Vocab is a numbers game.

Remember how earlier in this book I talked about how Japanese has a shallow orthographic depth (i.e., is easy to pronounce)? Well, in my opinion, that is exactly what makes Japanese such a simple language to learn.

If a Japanese person “learns" an English word, then they still probably won't be able to catch it when they hear a native speaker saying it. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it basically boils down to Japanese people being unable to “hear" English words just by reading them.

But this is not true of (English speakers) studying Japanese. The sounds that make up the Japanese language are simple enough that when you hear a word that you've “learned" in a book before, even if you're only hearing it for the first time, there's a very good chance that you'll be able to catch it and understand its meaning.

Because of this association between writing and sound, we have a situation where increasing vocabulary actually increases listening comprehension simultaneously. And if you increase your Japanese listening comprehension to a very advanced level, then you'll be able to understand what's being said on TV shows, anime, and radio broadcasts. In other words, you'll be able to supercharge your passive listening practice by listening to content that you actually enjoy. And that's an incredible springboard to high-level mastery of Japanese.

What I'm trying to say is that vocab is really, really important. And after you've learned the kanji (which I'll talk about later), vocabulary acquisition should be the main focus of your studies. The funny thing is that a lot of classes gloss over vocabulary acquisition, because it's not well-suited for group study. Personally, I've always thought that vocab study doesn't get stressed enough in books and blog posts about studying languages.

If you want to understand TV shows and anime, you need to know every word of every sentence they're saying. I know that when I was at a lower level of Japanese, it was really frustrating trying to watch TV or listen to radio shows, because all it took for me to get lost was one single unknown word. One word could throw me off entirely.

Now I'm at a much higher level of Japanese, and I can usually manage if an unknown word or two pops up in conversation or in Japanese media. But the main reason that I can cope is that (1) I have a huge vocabulary (for being a non-native speaker) and (2) I have an extensive knowledge of kanji readings, which often gives me the ability to learn a word simply by hearing it for the first time in a given context.

But, yeah, tackling a mountain of vocabulary is really intimidating, right? I remember I used to do searches online for things like “number of words to pass JLPT N1" or “number of words to understand Japanese TV." Looking back now, I think that I was doing those searches for two reasons. First, I didn't feel confident that I'd ever learn Japanese. And second, I was being lazy.

With all of that in mind, for this book I've tried to create a vocab study system that is extremely simple to set up and easy to implement consistently over a long period of time.

I'll explain the details of that system in Phase #2, but for now I'd like to help you get set up with the tools to make it happen. Specifically, we're going to need three ninja tools:

• Anki Flashcards
• Remembering the Kanji Study System
• Reviewing the Kanji
  

Allow me to elaborate…