When I first started I thought 10k would be enough, it seemed like that was sort of the number everyone aimed for. That's the biggest core deck (with audio at least). I thought I would be able to read most things with that amount.

Unfortunately that's way too low. I can still barely read anything, and it's because of a lack of vocabulary. I stopped adding words to Anki at around 11.5k (still do reps) in the hopes that I would just naturally pick up vocabulary by reading, but after 6 months it's not working. I have made little to no progress in that time.

Recently I started adding again. I've added just over 100 words a day for the last 2 weeks, and now I'm up to 13k. However my rep count is getting pretty high (so far at around 500, but will probably keep increasing). I've been able to handle them so far, but I'm sort of nervous about the future.

Should I just push through with Anki (way faster progress than reading)? Is there another method I could use? How do you build up your vocabulary to a fluent level after you've built a base? Because I'm not satisfied having to constantly look up words, and reading seems to be a bad way to acquire vocabulary. I basically learned nothing in that 6 months except getting more used to grammar. Does anyone have any advice?

Getting more used to grammar is an extremely valuable thing, so don't underestimate that. It's a huge factor in reading speed, and also how much you're able to compensate for words you don't know.

What are you reading that you're not able to read? What have you tried? I feel like around 13000 words you should be able to find *some* material that's both relatively interesting and relatively readable, even if it's manga and children's novels.

Do you feel like you have to look up every unknown word when you're reading, or do you ever try to read without dictionary lookup? Don't do this for something that's completely incomprehensible without dictionary lookup, do this for something where you can at least get the basic sense.

At 13K you definitely won't get to the level of "I'll never see a word I don't know," even if you're dealing with relatively easy material. But just doing Anki until you have a vocabulary of two or three times that many words seems really depressing and demotivating! So not stressing too much about 100% comprehension is important in getting past that barrier, I think. (Reading is an excellent way to acquire vocabulary if you read a lot and you read fast. If you don't, then also using Anki is not a bad idea. But I definitely feel that at the high-intermediate level, the balance of your studying should tilt towards reading.)

What kinds of things have you been reading and in what amounts?
Are you slogging through stuff above your level with a dictionary? Because I've never found that very worthwhile. Lots of words that you understand with a few you don't is the way to go.

Reading is how native speakers fill out the gaps in their vocabularies, so I can't imagine it's actually a bad way of learning vocabulary.

If I recall correctly, once you get past the first 6k-10k most common words or so, just memorizing random stuff through anki isn't terribly effective because of diminishing returns, at least in terms of the overall language. There are still a LOT of words that you aren't going to know, but most of them are fairly uncommon words, so you learn a ton of words that might actually come up in your life a few times a year, but you still don't know a ton of other words that come up just as infrequently.

It might be beneficial to target your learning towards specialized topics. Like if there is a certain genre of books you like to read, try learning words specifically from those kind of sources, because you are much more likely to see them often than some random word from a thing you have no interest in.

Zarxrax Wrote:It might be beneficial to target your learning towards specialized topics. Like if there is a certain genre of books you like to read, try learning words specifically from those kind of sources, because you are much more likely to see them often than some random word from a thing you have no interest in.

This.

so you're adding vocabulary from the books or whatever other sources that you're reading (and hopefully enjoying) right? It's not premade decks or anything like that. it's not really the number of words as it is the acutal words you're learning though number is important (and you reached your 10,000 GJ). if so just keep going and adding eventually you'll get "used" to japanese more and more. and make your goals are realistic. it shouldn't be 100% comprehension without dictionary... basically it's never gonna be 100% but maybe close to it and you also have to use your japanese language intuition (if you don't have one or if it's weak then you have to train it)

I get the vibe that you're noot reading something that you're that interested in. i would try harder to find something that interests you whether it's a tv show or songs or articles or websites or books. You don't have to read every word or everypage nor do yo uhave to sit through every second of a show. you relaly should focus on finding something you relaly like or just read/watch the parts that interest you. in the end that's what you do in your native language and hopefully that's what you plan to do with japanese if you ever reach fluency (depending on how you define it and all that jazz). don't treat is so special. it's just a language.

for looking up if it's website or on the computer it shouldn't' be that bad with rikai-chan.

maybe you should tell us what exactly ou're reading or doing in japanese and if you actually doing it or if you're just doing it because it's accesible and it's in japanese. For me personally I've found some amazing entertainment in japanese and I watch/read/etc not because it's in japanese but because I ENJOY It. thta's my first and foremost reason. the fact that a show or movie has subtitles does not make me inclined to watch the show if the show itself does not interest me. i'd rather re-listen to a show without any subs to learn from it and understand everything (or even ask japanese people what the hell they're saying) then watch a shitastic show with complete subs (those things are juts not worth watching ).

I'm kind of where you are right now.
Just to give you an example, I'm playing through Tales of Innocence R right now. So far, after "35+ hours" (actual time is longer due to having to reload to watch scenes to get vocab readings), I've had to look up 636 words. Although I probably could have cut out 1/4 of those if I hadn't insisted on talking to everyone, everywhere, after every major event. But roughly speaking, about 500 of those only appeared once, 100 appeared twice, and 30-ish appeared enough times where I just "picked them up". But I'll probably dump them all into Anki once I'm done, anyway.

My thread:

What is the "ideal" vocab goal? Give me your theory and practice.
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=11553

You know, I have learned maybe 15k English words since I started learning the language, but I've found that it doesn't really hinder me when it comes to doing things with the language (even regarding subjects like scientific texts with difficult vocabulary). It is infinitely more important to really learn inside out the words you do "know" and how the language is structured around them (especially the most common words). Then you can pick up words from context or you don't even need to know them to understand what is being said.

While picking up new words and studying them in Anki will most likely help you in the short term, the long term understanding will only come in time, after really getting to know the vocab you have already accumulated. You should focus on that.

Just my 2 cents.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:You know, I have learned maybe 15k English words since I started learning the language, but I've found that it doesn't really hinder me when it comes to doing things with the language (even regarding subjects like scientific texts with difficult vocabulary). It is infinitely more important to really learn inside out the words you do "know" and how the language is structured around them (especially the most common words). Then you can pick up words from context or you don't even need to know them to understand what is being said.

While picking up new words and studying them in Anki will most likely help you in the short term, the long term understanding will only come in time, after really getting to know the vocab you have already accumulated. You should focus on that.

Just my 2 cents.

Being someone who learned English, how does it compare to learning Japanese? Which did you find easier and how long have you been studying both? Your English is really good so I'm just wondering how Japanese studying is going for you.

Your average J-E dictionary has 20000 individual words, a good portion of which are derivates such as 現実・現実的 or 粋・無粋, while some others are pseudo-homonyms where a change in writing denotes a change in nuance such as 早い・速い or 計る・測る. My Japanese is not good enough to read anything, but is 10000 really that crippling? I'm pretty much sure you don't need 40000 words (native speakers of English know between 10000 and 20000 word families, with university graduates averaging at 17000! I posted the source on qwerty's thread if you're interested.)

learningkanji Wrote:

Betelgeuzah Wrote:You know, I have learned maybe 15k English words since I started learning the language, but I've found that it doesn't really hinder me when it comes to doing things with the language (even regarding subjects like scientific texts with difficult vocabulary). It is infinitely more important to really learn inside out the words you do "know" and how the language is structured around them (especially the most common words). Then you can pick up words from context or you don't even need to know them to understand what is being said.

While picking up new words and studying them in Anki will most likely help you in the short term, the long term understanding will only come in time, after really getting to know the vocab you have already accumulated. You should focus on that.

Just my 2 cents.

Being someone who learned English, how does it compare to learning Japanese? Which did you find easier and how long have you been studying both? Your English is really good so I'm just wondering how Japanese studying is going for you.

I've learned English from the third grade so I've been "studying" it for 15 years now. I think that I can point out three particular stages of language learning that seem to apply for Japanese as well.

You try to get a decent base by getting to know the language through study books and vocab lists (in other words, canned material). At some point you've learned "enough" that you can start getting more and more exposure in the language without having to rely too much on study books. It might be a struggle at first, but slowly but surely the focus shifts from canned material to native material and at that point the learning process is almost automatic, as long as you keep exposing yourself to the language. However sooner or later you hit "a plateau" where you're not getting much gains out of simply exposing yourself to the language. If you want to get even better you will have to turn back to studying and focus on working on your shortcomings. I guess that is the difference between a native and a fluent person.

Granted, some of us will not reach the same proficiency no matter how much we cram grammar and vocabulary. It depends on what you want out of the language. Some of my friends have not come in contact with English on a daily basis, so their English skills are naturally not on a same level. On the other hand these same people may have studied English harder than I did in school, but it really doesn't help you past a certain stage. I never studied English after becoming exposed to the language on a constant basis in the seventh grade, so in my experience there is definitely a point of diminishing returns.

poblequadrat Wrote:Your average J-E dictionary has 20000 individual words, a good portion of which are derivates such as 現実・現実的 or 粋・無粋, while some others are pseudo-homonyms where a change in writing denotes a change in nuance such as 早い・速い or 計る・測る. My Japanese is not good enough to read anything, but is 10000 really that crippling? I'm pretty much sure you don't need 40000 words (native speakers of English know between 10000 and 20000 word families, with university graduates averaging at 17000! I posted the source on qwerty's thread if you're interested.)

In Japanese at least, 10,000 words is crippling for reading. I've read a bit over 20 light novels and have 20,500 words in my deck and I still average a little under one new word per page per book at this point. I think the last 250 page light novel I read had 200 words I added to my deck. But it varies per book. If you read a light novel after doing Core 10,000, I wouldn't be surprised if there would be over 800 new words in the first book. I know that happened to me. I am aiming to get to around the 28,000 word area for now.

Is studying really not as effective as just reading and immersion, or is it just less fun? Like say I was in a race to get to fluency, would just immersing myself really be the best option, or would studying be more efficient? I know people will say that you'll get bored and give up, so just keep it hypothetical and say that will never happen.

It seems like I would get way more out of spending an hour memorizing 100 words out of a vocab list than I would spending an hour reading. Obviously you need grammar too, which reading helps with, but getting used to grammar takes a fraction of the time that getting a native level vocabulary does, which opens up the opportunity for studying vocabulary separately.

Maybe past a certain amount of time per day Anki becomes less effective than reading, in the sense that 10 hours of Anki seems like you'd forget a lot and not worth it, but 10 hours of reading makes sense. However I still think at least 3-4 hours of Anki per day would be worth it before reading becomes more effective.

Again keep in mind this is hypothetical. What do you guys think? Is reading more efficient after you have built a base vocabulary, or is it just more fun and therefore more preferable?

3-4 hours of Anki sounds to me like a recipe for burn-out. How long have you been keeping this up for? Give yourself time to enjoy the journey and start getting into things you can understand, especially classic manga etc., and reduce the pressure a bit. It's never too early to enjoy what you are doing.

Here is a good article about the importance of reading: http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_why..._vital.htm

We have to worry not only about meaning, but usage. Seeing a word in the context of a story is of course more enjoyable for us, but also it helps give us a better feeling for usage, for patterns, for the general feeling of how things are expressed. Through reading a lot we don't just increase the raw number of words we know therefore, but also learn a lot of related things about how those words a put together. If you don't go through that process, reading will never really feel very comfortable. In other words, the fun/efficiency thing is intertwined. It is efficient because it is fun. Only on paper might it look like you can brute-force it, unless you have other extremely powerful motivating factors.

It is never too early to start I think, provided you have material that is interesting, or at the right level. At 10,000 words, you definitely should be diving into reading. Reading is in itself a skill that you need to be building up too which is kind of different to just raw vocabulary acquisition.


The 多読 contest for June starts in two days by the way. Have you given that at try before?

kameden Wrote:Is studying really not as effective as just reading and immersion, or is it just less fun?

I think it's fairly obvious that studying CAN BE more efficient than reading. The suggestion that reading is the most efficient study method seems silly. However, that doesn't mean that ALL types or studying are more efficient. For instance, someone above suggested that using Anki to study rare words someone mined from a random source (or worse, a dictionary) is not a very good method of studying. I agree.

Also, efficient is not the same as effective. Efficient means "achieving as much as possible, in x amount of hours spent on a task", while effective means "something that guarantees the competing of the task or achieving of the goal". Effective says nothing about how much you work on something, just that you choose a strategy that will lead to success. So, I would say that a method that isn't the most efficient, but is enjoyable (like reading) is effective (guarantees success), while a method that is efficient but isn't enjoyable might not be effective (might cause you to give up).

But, alas, there are other options than 1. just reading and 2. just studying. There is the option of combining the two. For instance, I didn't have Anki (or constant access to the Internet, or a good enough dictionary) when I studied English in the late 90s, but, as was reading various novels including Joyce's "The Portrait..." and Ulysses, I would write down the words I didn't know, and look them up later, make a list, and study them. It helped me immensely. I felt the progress as I was reading along.

This is what you should do as well (I'm very confident in this advice). Don't interrupt your reading, except to quickly note down or copy the strange word, and then later on, once you're done reading, study those words. Most of them will show up again, later in the novel, and you will see immediate progress. The studying and reading will work together, to help you tackle the same material from two different angles.

As far as using Anki, I don't know if you should. It might be overkill, it might be easier to just use a pen (a mechanical pencil, actually, I found, is by far the best instrument for writing Kanji) and paper, go over your word list a few times, and then discard it. You could of course also do that with Anki (review a deck for a little while, and then start a new deck, forget about the old one), but if you're reading a paper book, it's easier to just stick to paper for the studying as well.

Go read a hundred books and come back a new man.
That is what I did. I would underline words that I didn't know, literally every single one of them, and then look them up after I finish reading the book. Then I would go to the Japanese version of Amazon and read reviews about the book.

The only reason why I would look up a word while reading the book is when it keeps popping up over and over again. In that case, I just end up learning it naturally. I

In the beginning, I was underlining 2-3 words every two pages.

I also wonder, but are you using a monolingual J-J dictionary? Now might be the time for you to convert. Great boost to your understanding right there.

Just for some different perspective:

I had a vocab deck until 10k, then just dropped it and started reading Japanese.

The first few thousand pages were very straining, with many new words, but it got a lot better after ~5k pages, then again at 10k and 15k pages. I'm now at 20k pages read and I don't need to look much up if anything. Maybe a word every few pages, but most times I don't bother. Of course material more difficult than light novels still has more unknown words.

I keep a kanji readings deck that has a very low review load, maybe up to 20 minutes of Anki a day.

Just saying that you don't need to bury yourself in an 30k Anki deck to learn reading.

I regularly see some new words on every page I read and that doesn't necessarily slow down my reading too much or prevent me from understanding the general idea (although once in a while I get confused at what is happening or who's speaking) so I'm not sure what you mean by "barely able to" read. Are you not able to follow the plot? Understand who/what/when/where/how in general? How many words do you add per page?

apirx Wrote:I keep a kanji readings deck that has a very low review load, maybe up to 20 minutes of Anki a day.

I second this - make sure your vocabulary deck covers all common readings with at least 1 word for each reading. This can include some number of non-joyo but nevertheless very commonly used kanji. I spent some time making sure my 10k cards covered this and it reduced a lot of annoyance with reading.

I also agree with others about the importance of reading to complete acquisition of vocabulary - it's hard to use the word or understand how it's used when you only memorize a meaning from Anki.

I'm a little over 3000 words in core2k/6k and I've been reading NHK easy for a few weeks now. I tried Yotsubato but there's too much colloquial speech there that I don't know so I put that on hold. I tried to find other reading material but didn't find anything helpful so I decided to give NHK easy a try.

There are a lot of unknown words there but with the help of Rikaisama, I can quickly look it up and continue reading. I first read while listening to the article being read and find that I understand about 80% of it. Then I reread it again looking up any words I don't know and this helps me understand probably 95% of the article.

I find it almost hard to believe that you "can still barely read anything" at 10k. I started reading novels at around 9k and it goes pretty well. I definitely recommend reading along with a translated edition, so you can refer to it when there's something you don't understand.

Also, haters gonna hate and sometimes I'm a hater hahaha! But 100 words a day... *__* You realize it's a LOT? If you've been going through those 13k words at this rate, then I wouldn't really expect super duper familiarity with all of them. We're all in the same boat though, a lot of times, sentences I don't understand are made up of words I've "learned".

I think it's exactly in that sense that reading is helpful: it grounds the vocabulary you've learned onto something concrete. Dog = 犬 doesn't need much help, but かかる might.

learningkanji Wrote:I tried Yotsubato but there's too much colloquial speech there that I don't know so I put that on hold.

Have you tried the yotsubato reading pack? I've heard great things about it, and you can get it free for volume 1, help you ease into some of it.

http://www.livingjapanese.com/p/reading-pack.html

comeauch Wrote:I find it almost hard to believe that you "can still barely read anything" at 10k.

I think OP's main issue is that he expects the process to be as fast and tangible as during the Anki/RtK/grammar studies phase. No matter how fast you want to become fluent there is only so much you can do to force it. Primarily (imo) that means to make the transition from canned materials to the real language as fast as possible, and then exposing yourself to the language as much as possible. Once you start exposing yourself to the language there is really not much you can do to make the process that much faster. It is the most time consuming part no matter how you slice it. I'm quite certain that OP's problems would go away for the most part once he acquires the ability to read between the lines and to interpret the context better. Knowing 40k words won't exactly help with that. Reading, listening, speaking and writing as much as possible will.

One thing that's also worth considering is that only because you learned 10k words in Anki doesn't mean you know 10k Japanese words. You still lack:

knowledge of what the word actually means in context beyond guessing from whatever definition you learned it with

the ability to instantly recognize it while catching only a glimpse of it, which is required for fast reading

Only actual reading gets you to this point.