When I was learning English, an extremely useful learning aid was a set of age-graded vocabulary lists. These consisted of vocabulary words that a normal x-year old would be typically know, where x ranged from something like 6 to 18. (IIRC, the contents of these lists were descriptive rather than normative.)

I think that this is better than, say, word-frequency in some corpus, as the basis for prioritizing which vocabulary to learn.

Does anyone know of such an age-graded vocabulary lists for Japanese?

I don't know of any such lists, but to me this doesn't sound like the best thing to study -- assuming you're an adult, you have the need of a lot of vocab words that children don't use.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I don't know of any such lists, but to me this doesn't sound like the best thing to study -- assuming you're an adult, you have the need of a lot of vocab words that children don't use.

He's already said how valuable it was when he was learning English. How could you possibly argue with that without any actual knowledge or experience?

As for the lists, I haven't seen them, but I'm using the JLPT lists for that purpose. They start off fairly easy and work up.

Alternatively, the Core lists from Smart.fm start very easy (Core 400) and work up to medium (2000) and hard (6000). It changes difficulty too quickly, though. There would be more levels.

If you find such a list, I'd like to know about it.

About.com has vocab for the kanji arranged according to grade level. Perhaps that's a good place to start.

wccrawford Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:I don't know of any such lists, but to me this doesn't sound like the best thing to study -- assuming you're an adult, you have the need of a lot of vocab words that children don't use.

He's already said how valuable it was when he was learning English. How could you possibly argue with that without any actual knowledge or experience?

Yudantaiteki is a teacher. I'd say she's one of the few here who actually has real knowledge and experience.

Well, that doesn't necessarily mean I know everything about language learning. JLPT and Core lists are different from age-graded vocabulary because kids do not learn words in the same order that adults (usually) do in learning a language. There's plenty of vocab that is very useful for a 6 year old but useless for an adult, and vice versa.

(I'm a guy, BTW)

yudantaiteki Wrote:(I'm a guy, BTW)

Sure. Just like nest0r and Thora, too, right? >_>

Hmm, why was I so sure that you were female? Must be something I misunderstood in some earlier post. Anyway, I would think a teacher to have a good grasp of what vocabulary students need to improve. I mean fine, we all have different reasons for learning a language, but I doubt anyone here has the ultimate goal of being able to read stories for kids.

yudantaiteki Wrote:There's plenty of vocab that is very useful for a 6 year old but useless for an adult, and vice versa.

I disagree. At the very least, you need to know what a 6 year old is saying. It might be less useful when speaking, but none of it is less useful when listening.

I am constantly frustrated by my inability to read books that first graders are able to read. Yet I know a ton of words like 'economics' that they wouldn't have a clue about.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I don't know of any such lists, but to me this doesn't sound like the best thing to study -- assuming you're an adult, you have the need of a lot of vocab words that children don't use.

This implies that I'd stop with those lists. Where do you get that from? And why shouldn't an adult want to know the words that children know? Also, as I wrote, those lists went all the way up to highschool level.

gfb345 Wrote:And why shouldn't an adult want to know the words that children know?

You'd be wasting your time. By the time you learned them all 1000 new one's will have been invented.

wccrawford Wrote:As for the lists, I haven't seen them, but I'm using the JLPT lists for that purpose. They start off fairly easy and work up.

Alternatively, the Core lists from Smart.fm start very easy (Core 400) and work up to medium (2000) and hard (6000). It changes difficulty too quickly, though. There would be more levels.

Thanks. I'm particularly interested in those JLPT lists.

Thanks to kazelee too for the About.com pointer.

kazelee Wrote:

gfb345 Wrote:And why shouldn't an adult want to know the words that children know?

You'd be wasting your time. By the time you learned them all 1000 new one's will have been invented.

I think you're misunderstanding the lists I'm referring to. These lists were specifically designed for vocabulary-building; the ultimate goal (at the high-school senior level) was something approaching an adult-level vocabulary. They did not contain words like "daddy" and "tummy", but rather words like "father" and "stomach".

@OP

I know what lists you are referring to. I was making a reference to the futility of trying to keep up with youth terminology.

gfb345 Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:I don't know of any such lists, but to me this doesn't sound like the best thing to study -- assuming you're an adult, you have the need of a lot of vocab words that children don't use.

This implies that I'd stop with those lists. Where do you get that from? And why shouldn't an adult want to know the words that children know? Also, as I wrote, those lists went all the way up to highschool level.

Well, if you think about the end goal (have learnt a huge number of words) then in some sense it doesn't matter which order you learn them. If you want to also get maximum amount of use out of them as you go along, then at (say) the 2000 word mark which is more likely to be useful:
(a) the first 2000 words a kid learns
(b) the 2000 words you're most likely to encounter and use as an adult (ie the 2000 most frequent)
?

I'd suggest that (b) is going to be of more practical use, and to the extent that (a) is useful it's because it's going to overlap quite a bit with (b). The stuff in (a) which isn't in (b) is worth learning at some point, but effectively any kind of sorted list like this is prioritising some words above others, and so it has to stand up to criticism of whether its priorities work in a relative sense, not merely whether the words it includes are worth knowing in an absolute sense.

(Actually I think that the main requirement of a sorted word list is (a) is it conveniently available (b) are there useful materials surrounding it © is it not totally loony. So the Core2K/6K etc score well here, particularly in (b) because of the preexisting sentences and audio and so on. JLPT lists are ok on (a) and © but not so good on (b). An age-graded list would pass © but appears to be falling down on point (a) at the moment...)