Advice for us low-levels?

I came here to say exactly this, but since someone else already covered it, let me offer an equally useful piece of advice:

Don’t suck at remembering things. :thinking:

Y’all can thank me later.

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OMG THAT’S WHAT I’M MISSING!

GENIUS!

What anime is this from?

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Most of the key points have already been mentioned by now. My only addition to this would be the Anki style script:

It’s great if you’re like me and hate having to manually type out every answer, even long or complex ones. I found my review speed increased immensly from using the Anki script, and it really makes big review piles much less daunting, since I just have to use a couple of keys to reveal the answer and select whether or not I guessed correctly. :slight_smile:

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@rfindley wrote a bunch about the 1x1 being beneficial a while back.

I use it all the time, since it feels very unnatural and counterproductive to me to have to remember a word’s pronunciation and meaning separately from one another.

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Yeah, I’ve found this, too. I can blast through reviews much more quickly in 1x1 mode, since my mind naturally remembers both the meaning and reading at pretty much the same time, so I find the reading is already sort of queued up and ready by the time I’ve answered the meaning, etc. Which is much better than having that momentary pause before both the reading and meaning that I get when they are separated between a load of unrelated kanji and vocab. :slight_smile:

Actually, before I started using the 1x1 mode, I had two problems.

  1. I tend to recognise the meaning of kanji more easily than the reading, so when I was asked for the meaning I’d just write it and not bother with trying to pronounce it. This is not what I want my reaction to be when I read Japanese (and to be fair, I sometimes have to force myself not to do this when reading Japanese texts in general).

  2. If I, when asked for, say, the meaning, instead think of the reading, I kind of feel like “Oh no, this isn’t what I need to think about now, I’ll be asked about this later” and that I have to forget it.

So for those two reasons it certainly helps me a lot.

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Party. Bonus.

don’t fall off the horse and take a long break. I took a year break. I would be level 40 something at least if if didn’t do that. on top of that I had to do like 2000 reviews when I came back

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1- Prioritize radicals and Kanji on lessons to level up (You can use the Ultimate Reorder script for this), but don’t neglet the vocabulary because they’re one of the most important aspects of the language, you can spread out vocabulary lessons to make it lighter on yourself.
2- Expand your vocabulary beyond WK because it sadly doesn’t teach you enough in my opinion, Anki is the perfect tool for this and I’d recommend you have 3 decks, one for the JLPT, one for the core 10k sentences, and a personal deck with vocabs you might find that are not in the previous 2 decks or WK.
3- Study grammar, even right now if possible, grammar is the most important part of the Japanese language, it’s also the hardest to get a grasp on but at the same time it takes the least time to figure it out.
4- Read as soon as you feel confident, all the SRS in the world won’t stick if you don’t expose yourself to the language constantly, I’d say around level 30-35 is a good time to start, it doesn’t matter if you find vocabulary that you don’t understand while reading, mark it and leave it to study it later the point is that you at least understand what you read on a surface level for practice.
5- Clench real hard.
6- All that I’ve told you sounds like a lot of work (and it is), but you can take it at your own pace and remember that it is all worth it, remember everytime you feel the satisfaction of looking at those lines of text and seeing them no longer as something alien and nonsensical, but as something coherent, to me just these moments make it all worth it.

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Honestly, generalizing that seems rather strange to me.
If you’re doing something fulltime (Working, Studying, …) and studying Japanese is just smthg on the side, going 8 days per level is already alot. If you’re actually studying Japanese and not just Kanji, you’ll also have to work through Grammar, practice speaking, listening and reading (aka actually use what youre memorizing).

WaniKani isn’t a race. Completing WaniKani doesnt make you a Japanese-Language-God. Do it as fast as it suits your goals.

Having said that, if you have the free time, go for the 7 days per level.
Just saying you can’t generalize such things.

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I was wondering the same thing (what is a leech) :slight_smile:

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I appreciate your comments. Taking it slow is my only option. I have a full-time job, a wife, 2 kids (soon to be 4 :sweat_smile:), and a house and yard to keep up. I do reviews 3 times a day - in the morning before I leave for work, on my lunch break, then before I go to bed. It is working for me so far, although I do wish I could speed up a bit more.

I spent the 90’s and 2000’s trying to speed-learn languages (5 of them, Japanese included), and it never worked. So, after all that time, slow and steady is my current philosophy.

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Sounds like you have a lot on your plate :)) I’m just lazy and relaxed, so I prefer going slow. That and speed isn’t always the best thing when it comes to learning (as you mention). What matters most is that you actually remember the kanji. That’s why I tend to prefer literally throwing myself at the reviews until the kanji sticks without mnemonics, no reordering (except maybe for radicals), no ignoring, even if I typoed. If your accuracy is high enough, making several mistakes and typoes isn’t going to destroy your review pile. I always tell myself if I made a mistake from reading too fast it’s because I didn’t know the kanji well enough.

And again, I’ll stress putting your learning to work. That’s where you really form the connections to keep the kanji in your mind. Maybe one article on a Japanese news site a day? Once you’re a higher level, of course.

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That’s funny, because I’m the opposite. I always say the reading of a kanji/vocab out loud the second it appears (assuming I know it), regardless of whether it’s asking for the reading or the meaning.

I personally like the readings and meanings being mixed up. I don’t know if that makes me go slower, but I think I learn better this way. Sometimes I only remember the meaning once I remember the reading or vice versa, so having them mixed up forces me to prove that I know one without relying on the other (as much as is possible in a single review session anyway).

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I’m level 8 and I feel like when I try to read something like a book or news article, there’s still A LOT I can’t understand. I know I’m lacking in grammar, so thats part of it as well.
However, I watch a lot of anime in Japanese too and I can pick up a couple words here and there, but by no means could I watch without subtitles. Keep in mind this is with me almost exclusively using WK, though. (I just started Genki, but I’m only on chapter 2.) So someone who is learning from multiple sources or had prior knowledge might think differently.

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Come join my​ Genki thread…!

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@cliff900 @KSamo A leech is an item that hangs around in your review pile for months or even years. I have some items I’ve seen literally a hundred times. For whatever reason they just don’t sink in. If you let them build up, they can really slow you down. The problem is, if they keep appearing in the middle of a pile of 100 reviews, you never focus on them. That’s why it’s good to identify them and try to deal with them.

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