Word of the day

If you’ve been following my twitter account, you may have noticed that I’ve been posting a new word along with an example sentence and a link to the source material every day for the past few weeks. I wanted to see if I could keep up with it before I blogged about it. So far, it’s been really easy to take a few minutes out of the day to pick a word, search for something using that word, and post something on twitter every day.

What I haven’t mention yet is that each word I pick is a word I just learned personally. Usually, I pick a word from my dictionary history, which has things I looked up recently while reading books or listening to podcasts and then search around for something online that uses that word. It’s actually more for myself than anything as it allows me to review a word I just learned in a different context. At first, it annoyed me that I couldn’t just add a bunch and schedule them to appear later on twitter. But it’s actually helping me to memorize the word because it may be a few days after I learned it that I actually post it. As fans of SRS know, it’s best to not think about a word for a while before conjuring it up again.

If you’d like to try your own WOTD on twitter, post a link to your account in the comments so I can follow you. Don’t just post the word though (which is same as looking it up in the dictionary). Try to find a sentence that uses the word and post a link to the source.

7 thoughts on “Word of the day

  1. I think it’s a good idea I just a beef with the level of difficulty.

    Like take this for an example the one you posted.
    欣喜雀躍 【きんきじゃくやく】 (n,vs) jump up for joy;

    First of all, personally I’ve never seen this and i’ve been pretty immeresed if i do say so myself. . Secondly, I feel like if you need to learn this word with the english definition you shouldn’t even be learning it. I don’t know how much you agree with the ajatt guy but he was saying oh I just learn 1000 words and switch to monoligual… or at lesat that’s his suggestion. It makes complete sense to me because looking up japanese words in english is going to hold you back after a certain point. It’s important to make that transition. I’m guessing… that you’re at the monoligual dictionary state since you know so much japanese with the grammar guide and blogs and everything.

    It’s just if you’re going to put up words for people to learn…. if it’s beyond really common/useful you should put the japanese definition and let the people who can read the definition learn it/notice it/etc. The people who can’t read the japanese definition should be learning other common useful words.

    Just sayin’

    • Thanks for your comment. As I mentioned, this is really something I’m doing more for myself with words I’m learning. In terms of difficultly, I’d like to believe that I’ve learned most of the more common words already. I’m more interested in seeing other people post their WOTD. As for going monolingual, personally, I use both J->E and J->J dictionaries and I don’t feel like reading English definitions is holding me back. I tend to not don’t dwell too much on the exact wording of the definition anyway and instead try to get a “feel” for the word based on the context that I’m reading it in.

  2. This is a good idea, I think I’m going to give it a go! I like the idea of being exposed to small digestible snippets and also it provides a record for myself of words I’ve looked up and should be somewhat familiar with.
    My account is @jBalaam
    Thanks for the tip!

    • It’s been working for me. I still remember words like あるまじき、大理石、野次馬、妬ましい、 etc. etc.. I think the time spent in looking for other links that use the word helps. For instance, I remember watching a bunch of videos of politicians apologizing for their あるまじき行為. I don’t even remember where I first saw the word.

      I just wish twitter had a way to search your tweets. Seem like pretty basic functionality.

  3. This is an excellent tip! I’m going to try it out as well. This will be a great new way to retain vocabulary as well as (potentially) help other learners out there.

    My twitter account is @ksaiydt

    P.S. I’ve always been a big fan of the grammar guide. It was my go-to resource when I first started learning Japanese (exactly 2 years ago today ).

  4. Pingback: Updates: Word of the Day | KSaiydT's Room

Comments are closed.