“I had a bad habit of knowing what a word meant, but had forgotten the reading (especially for words with single kanjis), so, no matter how much I read, that would not get better.”
That is me in a nutshell 
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If you decide to continue with WaniKani, take a look at KaniWani and KameSame. You unlock lessons for them based on your progress on WK. I feel like because they show the English rather than the Kanji, they’re more useful for learning the vocabulary. You no longer get the okurigana for free, for example.
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@nobleguy: Here my 2 cents
- I use WaniKani to learn Kanji. I like the story method because I used stories already for many years to remember phone numbers and lap times when running.
- I use a couple of scripts to be able to go through a level in about 8 days. I’m at level 6 now.
- Vocabs are also nice but sometimes I cheat when I get the readings slightly wrong. OTOH I think they are great to get a feeling for some funny readings. I don’t have a bad conscience with cheating because for me counts learning kanji.
- I’m ready to pay my monthly fee because for me paying means motivation to learn, the limitation to about 8 days a level with it’s more or less fixed number of new kanji stops me from perhaps overdoing it with the consequence of being burned out and stopping and last but not least I don’t have to create the stories and radicals (Even if I sometimes already create stories which fit me better).
- That said I’m not sure whether WaniKani is the most efficient tool for somebody who already knows a lot of kanji. Personally I think I will definitely use WaniKani to level 10. Probably also to level 20. Later I plan to switch more to Anki with a note type I defined which mimics the main features (IMHO) of WaniKani and doesn’t slow me down anymore.
- And perhaps in a couple of years I will be able to read some manga and light novels. A man can dream I already have some tankobons on my bookshelf from visits to Japan during the last couple of years.
So that’s just my personal journey, YMMV.
Also, I don’t think anyone in the thread hit on this yet, but the radicals in WK are a little strange. Strange, not just in the naming, but they also don’t really match up well to standard radicals. They are really only useful if you learn the kanji according to WK’s method, so if you already know the kanji OK, then I don’t think learning WK’s radicals will be of much use to you. I won’t say you shouldn’t use WK, but this would be one less reason for you to do it.
things will speed up eventually, the first few levels are slow and meant to help acclimate you.
I feel you on that 100% though, it gets boring once you’ve learned the first few.
Hang in there
Yeah…you’ve hit my main reason for wondering if it’s for me - I just saw another example of 弓 - “spring”, when I know it really means “bow, archery” and I’ve learned the kanji with 弓 using stories around “bow” and “archery”.
Someone above mentioned iKnow! which I’ve had a look at today - this looks like it’s centred more on vocab and it has audio with the example sentences (listening is a very weak point for me) so I think I’m going to go with that for a month and see how I go.
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You can give me the list of all kanji that you already know, and then I’ll do the reviews of those kanji for you so you never have to see them again. You only have to do reviews of kanji you don’t know yet. For each reviewed item per review session you pay me 100 Yen. Deal?
Actually, even that way, they did help me remember how to write kanji. When I was preparing for the kanken 5, I had trouble remembering how to write 段 for instance. Looking at it, I thought “ok, comb ikea”, and that was it, I could suddenly write it.
As long as you remember that the “radicals” aren’t real radicals, I feel like they do have a use. The names aren’t important, though, but I add no problem remembering them except when the radical is a legitimate kanji. In that case, I just added the “real” meaning.
The names of the radicals aren’t too important IMO, their appearance is. As long as you can remember
that there’s a radical that looks like 弓, you can call it whatever you want.
If you get a wrong answer because you forgot to add your own meaning to the synonyms, just add it during the review, I think WK ignores your answer if you mess around with the user synonyms.
No, it only pretends to do so. I don’t know what is the intended behavior (not asking again OR ignoring the initial wrong answer) but it’s doing neither. (It asks again, tells you that the SRS level increased, but the answer is still counted wrong)
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