Hi everyone,

First, apologies in advance if this has been covered thoroughly and I'm missing it. I'm going through past posts, but haven't figured this out wanted to ask myself.

I'm currently working my way through the core 6000 list on Anki. I'm wondering if anyone knows good vocab lists to try after that.

I like doing big, pre-made lists. I sometimes add other words I hear, but don't really like making my own full lists. I have no problem doing super repetitive stuff for weeks, so the anki/core6000 style works fine for me. Ideally any lists would have natural example sentences (pretty important), and, if possible, audio (less important but nice). I'm not looking for anything particularly specialized (like business terms); I just want to increase my vocabulary as much/fast as I can in the coming months.

I know I have a lot more grammar to learn, but I feel like vocabulary is by far the biggest thing holding me back right now (especially my lack of listening ability, and with reading too). Also, I'm sure finishing the 6000 list will help this problem, but I remember hearing some people here and elsewhere mention knowing 10,000-20,000 words, and I was wondering what they use to get there.

Thank you very much for any ideas!

thenewpollution Wrote:I'm currently working my way through the core 6000 list on Anki. I'm wondering if anyone knows good vocab lists to try after that.
[...]
I know I have a lot more grammar to learn, but I feel like vocabulary is by far the biggest thing holding me back right now (especially my lack of listening ability, and with reading too).

Well, same here. core6k works super with me, too, and I thought I will get the KO2001 vocabulary list (mainly compounds of kanjis.. if used thoroughly in anki with kana->kanji one could increase writing abilities, which I will do at least after finishing core6000) and sort out the compounds I learnt already with core6k. That's probably the best thing to do before one adds less-common, less-frequent vocabulary one stumbles across the internet perhaps.

thenewpollution Wrote:but I remember hearing some people here and elsewhere mention knowing 10,000-20,000 words, and I was wondering what they use to get there.

I memorised the common words that I didn't know from http://jisho.org/, lol, while using the example sentences on http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp. There's about 22k total I think...

I just went through all of the Jouyou kanji plus some others one by one and learnt all the words. So for 絶　it comes up with these: http://jisho.org/words?jap=%E7%B5%B6&eng...&common=on


These idioms come up quite often too.
http://quisition.com/library/pack/443/japanese-idioms/

Thanks for the ideas!

Tori-kun, do you happen to know how much KO2001 overlaps with core6k? I keep hearing about KO2001, but I'm not totally clear about what it has.

dizmox, that's pretty intense! Did you do SRS with all that? Or just studied it on jisho.org?

thenewpollution Wrote:Also, I'm sure finishing the 6000 list will help this problem, but I remember hearing some people here and elsewhere mention knowing 10,000-20,000 words, and I was wondering what they use to get there.

Generally through actual exposure, not pre-made lists. Ie, read something and SRS the words you don't know or the words you think you should know.

[Katsuo]

@OP
If you liked Core 6,000 there are some more: try searching the user-submitted Anki decks for Core 10,000 (or buy the app "Japanese Sensei" if you have an iPhone/iPod Touch).

@dizmoz
That idiom list is from "The Complete Japanese Expression Guide" by Mizue Sasaki. The book has lots of example sentences too, but all are in romaji.

Well, KO2001 is the so called "Kanji Odyssey 2001" sentence pack covering a lot of compounds for kanjis, yet I'm not sure if the "Advanced Section" is also included in the available decks. (can anyone confirm this perhaps?)
Having both lists of core6k and KO2001 it is an easy one to synchronise them, i.e. deleting double entries when combining two lists. -> afterwards just importing the .csv file into Anki. (First finishing Core6k in Anki would be more clever than thinking about these steps right now, I think.)

@katsuo: Is there a CORE6K tag in this huge deck included? Then one could just disable the already learnt core6k cards in that file..

It's not what you're asking for but using rikaichan + the press s to save the word to a text file plugin, then import to anki is a sweet way to get new words easily, with real context and sentences.

caivano Wrote:It's not what you're asking for but using rikaichan + the press s to save the word to a text file plugin, then import to anki is a sweet way to get new words easily, with real context and sentences.

Foodcube...'s or someone's hack was better for that Imo.

I'm up to 16k and I'd say lists can get u started but they won't get you to 20k. You need to get the vocab from the stuff you read/listen to.

jettyke Wrote:

caivano Wrote:It's not what you're asking for but using rikaichan + the press s to save the word to a text file plugin, then import to anki is a sweet way to get new words easily, with real context and sentences.

Foodcube...'s or someone's hack was better for that Imo.

No idea... but that works fine for me

[Katsuo]

Tori-kun Wrote:@katsuo: Is there a CORE6K tag in this huge deck included? Then one could just disable the already learnt core6k cards in that file..

No tags, but the Core6K sentences are numbered so you can sort them; non-Core6k sentences are all assigned "-1".

I'm in a similar position as the OP, although not as far along with the Core vocabulary. I've done Minna no Nihongo, passed the JLPT 3 exam a few years ago, finished RtK 1, and I'm on step 3 of Core 2k. I blew through steps 1 and 2 in Core 2k since I already knew most of that vocabulary from previous studying, but I'm finding it much harder going in step 3 because I'm now learning a lot more compound words, and words that I've never seen or used before.

So my variation on the question is: would KO2001 be a logical addition to my studies at this point? Any other kind of textbook that would help speed things up? I'd really like to do something else in addition to SRS lists, but I find my vocabulary is still not quite good enough for most reading and am having a hard time figuring out what the best next step would be. I figure a good textbook of some kind would be useful, just having a hard time identifying which it should be.

subs2srs (see also the JDIC stuff in that comment) - I'd recommend just using that and JDIC (etc., but I mention the latter dictionary because of the per word audio/resources we have for it) once you've finished all the Core stuff. Likewise extrapolate from this idea and focus on targeted vocabulary from native materials in varying ways. We have so many tools now to turn materials into corpora and manipulate them, there's no reason to rely on general prebuilt decks (as opposed to targeted/specialized stuff you make/find and customize) once you've gone through thousands of smart.fm words and the like.

And like Katsuo mentioned, there's effectively a Core 10000, but I believe they never did get the files matched up so it's a bit sloppy.

Edit: Oh yes, and there's also the Tanuki deck(s), e.g. Tanuki Ultima. For the monolingual twist, though I believe you could use overture's glossing plugin to decompose the sentences and add English definitions.

Edit 2: And I suppose I should add that what I use all those big prefab decks for is general, fixed reference corpora that sit around on my PC with all cards suspended till I query it for a new word I encounter in subs2srs/native media, at which point I unsuspend the card(s) containing this word in those big decks and SRS them before eventually going back to the subs2srs/native media stuff. So I guess in that sense I'd recommend not even doing stuff lik Core 6000 straight through. Instead, when you're done with Core 2000, go to subs2srs and only use the big general prebuilt stuff as fixed reference corpora.

If you have magically acquired the 5000 books that are hidden somewhere (bad, bad since it's illegal to download...), Yomichan is another option - you can set it up for pre-made, super-quick cards and one can easily mine a couple hundred words in a day since it's lots of point-and-click.

nest0r Wrote:Edit: Oh yes, and there's also the Tanuki deck(s), e.g. Tanuki Ultima. For the monolingual twist, though I believe you could use overture's glossing plugin to decompose the sentences and add English definitions.

How's that done? Do you meant he morphology plugin or what?

thenewpollution Wrote:Thanks for the ideas!

Tori-kun, do you happen to know how much KO2001 overlaps with core6k? I keep hearing about KO2001, but I'm not totally clear about what it has.

dizmox, that's pretty intense! Did you do SRS with all that? Or just studied it on jisho.org?

Between the time I started going through the dictionary and the time I finished, I added about 8000 cards to my SRS... so I guess that meant I knew at least around 13000 words already, so it wasn't so bad. Some days I spent hours just copy-pasting from the dictionary into Anki which I guess wasn't a good use of my time though. >_>

Tori-kun Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Edit: Oh yes, and there's also the Tanuki deck(s), e.g. Tanuki Ultima. For the monolingual twist, though I believe you could use overture's glossing plugin to decompose the sentences and add English definitions.

How's that done? Do you meant he morphology plugin or what?

I mean the glossing plugin. ^_^ In the shared plugins. You can also use this: http://langrid.org/playground/dependency-parser.html - This divides the sentence into words/bunsetsu (文節 [Edit: fixed link to a more accurate definition of 文節, see footnote 5]), where the arrows (in this notation) point to the root/head (the one with the most pointing to it is the overall root of the sentence). It's a good way to get a feel for how Japanese sentences are structured and how the different parts interact.

Edit: And if you want to use the glossing plugin with the Tanuki Ultimate deck (well, the way I have mine set up), you'd want to add a Gloss field to the cards in the layout, and what I've just done is create a copy of the jmrGloss.py file in Anki's plugins folder, renaming it TanukiGloss.py. Then I opened it in Notepad++ and changed the ‘Update facts with gloss’ area so that it's Gloss and ExampleSentenceKanji rather than Gloss and Expression or whathaveyou. I also changed the ‘Regenerate Glosses’ in the ‘setupMenu’ area just beneath the above so that it says ‘Regenerate Tanuki Glosses’ so I can tell the difference in the Actions menu.

I'm sure what I'm about to say will ruffle some people's feathers, but there is no set amount of words you have to know by heart to be able to enjoy Japanese books for instance. Yes there are a lot of words you don't know, but if you postpone trying to enjoy Japanese media just because you don't know every word you're never going to be able to enjoy them. The sooner you try reading actual Japanese ( outside of an SrS) the sooner you'll get fluent at reading. Some people on here remind me of that Big Bang Theory episode where Sheldon tries to learn how to swim by studying every swimming technique there is on the internet. Likewise some people on here SrS over 10 k words of vocab but probably still can't read a basic novel with any fluency. If you never jump in the water you'll never learn how to actually swim.

@Kuma01 - What are you referring to, precisely? Sounds like you're constructing a straw man, to me.

Kuma01 Wrote:I'm sure what I'm about to say will ruffle some people's feathers, but there is no set amount of words you have to know by heart to be able to enjoy Japanese books for instance. Yes there are a lot of words you don't know, but if you postpone trying to enjoy Japanese media just because you don't know every word you're never going to be able to enjoy them. The sooner you try reading actual Japanese ( outside of an SrS) the sooner you'll get fluent at reading. Some people on here remind me of that Big Bang Theory episode where Sheldon tries to learn how to swim by studying every swimming technique there is on the internet. Likewise some people on here SrS over 10 k words of vocab but probably still can't read a basic novel with any fluency. If you never jump in the water you'll never learn how to actually swim.

Who are these mythical people who know over 10k words but can't read a basic novel? You'd have to have picked a pretty stupid 10k for that to happen.

I'm not sure where "10k-20k words is a nice number for reading fluency" got transformed into "learn 10k-20k words from a massive list". Khatz certainly didn't do it that way, and neither did mezbup. In fact, the only people who talk about 10k words from a list seem to be people who are *planning* to do so or people who got there without the lists, but are trying to throw the beginners a bone. Read into that what you will.

Kuma01 Wrote:I'm sure what I'm about to say will ruffle some people's feathers, but there is no set amount of words you have to know by heart to be able to enjoy Japanese books for instance. Yes there are a lot of words you don't know, but if you postpone trying to enjoy Japanese media just because you don't know every word you're never going to be able to enjoy them. The sooner you try reading actual Japanese ( outside of an SrS) the sooner you'll get fluent at reading. Some people on here remind me of that Big Bang Theory episode where Sheldon tries to learn how to swim by studying every swimming technique there is on the internet. Likewise some people on here SrS over 10 k words of vocab but probably still can't read a basic novel with any fluency. If you never jump in the water you'll never learn how to actually swim.

I agree. I am only now approaching 4000 words in my anki deck and I passed JLPT2. But then again I know a lot more words than that 4k I guess from having studied in Japan and seeing them in context everyday.

I have done about 5k words in core and I got so lazy with it that the last 2 months or so I'm just reading and reading Much more interesting...

Manga, articles, threads, Chiebukuro stuff, lifehacker, made skype group where there're lots of Japanese people, exchange messages as usual. I dunno if core is even worth it now that I can read about middle school level stuff and can spend my time reading a lot?

I couldn't read a basic novel without pulling my hair out until I learned more than 10,000 vocab.

It was actually when I finished up studying up for 漢字検定5級 when everything clicked into place.

Thanks everyone, and especially nest0r for the detailed reply. I think you've all confirmed for me the direction I was guessing I needed to go in: keep plugging away at Core2k (and then move on to words from native media that interest me), get going on subs2srs soon, and keep looking for native reading material at my level (still a bit hard to find for now). Similar to what nukemarine suggested for his Basic level, even though I *have* passed JLPT3 already.

Sigh...was looking for something a bit quicker, but I guess there ain't no shortcuts, damn it!