Yeah, wk is nice for getting into kanji which can feel scary and giving you a sense for learning them for sure. A personal level builder would be interesting for sure.
Personally, I kinda went for the other way around, though. Learn words you need the most and if there happens to be a kanji in there you don’t know, then just learn the kanji while you’re at it. Much easier once you have a feel for kanji already though.
The vocab on WK and it’s ordering can definitely be frustrating while reading though. Also, one thing I remember was when I was learning on wk there would be threads about natives being like “why are you learning these words” and I would always jump in to defend wk and say “it’s to reinforce the kanji!!”. Now, after years of studying I look at wanikanis words list and find myself being the one saying “why the hell is this on here” lmao.
Yeah that’s definitely what brought me to WK in the first place, I tried this approach but when you start from zero kanji knowledge you end up having to learn “complicated” ones early on and it’s just hard to bootstrap. Like 綺麗 is a super useful word to know, but good luck drilling those kanji as a beginner…
寡婦? Never seen it I think and it’s less common than 未亡人 which uses simple kanji and isn’t on wanikani
So, chances are even if you learned “widow” on wanikani by getting to 60, you wouldn’t know the word when you saw it in the wild because they didn’t teach you the more common way of saying it. Roughly 4x more frequent on jpdb.
This sorta all ties back into the whole wk vocab being not great thing.
Yeah I agree. I couldn’t imagine with all the lessons and reviews they are doing at top speed that they would have time to study grammar. I’m going slow on WK, but that’s fine with me cause I’ve been working on grammar which is really huge for reading comprehension.
I feel some people make the mistake of making their goal to level up on WK rather than use WK as a tool to level up their Japanese when exposed to native material.
I think I saw a comment somewhere else of someone saying around there is a diminish of return around the 40s level. Since you are at level 27 after you reached level 20 did you noticed diminish of return?
Yeah I feel like I’m in a sort of twilight zone. Many of the kanji I learn now feel less useful, but at the same time when I try to read Japanese in the wild I encounter many kanji that are in levels 2x and 3x. Like I just learned a few days ago the kanji 織 that’s used in 組織 (organization) which is a common word that features heavily in a game I’m playing.
Every time I encounter an unknown Kanji while playing a game I tend to look it up on WK, and the overwhelming majority of the time it’s below level 40 and extremely rarely above 50.
That’s why I decided to aim for 40 and then slow down, by then I expect that my kanji knowledge really won’t be the limiting factor to understand “standard” (i.e. non-literary) Japanese and I’ll be better off investing more time in other aspects of my language study routine.
To give you an example here’s a random screen of a game I’m playing lately (Final Fantasy VIII):
There are only 3 kanji in there that I haven’t reached in WK yet:
刊 (“edition”, level 38) but this one is easy to remember: the reading (カン) is the same as 干, and in context after 月 I know that this is about a “monthly issue” of something. I wouldn’t recognize the kanji if I encountered it in a different context, but it’s enough to play this game.
己 (“oneself”, level 35) this one is taught as a radical at level 7, so I already know the meaning, I just lack the reading
魔 (“devil”, level 46) this one is pretty far in WK but it’s so incredibly common in videogames that I’ve learned it a long time ago, it’s used for instance in 魔法 (magic) and plenty of other magic-related things. Also WK teaches the main semantic component 鬼 (“demon”) at level 23, so it’s easy to recognize.
So you can see that for this particular screen I’m not exactly limited by my kanji knowledge. In fact my main difficulty reading this was figuring out that グラブ does not only mean “grab” but, in this context, “glove”.
I heard about it but haven’t looked it up yet. I don’t watch a lot of Youtube usually, so I don’t know if it’s the right format for me, but I should give it a try.
I’ve been noticing reoccurring kanji that just isn’t on WK at all so I have to make my own mnemonic for it.
There is a JRPG in development called Shujinkou that plans on going up to intermediate level of Japanese so once that game comes out I’ll be looking up on WK any words with kanji in them that they are teaching me. It also has SRS so not only would that apply to vocabulary, but to the grammar too. Whatever grammar they teach I’ll use MaruMori off to the side. I have a feeling after I’m done playing the game my use in WK will either drop or I end up no longer using it.
I am hoping someday Game Gengo will finish the Let’s Go pokemon video game cause after that I’ll actually feel brave enough to play the entire game in Japanese. Lol
