Published vocabulary lists are a reasonable starting point and a poor finishing one. They contain hundreds of words you already know and omit the ones you keep forgetting.
A personal list fixes both problems. Here is how to build one that survives contact with a busy week.
What goes on it
Four sources, in order of value:
- Words you met and did not know - in a mock test, an article, a conversation, a sign.
- Words you met and half-knew - recognised but could not use. These are the highest-value entries.
- Words specific to your sector - the vocabulary of the job you are going to do.
- Words from your own life - your family, your hobbies, your town. You will talk about these constantly and no textbook covers them.
What each entry needs
Not a translation. Four things:
食べ物 | たべもの | food | 日本の食べ物が好きです。
Word, reading, meaning, and a sentence - ideally one that is true about you. The sentence is what turns a recognised word into a usable one, and it is the part people skip.
Where to keep it
Wherever you will actually use it. The honest answer for most of our students is a phone app for review and a small notebook for writing new entries: flashcard app or notebook.
What matters is that it is one list, not four. Three notebooks and two apps means nothing gets reviewed.
The review schedule
New words need to be met several times, at increasing intervals, before they stick. That is what spaced repetition automates: spaced repetition for Japanese.
If you are doing it by hand, a workable minimum:
- The same evening
- The next day
- Three days later
- A week later
- A month later
Keep it small
The commonest failure is a list that grows to 400 entries and is never reviewed, because reviewing it would take an hour.
Rules that keep it usable:
- Cap it at 30 active entries. When one is known - three correct recalls on separate days - retire it.
- Retire aggressively. Retired words are not lost; they come back in reading.
- Do not add words you will never use. A rare word met once in an article is not worth a slot.
Why this beats a published list
Because of the arithmetic. If you drill a published list of 800 words and you already know 500 of them, you are spending 60% of your study time on words you know, to learn 300.
A personal list is 100% unknown words, all of them ones you have already met once - which means they have context attached and will stick faster.
Where to find your next fifty
Sit a mock exam. Every word you did not know in it is, by definition, a word at your target level that you need.
Our free exam demo is a full 48-question JFT-Basic paper under exam conditions, and the practice test explains every answer in your own language - which makes both of them vocabulary sources as well as measurements.