Hi folks,

This may or may not be appropriate, but I am wondering if anyone would be willing to post up their grammar decks. Apart from the fact that the Anki ones are pretty much sentences without any sort of information, I would love to see how people are putting theirs together.

Also, does anyone have a list of 1000 or so really solid words (like action verbs, high use adjectives, adverbs, etc. rather than a list of nouns, as these seem most useful to me now.) I am thinking about doing a top 500 cram deck based on English lists of these lexical categories and going through them in Japanese. If I do actually do it I will post it up in return. (I've done pretty much everything Anki has to offer so far.)

Anything JLPT 3 upwards would be particularly good. You can email me if you don't feel comfortable posting information below.

Cranks Wrote:Also, does anyone have a list of 1000 or so really solid words (like action verbs, high use adjectives, adverbs, etc. rather than a list of nouns, as these seem most useful to me now.)

Here are some lists I created from a corpus of light novels (140 volumes, half a million sentences): i-adjectives, na-adjectives, adverbs, adverbial conjunctions, adverbial nouns, suru verbs and other verbs. If you learn every adjective in level 4, you will still find, on average, one unknown adjective in every 5 adjectives. For levels 3, 2 and 1, the numbers are one unknown in every 10, 20 and 50, respectively. (level 1 is probably not very reliable; but I think the other levels are good enough)

Bonus: top bikkuri adverbs by frequency.

iSoron Wrote:Bonus: top bikkuri adverbs by frequency.

Huh, I'd never have guessed すっかり would be top-5...

pm215 Wrote:Huh, I'd never have guessed すっかり would be top-5...

And ironically, びっくり is not even on the list, because it's not an adverb.

Bonus #2: top bikkuri verbs by frequency.

Quite a long list iSoron. How did you go about using it? I resorted the suru nouns and there were still over 1000 odd in the level 4 category alone.

Edit: After look it over that's about 4000 or so items in level 4 across the lists you posted. That's quite a lot, lol. Good resource though.

Cranks Wrote:Quite a long list iSoron. How did you go about using it?

I didn't have that list when I was a beginner, so I didn't use it. The list I used was based on EDICT (popular entries) and kanji frequencies; it was not as good as this one. Basically, I just added some fixed amount of cards everyday. I did not studied the words previously, nor did I created mnemonics; I just dumped the words into Anki. The only thing slightly special was the ordering in which the cards were added (here's a description). After adding ~2000 words, I started reading light novels, and after ~6000 I stopped adding new cards (because I was lazy; don't do this).

Cranks Wrote:After look it over that's about 4000 or so items in level 4 across the lists you posted. That's quite a lot, lol.

If you learn 20 words a day, you'll finish in 6 months; that's nothing. (I suggest you keep a slow and steady pace, instead of rushing in the beginning and then having to review thousands of cards later. You can use that simulator to plan ahead)

Nice. Looking over the verbs and i-adjectives I could see myself including these into my deck at about 200 or so a week. At the moment I have a weekly SRS limit of 700 new cards. Most of my vocabulary comes from the wild right now, but I plan to start reading more difficult content shortly and wouldn't mind a head start. I will definitely have to consider exactly what to study (maybe anything with a frequency rate of over 300 or so).

Thanks heaps for posting this up iSoron. This really helps.