Inspired by my old buddy @trunklayer, I’m starting a study log.
I made my most rapid progress in Japanese back in 2014-16 while immersed in the original forum at Wanikani, and I think there’s really something to be said for social interaction as a boost to motivation. Life has moved on, the population here is different, but I’ve popped in from time to time over the past 10 or so years to keep up on things and people. Crazy to think I was 29 when I started this journey and am now 41.
I’ve managed to maintain high beginner/low intermediate despite the haphazard manner of study over the past 10 years, which honestly is testament to how effective the SRS method and WK’s system are.
For now, I want to re-establish a baseline. So I reset WK a couple of weeks ago. As I did back in 2014, I do all my lessons when I unlock them, which is made easier by the fact that I still remember many of the words and kanji. I also plan to read NHK Easy News, watanoc, Easy Asahi Shimbun, and maybe Matcha daily, all via the Migaku app. And I’ll do Migaku reviews and kanji writing in Anki as well. Oh and some Japanese listening on YouTube, though not necessarily daily.
Comments: Today will probably be a light day because it’s my daughter’s birthday. Also had some bad news yesterday so motivation for extra steps is hard to find.
Comments: With all the excitement of the party yesterday, I forgot to do my Wanikani reviews. But I got up early and knocked them out. Funny story: We went trick or treating yesterday and I dressed and Gandalf. I couldn’t go a street without someone complimenting my outfit. Two grown men even took their picture with me lol.
There are still some old heads still patrolling the forums. I do miss those OG Wanikani forum days I have to say. Especially watching Moguri be the first to reach level 50.
Wow back after ten years according to the crabigator. Join us and let’s all finally hit level 60. And pop on over to my Retro Wanikani Thread - I created it for the old timers to hang out and grumble. How have you been?
Comments: I made an interesting discovery today while doing reviews on Migaku. I’m having a great deal of trouble remembering kanji readings for words containing less frequent and non-Joyo kanji that I haven’t learned via Wanikani’s structured approach. In the WK method, we learn radicals > kanji > vocabulary, and by the time we get to vocabulary it feels like a breeze to remember the vocabulary meaning because we can deduce it to some degree from the kanji. But when learning words “raw” (from the wild), the often new kanji feel incomprehensible.
And so I’m going to have to adjust my study method. There’s no good reason to brute force it like that. Given that I want to be able to understand spoken Japanese rather than simply read Japanese, I think it would be better to adjust to audio cards and focus on audio comprehension, at least for my study outside WK. Once I complete WK, I will be in a much stronger place to consider expanding my reading comprehension and can perhaps make use of Anki to learn to write additional kanji as I’m using it to learn to write the Joyo kanji set.
Oh cool, I’ll check out the retro thread. Yeah I haven’t been doing reviews on Wanikani for a long time. I got a bit nostalgic and decided to hop on again. I’m probably not going to try and level up again though, I’m more of the mind that I’d like to level up my listening comprehension and speaking so just generally immersing and after coming back from Japan recently and I’ll probably jump on italki.
I reached a conclusion of wanting to acquire basic speaking and production skills as well, even if I am no longer in Japan. Making the language my own, my life. (Or maybe that’s just too deep in AJATT.)
Not sure if WK is the best platform to complete learning spoken Japanese. Spoken Japanese might be completed from a different platform (YouTube playlist? Audiovisual course?), while WK remains unfinished.
That stronger place might be somewhere far before completing WK. WK is just yet another support material before then.
Planning too far in the future is difficult, anyway.
I reached a conclusion of wanting to acquire basic speaking and production skills as well, even if I am no longer in Japan. Making the language my own, my life. (Or maybe that’s just too deep in AJATT.)
I agree with the “life” dimension to it. I think my continued interest, despite the ups and downs and restarts, speaks pretty clearly that it has a significant meaning to me. I actually tried AJATT and think there’s a lot of value to it, but I simply have so many other interests that I had to adopt a more gradual method.
Not sure if WK is the best platform to complete learning spoken Japanese. Spoken Japanese might be completed from a different platform (YouTube playlist? Audiovisual course?), while WK remains unfinished.
That stronger place might be somewhere far before completing WK. WK is just yet another support material before then.
I mustn’t have been clear in what I said - I don’t think WK is a source for spoken Japanese, but only for furthering my reading comprehension goal. For that, I’ve found it indispensable. The old wkstats site conveniently lists additional common kanji that are missing and so once I’ve completed WK I’ll create an Anki deck for those, generally following the WK model of kanji > vocabulary.
For spoken Japanese, I’m going to generally follow the immersion method of watching and listening extensively, then gradually moving to output. I’m going to be doing that concurrently with WK, starting again with quite simple material.
Planning too far in the future is difficult, anyway.
Absolutely. The more humble approach I have now with languages seems to be paying off - I’ve learned the hard way that overly developed study plans simply don’t and can’t work for me. I’m far more comfortable following my interests now.
For audio, I have a set of YouTube channels I quite like at the moment.
Since French is still my primary study subject (I’m reading through Jules Verne daily), I don’t force myself to do the audio at the moment. My goal is to maintain progress on my flashcards for Japanese. But I usually find some time to at least read an article and watch a video. When I watch one of these, I do it via the Migaku app and add any unknown words to my deck. If I happen to know a word already from the years I’ve spent learning Japanese, I simply mark it known.
I’ve tried returning to WK several times over the years and typically I reach somewhere in the 20s before I burn out. It’s always due to two reasons: first, competing interests; second, lack of clear goal for Japanese study. Over the past year, I’ve gone through a very extensive period of personal analysis in many areas of my life, including language study, and this has included grasping what actually motivates me to learn languages in general and each language in particular. For most languages, this has led me to realize I simply want reading fluency, which honestly isn’t that difficult to achieve to intermediate level for most of the ones I’m interested in (I’d like French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and German for sure, which will leverage my intermediate knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek).
So all this to say that I’ve popped in from time to time and seen some of the change. It’s definitely a much bigger crowd than it was back when I was here in '14-16. But despite it all, it feels like coming home in a way and its nice to settle back into the grind, but this time with the clear conviction that I’ll continue it to level 60.
