to get the dictionary result, so yeah I look it up right there. My problem is I'm not satisfied in only understanding the overall story, so I'll make sure I fully understood everything before moving on--which is sometimes a slow process. I also simply enjoy learning new words, almost as much as reading itself, so I'm not bothered if it takes a while to get through books.

Having finished Core 6k (along with other words I learned on my own, but those words and the ones I've forgotten probably balance out), I can read many manga and LNs with minimum look-up. However, I only look things up while reading when it prevents me from understanding what's going on (in paper media anyway, I look up more in VNs on the computer). I did this when reading books above my level in English too, so I figure it's fine to just enjoy what I'm reading.

Anyway, I decided recently (as in, yesterday) to leisurely go through 10k as well, due to my laziness when it comes to adding Anki cards. I'll only be going at ten or twenty new cards per day until I get some free time.

I don't know if I'll ever be completely done with studying new vocab, but I don't have the experience required to know for sure. Due to kanji readings, I think learning new vocabulary through osmosis would be more difficult than in English (where I'll only slightly butcher the pronunciation). So I guess my 'finish' point would be where the majority of unknown words I encounter will be given readings along with them (either with voice acting or furigana).
So I guess I'll be pretty close to that after these final 3700 some words, but I'm probably wrong.

I don't know every word in the English language and I consider myself to be fully literate in it.

There's a point where looking up every single word gets in the way of how much you can read, and to what extent you can stay in the flow of what you're reading.

I would like to get to a really high level of vocabulary, but it's a bigger priority for me to read a lot.

ya in terms of improving one's practical ability to use japanese, doing something practical in japanese, like reading, is much more helpful than anki'ing vocab.

my opinion is that after 10-15k vocab, anki gives very little marginal benefit per minute spent, as opposed to a much higher overall benefit from reading. having a chat in japanese is probably even better but we can't always do that.

anki is a comfortable safe zone, makes you feel like you're working hard making progress, but it's not always very helpful from a practical standpoint.
(too lazy to link to the "anki addiction" video from the polyglots and polynots thread.)

Fillanzea Wrote:There's a point where looking up every single word gets in the way of how much you can read, and to what extent you can stay in the flow of what you're reading.

Similarly, there's also a point where not looking up every single word gets in the way of the extent to which you can maintain your flow.

A year and a half ago or so I read a book, in English, called Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (which I highly recommend). The book teems with rare vocabulary used to describe, among other things, the flora, fauna, clothing, and gear of the American Southwest (here's a sample of the kind of words McCarthy uses).

Sure, I could have just skated over the words and visualized a scene based on my memories and assumptions about what the American Southwest was like. However, I would have lost the rich imagery McCarthy paints. As I was reading, I looked up every unfamiliar term that I came across either in the dictionary or through an online image search. Without having done so, I'm certain I would've enjoyed the novel less and I wouldn't have remembered the stunning imagery that I still recall today.

CaLeDee Wrote:I've got a vocabulary of roughly 20000 and still meet new words on almost every page in a book I pick up. I'm also not the type who just continues reading even if I don't understand something, so I'd say reading is still a slow process even at 20000 if you want to learn all the new words you come across, which I do.

You likely don't actually "know" 20000 words then.

dizmox Wrote:I probably have been through around 28k cards myself, started reading a bit back around the 10k mark. I can't remember words very well just by osmosis since I'm not a heavy reader. Native level vocabulary more or less.... always trying to expand active repertoire though, which is what really matters later on.

I'm around 15,000 words now and would like to get to your level. It's amazing how many words you really need to know. Right now reading light novels, I can encounter on average 1-2 unknown words per page over the course of the book. Hopefully when I get to your level it will be less than 1 word per page on average.

ryuudou Wrote:

CaLeDee Wrote:I've got a vocabulary of roughly 20000 and still meet new words on almost every page in a book I pick up. I'm also not the type who just continues reading even if I don't understand something, so I'd say reading is still a slow process even at 20000 if you want to learn all the new words you come across, which I do.

You likely don't actually "know" 20000 words then.

I probably know more than 20000, considering my Anki vocabulary deck is 19444 and a lot of the vocabulary I knew before starting it aren't included, not to mention the words I've picked up over the years without adding. I have a 10-15% failure rate on cards, but even the ones I fail I'd say I recognize. When reading a book I regularly meet words I know I haven't seen before.

As an experiment I just turned to a random page in the novel OUT (Natsuo Kirino) and there were 4 words on the page which I haven't seen before.

習熟
白飯
腹這い
暗渠

I could guess 3 of them, but I haven't seen them before, and they aren't in my Anki deck.

CaLeDee Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:

CaLeDee Wrote:I've got a vocabulary of roughly 20000 and still meet new words on almost every page in a book I pick up. I'm also not the type who just continues reading even if I don't understand something, so I'd say reading is still a slow process even at 20000 if you want to learn all the new words you come across, which I do.

You likely don't actually "know" 20000 words then.

I probably know more than 20000, considering my Anki vocabulary deck is 19444 and a lot of the vocabulary I knew before starting it aren't included, not to mention the words I've picked up over the years without adding. I have a 10-15% failure rate on cards, but even the ones I fail I'd say I recognize. When reading a book I regularly meet words I know I haven't seen before.

As an experiment I just turned to a random page in the novel OUT (Natsuo Kirino) and there were 4 words on the page which I haven't seen before.

習熟
白飯
腹這い
暗渠

I could guess 3 of them, but I haven't seen them before, and they aren't in my Anki deck.

I have 18000+ words in my deck and like you said, I can find a word or two on every page on average that isn't in my deck in a new light novel I am reading. For example, I just checked at there were about 365 words out of 250 pages of the last novel I read. Of course I could guess at or infer the word, but the word isn't in my deck. I'm hoping at some point this will slow down some more.

I find the best way to pick up new words is to stick a small post-it note on them when I see them (or use a highlighter, but that would damage the book), and just look up the exact definition and add them to Anki after I've finished reading.

Unlike the 20k'ers and 30k'ers above, at 10k vocab I regularly encounter more than a few new words on every page I read. I regularly skip over them too, especially if they are random adjectives or adverbs in hiragana. For unknown words made of known kanji I usually attempt to pronounce them in my head and infer meaning (both from the kanji and from the context).

Reading is quite enjoyable at this level, especially if you don't look up words and just let yourself get absorbed in the story.

I haven't added new words for a while simply due to laziness and the fact that I want my reviews to die down somewhat. At some point I do want to snag some jinmeiyo kanji and learn a bit of Japanese geography. Anki does get tiring though.

So if I understand your posts correctly, I'll continue to add vocab cards to Anki and the point that I will stop is the point at which I get sick of it, whatever that is 10k, 20k, 30k.

if you're able to learn from context, I think the evidence suggests that anki is relatively inefficient at high vocab levels. so my advice would be to keep anki'ing vocab until reading becomes easy enough to stop actively studying vocab. reading itself is an srs of sorts so it's not really like you ever stop.

dtcamero Wrote:if you're able to learn from context, I think the evidence suggests that anki is relatively inefficient at high vocab levels

Which evidence?! Sorry but that's kind of BS lol. I haven't seen any paper specifically about the inefficiency of Anki at higher vocabulary levels for learners "able to learn from context".

Everyone is able to learn from context and memorization is memorization. You probably just mean that there's no point in memorizing a lots of highly specialized words, which is nothing more than your own opinion. If someone wants to memorize those words, there's no reason why Anki would be less useful than before.

But I agree reading is similar to a SRS. The most common words/grammar gets used a lot, so maybe not as "efficient", but so much more reinforcing and enjoyable!

How are you counting your vocab? I suppose there are ways to approximate it (had another thread with links to sites that help you figure out approx. how many English words you know, with a 5 minute test), but I have a feeling you are instead talking strictly about how many words you studied with Anki. That isn't the same as how many words you actually know (at least not unless you're under the wrong impression that you can learn a language using nothing but Anki).


To learn a language, you need immersion. Lots of it. The role of SRS (and other study methods, grammar for instance) is to make immersion more effective (make it work faster). So there should be a balance between immersion and SRS-ing, with the bulk of the time spent on immersion rather than drilling vocab. I haven't conducted any studies on how that balance translates into numbers, but, from personal experience, it should be less than half of all the words you learn (so waaay less than half the time).

The bulk of your vocab should come from immersion, Anki should be a secondary tool.

Another point: Core6K, I believe, has a crapload of English loan-words in it, or simple Japanese words that you hear all the time. Stuff like アルバム, スカート, メニュー, etc. So, presumably, people who say that they have the 6000 Core6K words in their Anki deck, have reviewed the word アルバム a good 10 times. Why? Why would someone do that? What possible purpose does that serve, except bragging rights? I use the same deck, but guess what: I suspend over half the cards, because I either already know them, or I don't need SRS software to learn them. So, when (or rather, if) I finish Core6k, I'll have 2500 words, at most, in my deck, not 6000. I will know 6000, but not thanks to Anki. Thanks to immersion, and the fact that I already speak English. Even with the 2500, immersion will play a big role in helping me remember them, and Anki will merely serve as a helpful sidekick.

PotbellyPig Wrote:

dizmox Wrote:I probably have been through around 28k cards myself, started reading a bit back around the 10k mark. I can't remember words very well just by osmosis since I'm not a heavy reader. Native level vocabulary more or less.... always trying to expand active repertoire though, which is what really matters later on.

I'm around 15,000 words now and would like to get to your level. It's amazing how many words you really need to know. Right now reading light novels, I can encounter on average 1-2 unknown words per page over the course of the book. Hopefully when I get to your level it will be less than 1 word per page on average.

Yeah, depending on the book it's usually around a new word every 2-10 pages for me now, so not too bad.

People may say stuff like you only need a few thousand for every day conversation, but the reality is you end up needing "specialized" words and phrases quite often for everything but the most banal of conversations.

I review cards like アルバム to improve my pronunciation of Katakana words, which is often "unnatural" and quite hard. (also considering the fact that I am not a native English speaker)