Our Approach

There are some key traits to the resources that we're going to be presenting to you in this course.

Namely, our exposure to Japanese vocabulary is going to be...

Repetitive

In this course, I'm going to be recommending that you an Anki flashcard deck to rapidly acquire a solid foundation of Japanese vocabulary.

I've already talked a bit about Anki in other courses, but it's basically a "smart flashcard" program that shows you cards when it thinks you are likely to forget them.

Most of us will not be naturally encountering Japanese vocabulary repeatedly throughout our studies because we do not get enough exposure to the language in our real lives.

We would need to live in Japan with people who only speak Japanese, go to a school or job where only Japanese is used, watch and read things that are only in Japanese, and so on. (←I encourage you to try and make your life as much like this as you can, even if it's not feasible to do all of this.)

Instead, we can get repeated exposure to new words by using flashcards every day that force us to review words we've already learned.

Natural

Back when I was a low-level student, I learned A LOT of words that are borderline useless. Unfortunately, I didn't know that they were useless at the time.

To make matters worse, I wasn't learning new words inside of sentences that a native Japanese person would be likely to write or say.

It was a disaster.

All of the vocab we learn in this course will be useful. In particular, all vocab covered is needed for one or both of the following:

1. The JLPT.

2. Daily life.

We started out with what used to the be the official vocabulary list for the JLPT tests. In other words, we are covering all of the vocabulary likely to show up on a JLPT test. Once we get through the first 2,000 words, we'll have covered everything in JLPT N5 and N4. Once we get through the first 3,000 words, we'll have covered all of the N3 vocab, too.

Disclaimer: The Japan Foundation no longer publishes lists of vocabulary needed for each level of the JLPT. They have given some excuses for this, but I suspect that the reason is that a ton of the words in their old lists were not useful, and it's too difficult to maintain updated lists.

Just using the old JLPT vocabulary lists, we noticed that a lot of the words that we think are crucial for a student of Japanese to learn early in their studies were missing. So we added those, too.

Since learning words in isolation makes them very difficult to remember, each word also appears in a full sentence written by a highly trained native Japanese speaker.

Furthermore, sentences are written using kanji the same way that an adult native speaker would use kanji. (Don't worry, we always include kana breakdowns.) This helps us improve our reading ability as we make our way through the flashcards.

Varied

Formality is a big issue in Japanese.

Most Japanese learning resources, especially those for beginners, focus on formal Japanese the vast majority of the time. Consequently, students' Japanese ends up

sounding stiff and awkward in many situations.

Another downside to focusing only on formal language is that it tends to be more difficult to learn. Casual Japanese sentences tend to be much less complicated. (Check out Bunkai Beast to see what I mean.)

Each complete sentence that is included in our vocab flashcards will be labeled with its approximate formality level, one of the following:

• Super Polite
• Polite
• Somewhat Casual
• Casual
• Rude

↑ These formality levels are approximations, so please don't rely on them too much. Determining the exact formality of a sentence depends on too many things, such as the speakers involved, the context in which it is said, and so on.

Incremental

It is very difficult to read full sentences when you are just getting into your Japanese studies.

Getting hit with a long sentences five minutes in can be overwhelming, discouraging, and frustrating.

That's why we set up our flashcards so that:

New sentences only ever contain 1 new vocabulary word.

So, when you get to the word 腐る (くさる // to rot; to go bad), and it shows up in the polite sentence:

このりんごは腐っています。 この りんご は くさっています。 This apple is rotten. Literally: "this + apple + は + is being rotten."

...you will have already learned the words この (this) and りんご (apple).

And if you've already gone through the Bunkai Beast Grammar Course, you'll be less intimidated by that は (wa) and the conjugation of the verb (which is in polite present progressive tense, by the way).

Long story short, we will do our best not to overwhelm, discourage, or frustrate you. ^_^

Spoken

All sentences in our flashcard deck are accompanied by male and female audio recorded by Japanese voice actors.

I studied without audio for years, and my pronunciation suffered a lot (and took a long time to fix) as a result. You get to benefit from my mistakes!

In addition to the Anki flashcards, we also have shadow loops of each sentence covered in the course. I'll talk more about that later.

Contextual

Well, sort of.

While our flashcards cannot provide the level of context that you get when encountering a word in real life, we do have a ton of notes to accompany various sentences that appear in the flashcards.

Specifically, if you compiled all of the notes that appear with various sentences, we would have enough to fill a solid little book.

These notes will vary in a number of ways. Sometimes they'll give extra clues about formality or usage. Other times they'll provide a sample context in which you might encounter the phrase.

For example, for the casual sentence:

⾻気を付けてね。 ほね きをつけて ね。 Watch out for bones. Literally: "bones + be careful (and) + ね."

...we have the note: "The listener is probably eating some fish that may have bones in it."

This allows us to picture an appropriate situation for this phrase and allows our writers to use natural Japanese without trying to artificially insert context into their sentences.

Getting excited to learn some vocab?

I am. So let's dive in...