Coddiwomple-ing through WaniKani - A study log

First, a bit of a warning. People often spend far too much time looking for more resources than actually studying. The important thing is to find something that can get you to where you need to be and stick with that.

All that being said, for grammar stuff, here is my current workflow which is working well for me:

  • Bunpro (to order lessons)
  • Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series (to get a deep understanding of the topics from)

Bunpro usually gives page references to the DoJG entries so its pretty easy to go through. I would say that the dictionary may not be super useful on its own until you get to N5ish grammar and can understand most of the nuance explanations. Bunpro can at least cover you for that through links to other resources. After doing that, I recommend reading up on the N5 topics you would already know in the dictionary as you will learn to understand it on a deeper level.

And even if you don’t follow the Bunpro and Dictionary of Japanese Grammar pairing that I do, I still recommend those books. Its amazing how their explanations are usually better than anything you can find online. I’ve noticed that I can even inform fluent speakers of rules they may know intuitively but not explicitly (ie: the distinction between ので, んだから, and から).

I also am going to give an anti-recommendation to Tae Kim. I think people recommend it because they used it like a decade ago where internet japanese resources were scarce, but there is much better stuff out there. Wasabi does the same thing as Tae Kim’s but much better. Tae Kim’s guide ranges from oversimplifying to outright misinformation. The が vs は article is one of its first and also one of its worst. If you use the guide, you effectively need to relearn all of the topics it covers, looking out for where it lied to you.

For vocab outside of WaniKani, I recommend Torii

For reverse WaniKani (giving the English and needing to give the kanji/vocab), I recommend KameSame

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