After 100 days, I’ve made it through 12 levels! I started learning Japanese about 4 and a half months ago and recently have ramped up my time spent on learning; I keep at it on BunPro, I do my WaniKani reviews and lessons as soon as I can (0/0 streak anyone?), and I take more new cards on the Core 2k/6k deck on Anki now.
A friend recently sent me a video about GeoGuessr that I watched to gauge my listening comprehension, and I found that I actually managed to get the gist of most sentences with the words and grammar points I’ve learned so far. I’ll attach the video below, for anyone interested in assessing themselves. Even if it’s somewhat simple, it’s a great confidence booster to know that I’m actually making some progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9cBgOj9lW4
A question for more advanced learners: When did you start immersing, and with what? I’d like to start immersing in a couple months (around ~lv 20 on WaniKani) with manga of the fantasy genre and some anime, since I feel as if that would keep me interested as I learn.
It’s basically never too early to start. Personally, I started with the articles on Hirogaru and News Web Easy, and moved on to books from the Beginner Book Club around level 30. This thread also has lots of recommendations.
Nice! I wouldn’t wait to start immersing, if you want to you should do it now. I am once again shilling Japanese dictionary and spaced repetition system – jpdb - it’s an excellent resource for both learning and finding native media that’s around your level.
I started much later. I think almost everyone would encourage you to immerse sooner than later, but it can be really hard finding material you are into at you’re level unless you are completely open to things that aren’t in your wheelhouse.
Fantasy wise you’d need to probably go slowly and just mine every new word, or look at fantasy books aimed at young children (sorry, Harry Potter/LotR is out of that realm). I think the best thing is to kind of gauge your “language age” and work around that. When I was just starting, I watched a lot of しろくまカフェ which is oriented towards kids learning new words.
I had to look around for a bit, but I found the link to the core 2k/6k deck I use: https://djtguide.neocities.org/anki.html
The download link is under Step 2. I often hear about Anki decks that are better for other people, but this is what I’m using regardless.
Thanks for the advice, when I start immersion I’ll be mining a lot of vocabulary. I’m not exactly interested in texts geared towards children, so I’m probably going to encounter difficulties in reading what I want but I still think I’d be way better off then than I am now.
Another piece of advice I would give is while its good to try to read stuff you’re interested, things too high above your level will burn you out faster and every time you attempt reading its gonna feel like a chore more than a thing you enjoy doing. It’s happened to me many times.
On the other side it could be the case there is a steep learning curb but once you get the regular vocab down it might become a breeze. Depends on the reading you choose.
That is probably why. The retention goes down the toilet once you miss the first three review cycles, especially if you miss the first two. Also add leeches to that and it’s like torture.
I’ve been trying to do it twice a day recently. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. If the app notified me when it was ready to review I might try to pick up the pace a bit during December.
Congratulations on your progress! This might be a bit of a silly question, but I’ve seen several people post statistics like this, and I was wondering if this is available through wanikani or if you use a particular plugin. Thanks, and congrats again! It’s stories like this that encourage me to keep going…
It depends a bit on how you use Wanikani. I make a lot fewer mistakes when I do an extra “Recent Lessons” Study each day. I also noticed that I make a lot more mistakes when I do lessons in the evening and then get the new items again the next morning. Additionally if I have to do my evening reviews really late my accuracy also suffers because I’m already tired. Last but not least I found that my Accuracy is an surprisingly good measure for my mental state. It recently really crashed when I was under a lot of stress. A lot of this is kinda obvious but still worth considering .All in all my Accuracy for example is somewhat lower than most that I see posted on the forums but with ~90% I still consider it more than adequate:
I wouldn’t stress out about accuracy too much, you’re learning new things after all, mistakes are to be expected. On the other Hand if you feel your accuracy is very low it can’t hurt to think about whether you can change your learning routine to improve it.
