Overview
Do you remember the English vocabulary book I don’t like? I mean EIKEN Grade 1 Vocabulary: Derujun Pass-Tan…
Yeah, let’s talk about this one. While recalling my Pre-1 days, today I’m holding a tournament with the Grade 1 version.
What did I mean by “I don’t like it” again?
- From the 4th Edition to the 5th Edition, it was changed in a bad way (the difficulty dropped a lot)
- The bundled mp3 files are hard to use
- Compared to the excellent vocabulary book Distinction 2000, I don’t feel much passion from the creators
That said… I strongly realized during my Pre-1 preparation that, as an EIKEN strategy, this book has great time performance. So for Grade 1 as well, I still chose Derujun Pass-Tan. However, learning from the mistake of the 5th Edition, I made sure to buy the 4th Edition properly from the BOOK OFF online shop.
This is a screenshot from one year ago. It’s hard to tell the difference, but the one at the top of the image is the 4th Edition.
The “Which Ones Haven’t I Learned?” Tournament
For several months, I had been memorizing the 4th Edition, so I held a tournament to check how much I actually remembered.
Over four days, I went through all sections — “Frequency A,” “Frequency B,” “Frequency C,” and the “Idioms Section” — one per day, and wrote down the words I didn’t understand.
- Frequency A: 50 / 700 ≒ 7%
- Frequency B: 70 / 700 ≒ 10%
- Frequency C: 60 / 700 ≒ 9%
- Idioms Section: 11 / 300 ≒ 4%
On average, about 8% were words I hadn’t learned. That 8% are the winners of the “Which Ones Haven’t I Learned?” Tournament. Congratulations. And once I memorize the words I wrote down here, I’ll be a Derujun Pass-Tan master! (…that is the purpose of this tournament.)
Impressions
I input the contents of Derujun Pass-Tan into the Anki app and memorize them there. It turns out that I had accidentally failed to input part of “Frequency B,” so I hadn’t learned that entire chunk at all. That’s why the number of winners in B is a bit higher. Just realizing this already made the tournament worthwhile.
By the way, the Pre-1 Derujun Pass-Tan contains 1,900 words, while the Grade 1 version has 2,400. With 500 more words, I was overwhelmed at first, and it was tough. On top of that, the difficulty is such that almost every page contains words I had never seen or heard before.
Still, for Grade 1, the non-vocabulary sections are so difficult that memorizing words remains the most relaxing part of my study time.
