Anki one is good man. But as for the most common, not sure. What happened for me is that, once I know a large amounts of the readings for kanji. I could guess how the name would be said. I still make mistakes, but I believe the more you practice on this type of stuff the easier it will be come to guess the right readings for names.

Aim for like 5000 names, that way you'd know a lot. Chances of seeing something you don't know will be low.

Hi guys. If you're talking about the top 500 names deck, I'm the person that made the deck. Just put any feedback you have in this deck. I'll fix it soon and re-upload a new version.

I'm out right now and not near a computer.
Otherwise, I'd fix it asap.

Thanks.

JLPT 1 is hardly the be-all-end-all of Japanese fluency.

Something that I especially like about names is that they make use of many of the Heisig kanji with obscure keywords that I would never ever use (like the ones with weird plant names, geographical structures, etc). Many of them are almost exclusively used for names.

The top 500 names accounts for a large portion of the names used in Japan.
With Heisig we study 2042 (or 3007 with RTK) kanji. 500 names (or words if you wish)
is hardly that bad compared to what it takes to finish RTK.

Japanese people are routinely impressed by the fact I can write their names
down. Very few Japanese language learners get good at writing names.

It's also fun. I love to watch Japanese TV Drama and learning the names of all the actor's/actresses names. So the deck is useful for me.

Last edited by chamcham (2010 May 30, 5:40 pm)

Tobberoth wrote:

chamcham wrote:

JLPT 1 is hardly the be-all-end-all of Japanese fluency.

Something that I especially like about names is that they make use of many of the Heisig kanji with obscure keywords that I would never ever use (like the ones with weird plant names, geographical structures, etc). Many of them are almost exclusively used for names.

The top 500 names accounts for a large portion of the names used in Japan.
With Heisig we study 2042 (or 3007 with RTK) kanji. 500 names (or words if you wish)
is hardly that bad compared to what it takes to finish RTK.

Japanese people are routinely impressed by the fact I can write their names
down. Very few Japanese language learners get good at writing names.

It's also fun. I love to watch Japanese TV Drama and learning the actor's names. So the deck is useful for me.

None of this needs one to actively sit down and learn names. If someone who was good at English, conversational, but made mistakes all the time, couldn't read English books etc, told you they were improving their English by learning names, would you laugh at them? I sure would. It seems like a really odd and backwards way of learning a language. Again, it's good to know, it's always fun to impress a Japanese person. And true, JLPT1 may not be the be-all-end-all of Japanese fluency, but it's definitely WAAAY closer and more important than 500 common names.

Yes. I would laugh at that person, too. Choosing to learn names instead of reading books is not a very smart decision. Of course I'm not encouraging people to abandon their studies in order to learn names.

At the same, learning how to pronounce common English/Japanese/whatever is VERY helpful if you often meet new people.

One problem with names in Japanese is that ANY pronunciation is fair game.

There were literally times where I couldn't pronounce peoples names because they
are too many different combinations of possible sounds that would work.

Even if you know the kanji, they are just too many possible onyomi/kunyomi combinations.

Also, these are not just 500 common names. These are the 500 MOST COMMON names (by the number of households in Japan with that name).

Really, it's only 500 cards. You can go as slow as you want. 1-5 names a day is hardly much work.

Last edited by chamcham (2010 May 30, 5:51 pm)

I think names are important, and will play in one's social interaction. Therefore it's smart to train that ability also. Although I'm not using a name's deck, I do put names in my subs2srs deck. It's just the Face of the Actor and their name in Kanji with the kana being the answer. I don't fail these cards, just mark them difficult or good.

What I might also start doing is putting my wife's friend's names in this same deck, either with photos or descriptions ala a recent AJATT post. I'm horrible when it comes to names in my own language, and it's all but impossible in Japanese. While I've been away for a year, not remembering names can be forgiven. I doubt the same feeling will carry over when I'm finally back in Japan this summer.

Maybe that's why I've stayed in the military the last 16 years. So much easier 'remembering" names with everyone wearing their name on their chest. Joking aside, you do realize reactions are different to someone that seems to know you by name.

Yeah there many more important things for me to be studying at my crappy level. But I do it because it's kind of fun knowing names, and I want to be able to recognize them in the wild (It's kind of fun watching credits now). And I don't spend much time on it (maybe 10 min a day?). It's just a little piece of a huge pie, so I integrated it into my studies because it will be useful in the long term, it's fun, and I'd rather do some here and there and build it as I go then try and learn them later. I actually find it really easy (so far) - the names click with readings I'm familiar with, so I get them pretty quick.

Last edited by TaylorSan (2010 May 30, 11:56 pm)

Coscom have name lists (and loads of other free stuff). If you're converting the data into an Anki deck etc, then Opera seems to be the easiest browser to copy tables from.