I’m supposed to be at the “Pleasant” level but damn, this level is kicking my ass. Can’t even imagine what the upper levels must be. I use the provided mnemonics as much as possible and
I’m reaching that nebulous point where I forgot a lot of them but can still recall the readings and meanings. The problem is that sometimes I run into a word where I KNOW the kanji in isolation but seeing them side-by-side in a word for some reason tells my brain that I don’t know them and then when I try to recall the readings using the mnemonics, I fail (because I’ve forgotten them).
I wonder if people who use the mnemonics, forget them, and if so, when do they forget them? For me it’s looking like 4-5 levels later. I can’t even imagine remembering the mnemonics for everything. And I suppose they’re just a tool that will eventually fade away but I wasn’t expecting it to happen this quickly. For reference, I’ve been doing WK daily since I started without a single day off, but not always doing the 15 suggested lessons. I’d say I did the 15 lessons at least 95% of the days.
Not harder IMO, as far as I’m concerned the first few levels were the hardest because you’re learning something completely new. The more kanji you know, the more you can draw connections between them which makes them easier to learn.
That’s normal. Because WaniKani is kanji first, it takes a bit longer to see words as words and not just a collection of kanji. That will change when you start actually reading real Japanese, but at first it’s going to be difficult. Don’t be too hard on yourself, that’s part of the process.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. As you mention it’s just a temporary crutch to memorize readings/meanings, eventually you’ll stop relying on them completely. If you find that the mnemonics won’t stick and you also don’t remember the reading/meaning, try coming up with your own instead.
Personally I would advise trying to draw connection between kanji instead if you can. For instance in your current level you have 鳥 and WaniKani wants to use the “Mrs. Chou” mnemonic, but you could also link it to 町 or 長 that you’ve already learned instead and which have the same (on) readings. A long bird? A bird on a long street? Something like that. This way you effectively strengthen several kanji at once.
Your pace looks fine, probably even on the fast side. There’s a “critical mass” aspect to language learning early on, eventually things will start clicking in place. All of that stuff was (probably) completely alien to you 3 months ago, Japanese natives take well over a decade of schooling and constant immersion to get the hang of it. You need to keep grinding and not doubt yourself too much, you’re not doing anything wrong, it just takes a lot of time for all those weird scribbles and sounds to slot themselves in your brain.
Congratulations on your near level-up! I agree with the above poster—the workload increased the further I got, but it became easier the more kanji I learned. There are pronunciation patterns that my brain has picked up on, and now that I have experience with 1000 kanji, new ones are much faster to pick up. I would definitely say it was harder when I had little experience.
To be honest, I don’t have a lot of free time now, so I have gotten kind of ‘lazy’ with my lessons in that I breeze through them in lightning speed (maybe a minute per item). What’s cool is at this point, I’m actually able to pick up and retain (most) of them, wayyy faster than when I first started.
It’s pretty cool how mass exposure makes the game a little easier! So hang in there!
I’ll add just few notes to already mentioned things:
expect to forget things, you will eventually get them by repeating them using SRS
mnemonics are just a crutch, you are expected to forget them eventually
make your own mnemonics if the default doesn’t work
sometimes you hit the wall and need to slow down and take less lessons, so be prepared for it; I remember I hit two walls on the way up, one was around level 11-14 and another one was at level 22
don’t try to overoptimize, just do what you have time for and be flexible; SRS works better when it is not forced
BTW why do you take 12 days to pass a level with 15 lessons per day? 15 lessons equals to about 8-9 days per level. Maybe it is because of item ordering. I don’t use the default, so I don’t know what lessons it gives you, but I always click on “Advanced” and pick my own lessons. I am prioritizing radicals and kanji as long as vocabulary doesn’t fall behind too much, than I need to focus on that instead.
Thanks everyone for your replies. It’s really encouraging to read about the different aspects that I hadn’t considered, like the more exposure you get the easier it will get as the language becomes more familiar, as opposed to being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of stuff to learn.
I took the JLPT N5 ten years ago and I scraped the bare, bare, baaaaaare minimum passing grade. It was almost a miracle that I passed! After that, life got in the way and I moved to another country (twice) so I stopped everything due to lack of time and my head decided that Japanese was dead weight so it decided to prune it from memory.
As I’m doing WaniKani some things are starting to pop back up and I noticed that some words are extremely familiar but I can’t remember what they meant. I’m also complementing my studies with the Genki and Minna No Nihongo books, as well as the Todaii app, so that I don’t do vocab in a vacuum. I’m doing this a lot less than I would like to, but even at level 6 I notice that I can read soooooo much that I’m super proud of being able to do that even though I might not quite grasp the whole meaning just yet.
Your pace looks fine, probably even on the fast side.
Interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed I was going fast at all. I even thought I was going slower than average (statistic I pulled out of the hat probably due to impostor syndrome!). But I’m thinking of slowing down just a little bit as I don’t know how long I can keep this pace for. At the end of the day, I’m doing this as a hobby and have no goal in mind other than to enjoy the ride and maybe eventually re-attempt the JLPT levels.
BTW why do you take 12 days to pass a level with 15 lessons per day? 15 lessons equals to about 8-9 days per level. Maybe it is because of item ordering.
Maybe it’s because I don’t do all the reviews consistently. Some days I can only do one set of reviews. Ironically, I was laid off last week (along with 16% of the company ) so now I have a lot more time to keep up with the reviews. On the other hand, my accuracy has taken a massive hit because my head is someplace else now. Still, doing reviews is something that relaxes me so I plod on.
I never configured anything differently from the default WaniKani config (other than a couple user scripts). I just do as many lessons as I can out of the 15 per day, and as many reviews as I can from the ones available.
I would consider anything faster than 2week/level to be quite fast. The max possible speed is one week/level and, having done that for a good chunk of WaniKani myself, it’s really brutal. You basically have to organize your life around of WaniKani and dedicate a huge amount of time to doing reviews as soon as they become available. I don’t regret doing it, but also I wouldn’t really recommend it.
Seconding this, I did the about 7-9 days per level for most of the time on wanikani and the daily workload gets to be a lot. Exacerbated by the fact that going faster generally means getting more things wrong, and lower accuracy snowballs into more daily reviews. Level after level, gets exhausting.
Mnemonics can get real weird sometimes.
The one I just had said something about a “car egg that will hatch into a baby car”.
For some people that weirdness will make the mnemonics stick in their brains. for me personally it works the opposite way.
For me mnemonics work better if they are logical or when they use existing words that sound like the japanese translation, instead of made-up words like: “tamots(たも), that’s slang for delish tomatoes”
If I come by a weird mnemonics I usually just ignore/skip it, and let the SRS machine do it’s work instead.
Don’t worry about it, if words get hard to learn.
Make some mistakes, it will only add to your learning process. Take your time. Learning a language is not a race.
It might get harder going forward, but it also gets easier. Because you will recognise patterns. And some older kanji’s will be re-used or combined with new ones.
This really resonates with me. Whenever I make a mistake, my brain goes, “Oh no, this is going to set me back—who knows how many days?” But the truth is, I don’t mind how long it takes me to learn the whole program. I might not even go through all 60 levels—and that’s totally fine. Right now, it’s a great challenge, and I’m enjoying figuring out if it’s something I want to stick with.
Looking at the big picture, I’ve only been doing this for 69 days, and I’ve already picked up more words than I ever imagined I could. That still amazes me!
See how many items are not where they are supposed to be? I haven’t even burned 90% of level 2 and I am learning 25 already and I get burn reviews for level 19.
As long as there are available lessons, and reviews don’t pile up too much, failed review does not set me back in any noticable way.
In my opinion the levels will get easier. Or rather it’ll be like a bell curve where it gets harder and then easier.
And this has to do with various factors but here are the most important two factors (in my opinion)
1: A lot of retention will depend on practice outside of WK. The more you read books, play games, etc.. in Japanese, the more you’ll encounter those words/kanji and remember them. However, at the beginning, it’s hard to consume large amounts of such content. It’s exhausting, and can even be disappointing. But as you progress it gets easier and thus your brain gets more real practice. This creates a feedback loop where WK reinforces the material, and the material reinforces WK.
If you’re not at a stage where you’re trying to read yet, try to at least read the sample sentences (or list of words, for kanji cards) if you get it wrong.
2: As you progress you develop strategies that fit your learning needs. For example, I don’t read the mnemonics at all unless I realize I’ve failed something multiple times. That gives me less mnemonics to remember, but it means I have more things to just know without mnemonics. This fits me at the current stage of my Japanese learning journey. I also make tons of synonyms for readings, manually pick out lessons, and various other things to fit my needs.
Try to reflect regularly on what’s working and what’s not and adjust accordingly. I try to reflect at least once a month.
Best of luck and remember: the most important thing is to just keep trying.
I think the best thing you can do on this journey is change the view of getting something wrong. It isn’t a setback or bad thing. Its simply a thing you have a chance to get better at. Learning a language (or really anything) is a messy process. You’ll have things that just slide right off your brain sometimes. You’ll have things that click instantly cause of a connection you made to a silly joke. Let yourself go on that journey, and enjoy the time you spend walking it.
Some of my best advice I can give you is really keep in mind that you are not only learning the language but also learning how you best learn the language. You’re gonna get a better feel of what works and what doesn’t work for you. If you notice you’re getting a particular item wrong a lot it can be useful to sitdown and ask yourself why that item is getting you specifically.
For example, I know I move too quickly sometimes and don’t try to see if the 牛 has a head or not. Therefore I often mix up 牛 and 午. And that kind bleeds into a lot of my kanji where I need to let myself slowdown a bit and really observe the shape of the Kanji otherwise my overeager pattern recognizing brains goes “80% match, it must be this!”
I still make this mistake every so often, and I made it consistently for like a month and a half before I actually got myself into the more mindful habit of slowing down. And that’s just part of the process, you’ll make the same mistake again and again but remember making that mistake and noticing it each time is learning each time. Its all part of the process and it’ll click eventually, I promise
I found level 6 hard too! I think the volume per level ramps up significantly from 1/2/3 to 4/5/6. I was also travelling with work at the time so I think my brain was just overflowing. I’ve found that it settles down after that, in case it helps (I’m going a bit slower than you though). You get used to the routine. Also the total volume does seem to be quite variable level-to-level, so even keeping fairly consistent the timing seems to change a lot for me.
Mnemonics seem to be a constant process of not needing them any more, then forgetting the kanji, reminding myself of the mnemonic and then forgetting it again. Somewhere in that process your brain seems to just get comfortable making the jump from kanji → meaning/reading. I like the speed of having Wanikani’s ready-made ones, and only occasionally make my own if they really don’t make sense to me (or if I’ve seen the word lots elsewhere already).
I’m coming to the end of level 6 myself, 23/27 kanji passed. And I’ve also found the difficulty ramping up. Mostly its things from the first couple of levels tripping me up when they come back - and also some of the newer vocab words.
I’ve found each of the last 3 levels though, I get to about this point - and suddenly it all feels a bit overwhelming. Then a couple of days later, it all settles down again, I remember the new vocab and start pushing for the next level.
Though if my time to complete keeps getting longer per level like this, I’ll be at over 100 days per level before long!
I read all the replies here, and today I did my last batch of level 6 lessons (scheduled to level up to 7 tomorrow). I botched a few of my daily reviews too, but with a smile on my face. “Let the SRS do it’s thing” is my new mantra. The sensation was quite liberating. Thank y’all!
) so now I have a lot more time to keep up with the reviews. On the other hand, my accuracy has taken a massive hit because my head is someplace else now. Still, doing reviews is something that relaxes me so I plod on.
