Anything that makes you think, “I want to hurry and review those leeches,” can’t be all that bad =D
(Hopefully your next review session isn’t only vocabulary.)
If I can get just two more 100% review sessions for kanji leeches this week, my Apprentice could actually become only vocabulary…
finally hit a kanji!! This actually worked well…though not sure what your intent was with the script but saw something I didn’t know…and was going how do I read that…turns out it’s a level 54 kanji (if I looked up the right one)…not sure if your intent was to show all the WK vocab or not…but a future (if/when you ever get around to it)… an option to limit vocab that’s not unlocked yet (not sure if that’s a good idea or not…but really curious how this plays out as I do these kanji reviews)…
but that awesome part of this is I knew the first two right off (just read them)…and realized the kanji reading straight away and instead of going WTF is this stupid thing… haha … VERY VERY HELPFUL!!! It’s only the first kanji review I’ve had since installing but honestly this is pretty great.
Even if this ends up a failed experiment … (only time will tell)… this is a really great recognition approach so far. But if you end up helping me kill all these freaking leeches that WK ignores…I’ll seriously owe you some beer or something!
This is definitely a limitation of the userscript (at this time?), as it doesn’t look at any user data. If it did, then it could use a different visual style for unknown vocabulary (such as gray text, which then means needing to support dark mode, another thing to learn).
If I added a whole configuration section, then it could be configured whether to show or hide unknown vocabulary.
So, things to learn:
But not this weekend, as I’ll babysitting three rambunctious nephews.
And yeah, 秀 was trouble for me, too. Somehow I burned it, but I kept confusing it with 優, of all things!
It would be kind of awesome if when you finally reached those higher level vocabulary, they felt “familiar” already. But chances are you’ll burn 秀 long before you reach level 54.
My Apprentice leeches have recently been around the 40 to 70 count range. I’m finally occasionally getting a few days in a row with fewer than 100 reviews to do. I’ve even double a couple of kanji lessons! (And just my luck, they’re both kanji with almost zero occurrences within the kind material I’m likely to read…)
As I review my WaniKani kanji with vocabulary at hand, I’m finding these kanji fall into one of three categories:
1) I know this word, and it causes me to remember the kanji’s keyword.
These ones are great, as they contribute to falling leech numbers.
2) I know this word, but I can’t figure what the kanji’s keyword was.
I’m not too worried about about these, so long as I recognize the kanji in words and know the meanings of the words. But it does make it a little more difficult to get the kanji meaning reviews right.
3) I don’t know this word, so no help on the kanji there.
And these I probably need to look up sentences on Tatoeba and make sentence cards in Anki for. (I’ve been on a hiatus from making new Anki cards for about a week now.)
Somehow, may daily reviews on WaniKani are still around the 90 to 140 reviews per day.
With Nintendo’s re-release of Skyward Sword, which allows playing in Japanese on the American release, I wanted to see how easy the text would be for me to follow. I wasn’t able to find a Japanese text dump from the Wii release to analyze, so I settled on some other titles from the Legend of Zelda series to give a rough idea:
This doesn’t take into account all the words I know, and it doesn’t take into account words I know by reading/meaning, but don’t know the kanji. Also, these numbers may include some character and location names that I haven’t put on the ignore list, and thus are artificially deflating the percentages.
That said, I was expecting higher percentages.
The low numbers are discouraging, but I decided to go ahead and get Skyward Sword. I’ve played through it twice before, so I have an idea of what’s going on in case it’s difficult to follow. I started up a new game in Japanese yesterday, and played for a bit.
The result?
So far, pretty good. I don’t have any good workflow for looking up unknown words (due to various reasons), but for the most part I’m following what everyone’s saying.
The fonts are a bit weird (will take time to get used to), but I’m managing. I do wish there was an option to hide/show furigana in real time like the Legend of Zelda titles for the Nintendo DS had, as I notice I don’t even look at the kanji most of the time. Instead, my eyes go straight to the furigana.
Maybe that’s why this guy decided to withhold some furigana from me:
Something…さく…?
Thankfully he was forgiving on the next screen:
It’s a WaniKani level 33 vocabulary anyway, so no worries about not recognizing it. (I’m just glad it wasn’t one of my burned vocabulary…)
I may be doing reduced manga reading (just manga with short chapters) this week, but it will be replaced with a lot of video game reading, so it balances out.
does it though 
You’d think that with the type of game that Legend of Zelda games are, I’d have large amounts of gameplay without dialogue to read.
But not so with Skyward Sword!
All I need to do is have the character ファイ give all of her hints.
In the original release, one of the top complaints about the game was that Fi always interrupted the player to tell them what to do next. In this re-release, her hints are all optional, which appeases the vast majority of players. But I’m actually going to want to have her stop me every other minute to give a monologue. It’s going to be a whole manga volume’s worth of dialogue per dungeon.
(And I already have a lifelong habit of talking to all NPC’s in towns.)
Good luck! This looks really fun. I’ve been meaning to give Skyward Sword another shot sometime, myself. I burnt out kind of early on the motion controls when I tried it back in its original release. Love the series though, can’t wait for BotW2. For some reason I didn’t expect furigana in that game, but I suppose Nintendo wants to keep their games pretty all-ages appropriate, so that’s probably a common thing with them?
I expect most first party Nintendo games have furigana these days. I think the first Zelda game to use furigana was Wind Waker for the GameCube.
I feel like I’ve started to get to know my leech kanji a little better recently. Placebo effect?
I had 識 and 織 come up in reviews today, and I took notice of the primary difference between them. I still fail to remember that 識 is “discerning”, a problem that has plagued me since day one, when I first unlocked it over a year and a half ago. Maybe I need to come up with my own keyword for it? I did see the “thread” part in 織 as the main thing that keyed me in to its keyword. In both cases, I instantly recognized the various vocabulary these kanji are used in (thanks to my userscript).
The main reason I got 診 wrong is because I did the lesson a few days ago, and new kanji typically take me two or three weeks to get to know them well enough to get them to/past Guru 1. It’s only been a few days, so this one’s having trouble getting to Apprentice 3 still. I am using the mnemonic, but fail when I get to “Who was it that says what about a hat and hair?” It doesn’t help that I keep thinking the reading is しゅう when it’s actually しん, so I end up thinking, “Was this one settle in (就) or populace (衆)?” I think I’m making some really bad associations here, and I wonder if I should go pre-learn some of 診’s vocabulary to see if that helps any.
I stopped using my “auto-pass Apprentice leeches” script at the same time I started using my “show vocabulary for kanji during reviews” userscript. Since then, my Apprentice has been going down faster, and it has been staying down better. Still not quite as low as I’d like it to be, but it’s getting there!
I want to keep my overall Guru at 346 or below, but that takes a little longer to get numbers to shift than Apprentice.
so many of the same leeches!!! 
h8 that stupid discerning one also
Well, now we have to sit down and look over 識 a bit together here.
WaniKani gives it the keyword discerning, but also accepts discriminating and know.
The kanji is taught at level 17, and is used in the following vocabulary on WaniKani:
| Vocabulary | Reading | Meaning | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 意識 | いしき | Awareness | 17 |
| 常識 | じょうしき | Common Sense | 17 |
| 知識 | ちしき | Knowledge | 17 |
| 無意識 | むいしき | Unconsciousness | 19 |
| 潜在意識 | せんざいいしき | Subconscious | 41 |
Doing a text analysis on the type of material I’m likely to read, here are the words that come up, their frequencies (higher number = more frequent), and a translation:
| Vocabulary | Reading | Meaning | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| 意識 | いしき | consciousness; awareness | 51 |
| 知識 | ちしき | knowledge; information | 21 |
| 常識 | じょうしき | common sense | 15 |
| 認識 | にんしき | recognition; perception | 8 |
| 無意識 | むいしき | unconsciousness | 7 |
| 非常識 | ひじょうしき | lack of common sense | 5 |
| 標識 | ひょうしき | sign; mark | 2 |
| 博識 | はくしき | extensive knowledge | 1 |
My understanding is that the rightmost kanji gives the main meaning, and any kanji to the left are modifiers. In every case, 識 is the rightmost kanji. Let’s merge these two lists together, and look at the kanji. I’ll look at only vocabulary with two kanji.
|Vocabulary|Reading|Left Kanji Keyword|Notes|
|–|–|–|–|–|–|
|博識|はくしき|Exhibition|exhibited 識 = extensive knowledge|
|常識|じょうしき|Normal|normal 識 = common sense|
|意識|いしき|Idea|idea 識 = awareness; consciousness
(mind 識/thought 識)|
|標識|ひょうしき|Signpost|signpost 識 = sign; mark|
|知識|ちしき|Know|knowing 識 = knowledge; information|
|認識|にんしき|Recognize|recognition 認 = recognition; perception|
I can definitely see where discernment comes into play, but I also like the know optional keyword.
Heisig in Remembering the Kanji goes with discriminating, as in discriminating intellect. I actually think discerning is an improvement on that one. (Note that I’m not being negative toward WaniKani’s keyword. Not every keyword will work for everyone.)
The Learner’s Kanji Dictionary goes with know and discriminate for meanings.
The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course goes with discriminate/discern and knowledge/learning for meaning. It says to associate discriminate and knowledge via the keyword discernment.
And finally, we have The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji. (Have I mentioned yet that WaniKani was the first and only method for learning kanji that actually works for me?) This book goes with knowledge.
In the end, after pulling together all of these resources, and looking over the information contained within, my determination is that the best course of action is to give 識 the keyword shiki.
Not much out of the ordinary going on lately (aside from having paused playing Skyward Sword for the past week to focus a but more on Anki; should be getting back to Link and Zelda this weekend.)
I am satisfied with my leech progress lately:
Apprentice has unfortunately gone up, including some lessons from about a week ago that haven’t been able to get to Guru yet. I’ve added some non-WK vocabulary for them to Anki, but it’s too soon to say if that’s helping any.
I looked at some of my posts on leeches from November, and saw some kanji that I actually just recently started to get past Apprentice and even beyond Guru 1, so that’s pretty exciting.
That was nine days ago, and my Guru’s sitting at 305! How did this even happen…? A large part of it has to be those kanji I’ve been (mostly) getting right since adding vocabulary words to the review screen.
When I do my vocabulary reviews on the Flaming Durtles app, then after the last vocabulary word a kanji comes up, half the time I have no idea what the kanji is. And when I do know what it is, half the time I find out I was wrong.
I’m still uncertain if I should be concerned to not recognize a kanji when it’s not part of a vocabulary word. But I still think it’s fine so long as I recognize the kanji in a word, which will be within the context of whatever I’m reading. It may not help with learning new words, but I’ll cross that road when I come to it. I’d rather make progress now and worry about the future later, versus making no progress now and never reaching that future.
just keep going…
you’re script saved me again today! Finally burned something that’s been there forever … 読 kept thinking this was sell … finally burned thanks to your script …when it’s there with the vocab it’s super easy but by itself??? which was it again for meaning read or sell…always end up with sell…but I think it was because of the WK mnemonic in the first place that I kept screwing it up… seriously would have missed it again if it weren’t for your script…the irony is I can’t think of when I’ve ever seen this kanji by itself outside of WK…only in vocabl…so yes forward progress is still progress…
Don’t really know why but my brain locked onto sell vs read…happens a lot for me…
Here’s where it appears in a text analysis of material like what I’m likely to read. Higher number is more frequent.
| Match | Count |
|---|---|
| 読む | 327 |
| 読める | 51 |
| 解読 | 32 |
| 読書 | 16 |
| 読み | 11 |
| 読者 | 4 |
| 読みふける | 2 |
| 朗読 | 2 |
| 読心術 | 1 |
| 購読 | 1 |
| 棒読み | 1 |
| 愛読 | 1 |
| 音読 | 1 |
Specific ranges of numbers don’t have any concrete meaning. The more material I add to the parser, the higher the numbers will be. But relative to one another, we can see by far the number one usage is 読む (including its various forms such as 読んだ).
Number two on the list is 読める, which is simply the potential of 読む. And number five is the noun form, 読み.
Numbers two and three on the list are 解読 (deciphering; not covered by WaniKani) and 読書 (reading), with 読者 (reader) in a close sixth.
As 読 is never used on its own (as far as I know!), we see it never shows up on the list.
But, lest I sound like I’m complaining about kanji lessons/reviews (I’m not!), knowing that 読 is “read” and is pronounced 「どく」 can help one decipher 解読 (no pun intended) as かいどく (solve + read), as well as 朗読 being…ah, I haven’t reached 朗 yet. That’s level 43.
So, how will I handle learning words like 解読 if I fail to remember one kanji or the other? I’ll look up the kanji when I want to learn the word, I’ll recall the kanji (to…some extent), and then I hope I’ll be able to learn the combination of kanji as a word with a specific meaning and reading. Here’s hoping!
Here is a visual representation of my 2021 reading progress thus far:
See those laurels with that rest all over them?
My volumes read this year to date is only moderately further along than it was at this point last year. I expected to be quite a bit further along than I am by now this year.
Last year, my daily reading goals were based on page counts. Friction 1) Tracking pages count. Friction 2) Having to exclude pages with little to no words (common in manga). Friction 3) Finding the manga on my spreadsheet and typing in the number in the correct cell.
This year, to remove the friction, I switched to reading one chapter per day.
Issue: Different manga have different chapter page counts.
Solution: Supplement what I consider half-length chapters by reading short chapters the same day to get my page count up.
Reality: Having manga with five-page and eight-page chapters makes it easy to “settle” on reading a small amount some days. After all, I only needed one chapter to satisfy that day’s reading.
To avoid this going forward, I’m trying a new tactic. Rather than counting pages or chapters, I plan to track time.
I’ve worked this out to be fairly low friction. I enter the start time (Ctrl+Shift+;), tab to the next field, do my reading, then insert the end time. It tracks my reading time (including any grammar or vocabulary look-ups), and if I’m short of my goal after, then I pick something else to read.
I don’t plan to retain daily logs, as that would add friction. I get a goal (half an hour per day during the week, one hour per day on weekends), and I read until I meet that goal. Simple as that.
I expect this week I’ll find that 45-page chapters typically take closer to 45 minutes. If so, I may adjust my goals to 45 minutes weekdays and 90 minutes weekends.
I’m still reading a minimum of one chapter per day. I’ve only once split a chapter over two days this year (it was a very long chapter, with a lot of dialogue). If I’m lucky I put in the effort, perhaps I’ll build my reading stamina up for longer daily reading goals by the end of the year.
you might want to consider keeping (not a goal) but just the number of pages read during that time…
then you might be able to grasp the min/page and overall globally see that slope increase (hopefully)
I’ve found that I’m pretty bad at actually doing anything with the stats I collect. I collect them and collect them and never do anything with them.
I do almost envy the people who track all the stats of all their learning, but for me it would just add friction to everything.
For stats, right now it’s enough to be watching my Apprentice and Guru leeches (the lower-right number on each box) go down:
August 6:
August 10:
Have you considered using Google forms as less friction-inducing way of tracking your stats? It creates graphs and tables for you.
For example I track how/where I study grammar and vocab. I haven’t been filling out this form since the JLPT, but now that I’m back on top of things, I’m going to start filling it out again. I also have a section where I track what I’ve read/played/watched.
Actually creating charts and graphs is easy enough. I just never take the time to figure out what I’d want to actually be in the chart in a way that means anything. For example, if I had a graph of the number of pages (or amount of time) read from day to day, it’d probably look like /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/. I’m not certain I’d get anything out of that…
