Vocabulary and Anki: your first 1,500 words

Vocabulary is the single biggest thing standing between you and native Japanese. Grammar tells you how words relate, but if you don't know the words, there's nothing for the grammar to relate. And for an English speaker Japanese starts from almost nothing: apart from loanwords, there are no cognates to lean on the way there are in French or Spanish.

The good news is that words aren't equally common. A small core does most of the work, which is why the first few thousand words are worth learning deliberately and the rest can come from reading and listening. Research on English, the best-studied case, shows the shape clearly:

Paul Nation's study concludes that reading novels without a dictionary takes 8,000–9,000 word families and understanding speech 6,000–7,000, with 98% of words known. Nobody memorises that many from a deck. The plan instead is to learn about 1,500 of the most common words on purpose, which gets easy material within reach with a dictionary, and to let reading and listening supply the rest.

Anki is free flashcard software that uses spaced repetition: each card comes back just before you're likely to forget it, and every time you remember it, the gap grows. A card you know well costs a few seconds every few months.

Get Anki (opens in a new tab): free on Windows, macOS and Linux, free as AnkiDroid on Android, and paid as AnkiMobile on iOS (the purchase funds Anki's development). A free AnkiWeb account syncs them, so you can review on your phone and add cards on your computer.

Alternatives exist: jpdb (opens in a new tab) is a website with its own spaced repetition and decks built from anime, novels and games; WaniKani and Bunpro are paid apps for kanji and grammar. Anki is the one almost every guide builds on, and it's free, so this chapter assumes it.

Kaishi 1.5k (opens in a new tab) is the starter deck most current guides recommend. Its authors picked about 1,500 words by frequency from the older Core 2k/10k and Tango N5/N4 decks and fixed around 120 of their example sentences. Each card has:

• the word with furigana (reading) and its meaning;
• an example sentence with the word highlighted, and its translation;
• native audio for both the word and the sentence;
• an optional pitch accent display, and pictures you can switch off.

Download the .apkg from the releases page (it's also on AnkiWeb) and open it with Anki. It needs Anki 2.1.50 or newer. At 15 new words a day it takes a little over three months; you don't need to finish it before you start immersing.

Older guides point to the Core 2k deck or the Tango N5/N4 decks; they're fine, but Kaishi is Core's best words with the errors fixed, so there's little reason to start elsewhere today.

Open the deck's options (the gear next to it) and change these:

Easy Days, further down, lets you mark days of the week as lighter; Anki nudges due dates away from them. Useful if your weekends are busy.

• New card: look at the answer, listen to the audio, read the sentence, press Again, move on. You're meeting the word, not testing it.
• Every card after that: before flipping, try to recall the reading and the meaning. If you got both, press Good. If you didn't, press Again, even if you were close.
• Never press Hard for a card you forgot. FSRS treats Hard as a pass with hesitation; using it for failures makes every interval too long.
• Easy is for cards that were effortless. Most people barely use it.
• Do your reviews every day, even on days you add nothing new. Skipped days come back as a wall of overdue cards.

A card you've failed eight times becomes a leech: Anki tags it and suspends it by default. The manual's advice is to change how the card is presented (add a picture, a mnemonic, a clearer sentence) or delete it if the word isn't worth the time. Some words only stick once you've met them in a story, and some pairs interfere with each other until one of them is solid; suspending one for a while helps.

If reviews start taking more time than you have, lower new cards first. Reviews are the cost of words you've already started; new cards are the debt you're taking on.

Once Kaishi is done (or once native content is bearable), stop adding pre-made cards and start mining: making cards from words you meet in what you read and watch. Those stick far better, because you remember where you saw them.

What vocabulary learning looks like over time

Monolingual definitions, eventually

At some point, look words up in a Japanese-Japanese dictionary as well as an English one. A Japanese definition explains a word with simpler Japanese, which is reading practice in itself and gives you the nuance a one-word translation hides. Start by reading the Japanese definition after the English one; later, try it first. Yomitan can show both (see the tools section).