You’ve learned your Kana.  Great!  Congratulations!

Let’s learn some Japanese vocabulary and practice reading our kana at the same time!

Core 6k is a popular collection of 6000 Japanese sentences created by iKnow (previously smart.fm), a language learning company in Japan.  Core 6k is made up of the most frequently used Japanese words and basic Japanese grammar.  If you can understand these sentences, you can understand a lot!  The intermediate goal is be able to read and understand all 6000 sentences, but first, we need to learn some vocabulary.  We are going to use the Core 6k Anki deck which contains these sentences along with vocabulary, translations and spoken audio.

If you are just starting out learning Japanese and open this deck for the first time, you might feel a bit overwhelmed.  However I’ll show you how to format the deck to study the first several hundred Japanese vocabulary words by themselves before using them in sentences.  Once you learn about 300-500 words, you should be able to switch to the sentences in step 3.  The anki deck that I’ve suggested is organized so that new cards will have a minimum of new words in each new card.  This allows you to learn in a comprehensible n+1 environment and in the context of real Japanese sentences and real Japanese grammar.

Please view the pages about Setting up Anki to Study 6k Vocabulary and using filtered decks, which outline how I study Core 6k vocabulary using Anki.

I recommend studying Vocabulary at the same time as learning Kanji (step 2b).  I find that I can add a few extra new cards per hour than learning just kanji or just vocabulary separately.  This means that you can learn a little bit more in the same time period – which means faster learning!