Balancing vocabulary and grammar learning

Yes, that I completely agree with. WaniKani definitely shouldn’t be the main source of vocab. Not to play the devil’s advocate, but the vocab is there mostly to enforce reading kanji so it’s fairly minimal, only to cover the most common readings and meanings. The SRS checkpoints are also spread in time so much, to my understanding, to maximize long-term retention. But of course, the Burned items will fade from memory if not practiced elsewhere. To go further one has to read in Japanese (books, manga, novels, articles, etc.), right? :slight_smile:

I think that’s a great goal! Novels are a fantastic source of vocabulary. My usual approach to vocab is the following:

  • looking up new words with kanji I know on Jisho.org and picking up the more common/useful ones, possibly covering different readings
  • reading novels

All new vocab goes to Anki and the SRS magic does the review scheduling for me.

If you want to get quick access to books, I recommend this thread: Here, Have a List of Aozora Books by WK Level
You get a list of books, albeit fairly old, sorted by WaniKani level. The first one from the list can be read fairly early on in your WaniKani journey, assuming you know some grammar, but with the help of Deepl and a dictionary, it should be doable :slight_smile: .

I didn’t start learning grammar until I was around level 10 or so. It helps a lot to already know a few kanji when you’re reading example sentences. I started with Japanese From Zero but found it to be too slow so I switched to Genki 1 but I also found that hard to read. I just don’t like reading dry textbooks that much, so now I have resorted to watching Tokini Andy’s videos about Genki 1 on youtube. I feel like he does a really good job of explaining things and I like it a lot more than just reading the book on my own. The videos are all about an hour or so long and I try to watch about half a video every day plus doing WK reviews and 10-20 lessons every day. I usually have about 100 items in apprentice which is the bulk workload. I dont do more than 200 reviews a day, so its pretty managable. Just see how many reviews a day you can manage and then go from there.

Oh, I should also mention that the reason why I’ve chosen Anki over the other SRS options is because even though Anki can be a bit clunky and outdated in comparison to programs like Kitsun, it is free and also very widely used, so there are a lot of resources out there that integrate with it (like Yomichan), and it’s also possible to heavily customize it to get it to do what you need it to do. There’s definitely a learning curve to it, though, which can be a significant downside.

My ultimate goal is to eventually move away from WK and Kaniwani after I’ve burned everything, and I would really like to have all of my SRS reviews in one place as much as possible. I’ve chosen Anki to be that place, because in comparison to other programs, it is both more stable and more flexible.

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That’s a great goal. I also plan to do that. But I won’t wait until all vocabs are burned. Only radical and kanji is enough.

I’ve got great success with sentence cards instead of vocab only like WK did. WK definitely helps with kanji reading, but I’ve noticed I retain more vocab with iKnow than WK as they are in context sentences. So when at an intermediate level, I think you’d better move into sentence cards. Here’s some explanation of why you should use sentence cards. Anki is probably best for intermediate and advanced levels as you can heavily customize it. I use it for immersion, but never like it as I’m bad at customizing it :sweat_smile:

Are you looking to read a specific series to read in Japanese? If so, then invest your time into learning grammar until N3ish and then jump right into the series. You’ll run into all the words you need to know, common or not, and then you can put them into an SRS.

If you’re looking to just pick anything up and read in Japanese, then there’s slightly bad news. Even if you finish WK and get some decent grammar proficiency(assuming you hold off on immersion until then), you’ll still run into some kanji you can’t recognize, and whole lot for vocabulary.

Eventually, you’ll have to immerse yourself into the native language, but no one can tell you when. Considering you have a high tolerance for dictionary look ups with English, I would focus on grammar earlier and get acquainted with tools to help retain vocab/kanji you find while reading.

Personally, WK helps make the language less intimidating and more accessible, though it’s far from the best tool for learning a whole language. It doesn’t stress the nuances of certain kanji/vocab, but that’s why I also invest time into grammar books, monolingual dictionaries, and tutors.

Also, try not to get heavily invested into optimizing language learning. Give a tool a try and stick to it for awhile. If it doesn’t work, then you found out something new about yourself and try a different method. Doing something inefficient is still doing something. Give it your all and you’ll learn Japanese eventually as long as you don’t give up :slightly_smiling_face:

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