Getting Started With Vocab
“Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.” – Buckminster Fuller
When it comes to vocabulary, the main goal of season one and two is to not pile it on. In fact, if I can help it, I want you to learn as little vocabulary as possible until Season three or four, when vocabulary begins to become more important. There are a few reasons for this. First, I want you to learn your basic grammar (so you’ll actually have someplace to use your vocab), and second, you’re spending a lot of your memorization brain power points already on other things, like kanji (which, I have to admit, is a lot like vocab) already. That being said, there is some vocabulary I want to give you. It’s not that much, and one of the main purposes is only to show you how to learn vocab. If you practice learning vocab you’ll actually get better at learning vocab. It’s funny how things like this work (not to mention you get to practice your hiragana at the same time).
How You’ll Learn Vocab
Now, the thing is, learning vocab on TextFugu is not the same as learning kanji. That being said, you aren’t going to be learning the kanji associated with each of these common words. You are only going to learn the word itself, how to write it in hiragana, and how to pronounce it. Here’s why:
- You shouldn’t be learning kanji out of order for the most part. Let kanji be kanji.
- Even though all these words are extremely common, it doesn’t mean the kanji for these common words are simple. Many of them are very complicated, and it’ll hurt more than help if you tried to learn them now.
- As I mentioned before – focus right now should be on grammar, not vocab. I just want you to learn the vocab because they’re very useful and because you’ll be able to use them with the grammar you’re learning.
Eventually, though, it’s all going to come together like the ending of an episode of Seinfeld. A bunch of things will be going on, and they’ll be minding their own business, but then in some magical way it’ll all come back together at the end and everything will be perfect. Although things are separate now, it’s only because we want to get to the end goal faster (though it may seem slower at first).
Getting Started
To study this list, you’ll be using Anki (which I’m guessing you’ve used a bit, if you’ve been following along). If for some reason you’ve missed the whole Anki thing up to this point, you’ll want to read the tutorial on how to use it on this page.
“Common Nouns” Part 1
You will have only one “TextFugu Vocab” deck. There will, however, be many smaller vocab decks that are on different subjects that you will import into this one “TextFugu Vocab” deck. One of these decks is the “Common Nouns” deck, which is a deck of (only) 50 nouns that you will learn over the course of five lessons. They are fairly common nouns, and they’ll allow us to practice noun-related grammar with better effectiveness.
So, the first ten words are:
- ともだち (friend)
- みず (water)
- でんしゃ (train)
- せんせい (teacher)
- ねこ (cat)
- いぬ (dog)
- じてんしゃ (bicycle)
- くるま (car)
- りんご (apple)
- しんぶん (newspaper)
To get started, download the Anki list I’ve made for you. It’s the very first “vocab” deck, and will be the starting point for your bigger “TextFugu Vocab” deck. Go ahead and download this one, and then we’ll talk a bit about it.
TextFugu Vocab (Common Nouns 1)
After you’ve downloaded it, unzip it and then open up Anki. You’ll want to go to File>>Import and then import this deck (it’s pretty important you import this first deck, otherwise media won’t work properly). Since you’re importing this deck into a nonexistent deck, Anki will ask you to name it. I’d recommend naming it “TextFugu Vocab” or something along those lines (because that’s what I’m naming it).
When you’ve successfully imported this deck and therefore created the “TextFugu Vocab” deck, start studying. Before you start, though, I’d recommend looking over the above list and trying to cram one or two of the words. See if you can learn a couple by putting them in your short term memory before learning them on Anki. This will give you a jump start with some of the words, making it easier to learn the list.
When you’ve gone through them (or Anki tells you to stop), move on to the next page – we’re going to hit up kanji now!