Intermediate Japanese Vocabulary
Socorro Henson
At some point during your studies, you probably heard about the JLPT (Japanese-Language Proficiency Test). This is a standardized test that evaluates the Japanese-language proficiency of non-native speakers, including their language knowledge (vocabulary/grammar), reading ability, and listening ability. Level N3 is equivalent to the intermediate level, and setting a goal for yourself to pass this level would be a good source of motivation to help you keep up your studies.
Our next set of intermediate Japanese vocabulary words will cover the most practical nouns in a range of categories. At this stage in your learning journey, picking up as many new nouns as possible will help you better express yourself and allow you to hold conversations on a greater number of topics.
While adjectives describe nouns, adverbs provide additional information about verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. At this stage in your learning journey, having a few Japanese adverbs up your sleeve will allow you to give more detailed descriptions of events and help your writing flow more smoothly.
Japanese particles, or 助詞 (joshi), are suffixes or short words that follow a modified noun, verb, adjective, or sentence. Particles play a very important role in Japanese grammar because even a slight difference in this regard could change the meaning/nuance of a sentence. Memorizing and becoming familiar with how to use these particles is a great way to start improving your Japanese as an intermediate learner.
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Maybe one thing that will help to motivate you would be to challenge yourself with certain tasks. For example, reading a whole manga series or graded reader series is something tangible that you can check off. Or passing a JLPT level. Maybe mastering a professional self-introduction. Etc. Knowing that you can do certain things with Japanese might seem more real than say, being aware that you know x thousand vocabulary items.
Unfortunately, I think the intermediate plateau lasts just about forever. Although there are probably different sub-degrees within the intermediate plateau. And there are different domains within Japanese or any other language where you can have various levels of knowledge of vocabulary, catch phrases, etc.
First, I went through the entire Oxford Dictionary of English, and for each word in the dictionary I crafted a small wooden box and wrote the word on the side of the box. Then I drove to the beach and collected several truckloads of sand, after which I read through this discussion thread and upon reading each word I placed a grain of sand in the appropriate box. Once this wieldy task had been completed, it was a simple matter of tallying the grains of sand in each box, placing those tally numbers into a sorted list, and using my computer keyboard to input those selfsame digits into the input field for responding to this thread.
It's always easier to move a rolling snowball rather than pushing it and make it roll at the first place.This is the same when it comes to learn a foreign language. Here, I'm gonna relate my experience with learning Japanese (and maybe a little bit of my Chinese learning journey as well).
When you start out, do not look so far. No need some magical science studies apps to make your learning journey shorter. Generally in life, when someone is selling you some shortcuts to get hard things done, they are just selling you dreams.
Instead of wasting your time looking for and be picky on what resources and material to use to start with, just go to your local library and pick a book like Japanese for beginner where they teach you how to read/write Hiragana/Katakana. Alternatively, you can use something like Duolingo if you're not a book person, that's what I used to start off with learning Chinese. Why I recommend using simple books or apps like Duolingo, it's because they already lay out for you the structure of the lessons. You can have something to start with, and not endlessly digging into YouTube videos, or blog posts.
Remember, all you need to do is just to go through those simple resources. Don't waste time to find the perfect way or app to learn Japanese. You will just be in motion instead of taking actions. Being in motion is when you're doing your research (probably in English or in your native language) instead of just sitting and read or open the app to get your daily lesson done (this is actual action). Being in motion is a self-satisfied feeling because you feel like you're doing something about your learning journey. Don't get me wrong, there will be times where you have to do some researches, but for now, you don't need.
Give yourself one month or a few weeks, to go through the basics level on Duolingo Japanese, or finish the little beginner for Japanese book that you bought. Now that you know how to read Hiragana and Katakana and maybe a few kanjis, you can start to look further.
Some beginners complain that they can't understand anything in Japanese and that's okay. This is just true: look at a baby, when they start to learn a language, at first they are not able to say anything and before you realize, they are already speaking the language fluently.So when you're a beginner, it feels good to be able to learn from some travel guide, basics Japanese sentences just to get by in some situations.
But when you do that, your progression will just be slow, because you tend to focus so much on accumulating as many already made sentences that you can find from here and there and output them. If your goal is just to be able to say simple Japanese sentences when you visit Japan, that's totally fine. If you're content with being praised as 上手ですね when you say こんにちは, it's fine... But if your ultimate goal is rather master the language in order to, for example find a job here or something in the long term, then you have to bear for a while.
When you're a beginner, you don't need to find out why certain things are used in certain ways, your job is just to expose yourself as much as you can to the Japanese language. That's what I call finding the dots, instead of trying to connecting them. Those dots will make more sense when you're in the intermediate phase and your brain does the job automatically for you. A lot of learners often asked to natives or to their teachers what's the difference between two similar words or grammar patterns. Then after being explained, they just node their head and think yeah I see, that makes sense. But a better way to understand those similarities and actually absorb them, is to see as much use cases and real situation usages for those words as possible. Have you ever been asked by people who are learning your native language to explain a concept that you understand and can use without having to think, but you won't be able to explain it to others? That's what we aim for. Knowing when it's a proper usage or not, without having to explain it. Your goal is to be able to use those concepts and words, and not to explain them to someone (unless you aspire to be a language teacher...! ?)
So try to find as many dots as you can, and this can be in different forms: watching Netflix in Japanese with Japanese subtitle, you won't understand 90% of what's being said, but the remaining 10% that you can understand is what differentiates you from other beginners that will be stuck in the phase forever. This is because you always seek for things to learn.
I used to binge-watch and listen to everything in Japanese (songs, animes, dramas...) without understanding anything. Now that I know the mechanism of learning a foreign language, I'm actively applying those things into my Chinese learning journey.
Right after I finished my basics level on Duolingo Chinese, I just watched a bunch of Chinese TV shows with Chinese dub and Chinese subtitle.I don't understand anything (like literally) but with times, I start to understand some simple sentences and end of sentences. But most importantly, my ears get used to Chinese. Before, all Chinese sentences and words sound the same to me, but now I start to recognize differences and even words that I crammed.
In addition, this might be the most boring thing but also the most rewarding thing to do. When I start to learn Japanese, I was heavily using Anki Flashcards, to absorb the massive amount of vocabulary. Starting with learning the meaning of every single Kanji (using the famous Heisig RTK Anki deck). This was kind of a chore since those kanjis are not ordered by their usage frequency, so they can't be used immediately in the real world. I was just learning some mysterious kanjis with weird meaning, and literally just remember their meaning.
Once I'm done with the kanjis, I tackled real Japanese words, and those words are sorted by JLPT level: so simple words first and then things get complicated. This is when things start to click, when the dots start to connect. I can recognize words that I learned and even entire sentences where I understand every single word.
I wasn't focusing much on grammar (things that beginners always emphasize first, and I still don't get why...), but rather on those simple already made sentences that I heard from Japanese songs, animes and dramas. Now that they stick in my brain, that helps me absorb the grammar points instead of having to learn them raw from a textbook.
When you start out, it's more important to just collect information instead of being picky about where you collect this information from.A recurrent beginner mistake is to think that there is a clean way to learn a language, ie. everything has to be contained within some kind of structure, starting from point A to point B.