Speedanki and the official JLPT vocabulary

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions we’ve been receiving recently! Rest assured that I read every comment even if I don’t directly respond to them all. Also, I fixed a few typos in the cards based on reports from you; please do mail team@speedanki.com if you spot more, although they should be pretty much ironed out by now.

In this post, I thought I would begin to address the topic of “content”: that is, the word lists, examples, and how to develop them in the future. In this post, I will focus on the word lists, which some people have been asking about. Speedanki currently features 110 words for JLPT level 4, 230 words for level 3, 1092 words for level 2, and 1228 for level 1, with a small amount of overlap between the levels. Compare these to the full official lists (as specified in the JLPT Test Content Specification) from which words for the actual tests are picked. These lists have been made available in a digital form by Peter van der Woude at the JLPT Study Page. They contain 727 words for level 4, 1409 words for level 3, and 5035 words for level 2, with some overlap between the levels. Level 1 comprises approximately 10000 words, but these have not been digitised by Peter. In the actual test, up to 20 percent of the words can moreover be picked from outside the official lists at the discretion of the examiners. In other words, the Speedanki lists feature perhaps 15 percent of the total vocabulary that can appear in a Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

One way to look at this is that Speedanki is suffering from a serious lack of vocabulary, and needs to be brought up to 100 percent. The good news is that Peter has kindly given us permission to use his lists on Speedanki, so we could do that any time (for levels 4, 3 and 2, at least). But I am not sure if it’s the right way to go. Firstly, while Speedanki vocabulary is intended to be useful and challenging, the official lists also contain a lot of words that are less useful (a subjective thing, of course) and words that you are bound to learn from other sources. Secondly, I wonder if using full lists would be pedagogically optimal: what would it do for study motivation if you had 5035 words in front of you for level 2? You don’t actually need to know every word to pass the test. Finally, there is the question of example sentences, but I’ll talk about those in a further post.

Perhaps the optimal solution lies somewhere in between the current lists and the full lists, or in a choice between the two (but this would increase the complexity of the site). What do you think? I would love to hear about your experiences of studying the Speedanki lists and then taking the actual test.

Another story is that the JLPT itself is expanding: a new level is scheduled to be added perhaps some time next year between levels 2 and 3. But let’s leave that for later.