Forum bias or not that cannot be the average experience.
At any rate the type of knowledge you get from pure SRS like WaniKani tends to be more “latent” than more organic methods. You basically trade quality for quantity. The point for me is to quickly build a very rough and incomplete understanding of the characters early on, and then consolidate that through reading. Early on it wasn’t uncommon for me not to recognize a kanji only to then realize that I already studied it on WaniKani. It’s frustrating when that happens but it doesn’t mean that the SRS wasn’t useful, usually it would make it a lot easier to reinforce this latent knowledge by tying it to a meaningful real world situation.
Obviously regular users of the forum will often be cheerleaders for wanikani which is to be expected. My friend needed the kinesthetic input. He made huge progress once he started using writing as his main input. I know a high school student who passed N1 by studying on his own and is now also fairly fluent in Chinese. He just had to look at a kanji to know it. He is exceptional. Eidetic memory. Again, I am literally surrounded by people studying Japanese, in the local high schools at one of the ubiquitous Japanese language schools or at community centers or at one of the many Universities around here. The many people I meet literally daily in the wild who have gained very high level proficiency in Japanese for professional purposes did not and do not use wanikani. I am not aiming for high level proficiency, and given what I want wanikani for, it works for me. My Italki teachers told me that she has other students using wanikani. I use wanikani while I am doing something else, so I going to be slow.
The people you meet in language schools aren’t using tools for self learners? There might be a reason in there.
Most people I know who are high level in Japanese proficiency also didn’t use WK, they skipped kanji study entirely to just read as early as possible. I’m not sure any of them have ever written a Japanese character by hand.
I don’t attend a language school. The learners I meet are my neighbors, government officials, professors, etc… But, discussions about how we learn and retain, especially retain, our Japanese are common.
I thought you meant people using schools when you focused so much on people in schools learning Japanese originally. Regardless, to the actual point – Wanikani is SRS which is just flashcards with a fancier algorithm. We know quite well by now that if you put in the time and effort flash cards work, and good SRS algorithms make them work better. It’s just repetition; there’s no need to complicate whether that is a way to memorize things or not. The retention comes from not just sitting the stuff aside and not using it at all when you put down WK. And really Wanikani’s algorithm could use a lot of improvement but I’ll set that aside, heh.
If you keep using this stuff you’ll retain more than you forget. These days I actually recommend lightly against WK if anyone asks me, only because I disagree with directions the site has taken and think you could move quicker other ways, and without WK’s cost. But it certainly works.
All this said, I should probably just agree with you because in between these posts I’ve been over here reading Natsume Soseki’s こころ, and I just used WK, a little self grammar study, and read and listened to things all on my own. I have literally never even written down one kana. I think the endpoint of your argument is that I’m really special and smart, so, carry on
It is at least a very popular method online that I know a lot of people with very high level Japanese skills have had success with. You literally can’t say what you don’t already understand so there’s some logic to it. It’s basically what I myself have done (and am doing as I need to get more serious about speaking practice, but my reading and listening are strong now), though I used so many visual novels and videogames with voice acting that often listening came alongside reading so it wasn’t purely reading. A little more of a mix that way is probably better imo.
There are nuances about how much you need to focus on phonetics or listening, depending on just how high your goals are and also people just disagree on a lot of that stuff, but the general theory is sound.
Vanilla on these forums is a pretty good example of someone who just read, really hard for a long time, then by his accounts picked up listening and speaking afterwards without too much struggle. Every skill needs some specific practice but with the groundwork he had done it was mostly just laying the last pieces into place to use what he already knew, yeah:
My hope with this discussion is to reach the many, many users who are continuing to try to make wanikani work for them when it just doesn’t. It obviously works for some people. For those of us who have lifetime it is still not free. The major cost is your time and energy. Again, I am personally not the best example of wanikani use as I tend to be cooking and talking to several people while doing my wanikani lessons. But, I have met a number of people face to face who felt that their time using wanikani could have been much better spent. My message is to people who have been thinking wanikani is not for them. Such people are less likely to post here. If you think you are wasting your time with wanikani, you aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong and another learning method may work better for you. The end.
From my own experience (and I’m only level 11) it’s totally true that wanikani alone doesn’t work. It really doesn’t. I was to Japan a month and a half ago (level 10 back then) and I had hard time recognizing even the common kanji I’ve been practicing so much on wanikani. With few exceptions like 出 in stations, but that’s something even my husband managed to recognize pretty soon with absolutely no prior Japanese study. And to add salt to the injury, even my daugter who studies Chinese as a hobby managed some translations. It just does not work when wanikani is used alone.
However people on this forum don’t hide this fact. On the contrary - they keep recommending complementary resources and systems to use along wanikani. I should have listened. Your friend should have listened as well. He would have found out much sooner that his real life recognition of kanji and vocabulary (written and/or heard) doesn’t work.
Well, he found a good path in the end instead of dropping Japanese, so I’m happy for him! Congratulations, this achievement it’s well deserved. I’m now also trying to add new vectors. (Working on renshuu every day and I also started a game (Breath of the Wild) in Japanese which feels hilarious and so crazy at the same time, lol. Fortunately I almost finished it in the past, so I remember what should I do now even when I don’t actually understand the dialogs. Mangas/news/something will follow soon as well.)
Just to reiterate: Wanikani alone does not work. It’s an awesome tool in a toolbox, but it’s a specialist tool, not all-encompassing tool. Other tools are needed. Personally I’m really glad that I found this tool.
I don’t think so. You get better at what you practice – if you only read and nothing else you’ll be good at reading and pretty poor at listening, speaking and writing. How much that matters depends on what you personally want to do with the language and what you find interesting. (I mostly read these days so my speaking ability has atrophied badly since the time when I was in Japan and using it daily.)
If all you want to do right now is read manga and books and so on then it’s fine to concentrate on that, but if you want to be able to speak the language you should just start working directly on that. This I think is similar to “don’t learn 2000+ kanji up front before starting on any of the other things you need for reading”. Being able to do something soon is better than being able to do nothing for several years and then being able to do lots all at once. The task is too large to prioritize possible efficiency over being able to make visible progress on the parts you directly care about and start to do the things you want to do with/in the language.
(I also think that human brains are set up primarily to work with spoken language so ignoring it completely until late is probably not ideal. At least have some listening in there so you don’t bake completely wrong pronunciation into your brain and have to redo it…)
But why though? It depends on your goals but why is it necessarily better to immediately be able to do something just because? I ultimately wanna be able to do lots and have the easiest path getting there, even if it means I can’t do much for a while. Like if you were visiting Japan coming up, you’d probably want to learn some basic speaking skills. But if your ultimate long term goal is fluency, why not primarily focus on input for a long while? That seems a lot easier in the long term when you transition into speaking. How do you know what to listen for or what to say unless you stockpile knowledge from reading? I’m not worrying about speaking at all right now because I know I would suck so why even bother. I want to have the best foundation so I suck as little as possible. In hindsight, maybe it seems like there was no point in prioritizing reading first, but maybe it’s just hard to wage that.
I’m not really following here. Because the task is too large, I think that leans in favor of prioritizing efficiency over brute force. With an easier language for English speakers like Spanish maybe it makes more sense to jump into speaking right away because it’s not as difficult. But Japanese is one of the most difficult languages you can learn as an English speaker so stockpiling vocab and grammar and reading to give yourself an easier time would seem to be more applicable to Japanese than an easier language. I mean, there’s a reason doctors go to school for 10 years. The more difficult a task is, the more you benefit from training.
Here’s an off topic perspective. I recently graduated law school, and a common take of many students is that they feel like it was a lot of wasted time and they don’t feel that it prepared them for their jobs. Some think that they would be better off if they could just start working right away and learn directly through experience. But I think that they’re forgetting how little we all knew before going to school, and how confused we were initially. I think most people have an easier time focusing on input first and output later. In hindsight, you forget how much you learned and you just focus on what you don’t know. I think this is kind of the same thing.
I use it and I am glad I found it was well, more for some of the really generous people on the forum than for wanikani itself. What I have been trying to address are neuropsychological cognitive and sensory processing differences among individuals which make some learning tools more effective than others for different learners. Wanikani works better for people who have specific sensory and cognitive processing strengths and less well who are weak in the areas that wanikani use stresses. But, I was trying to avoid a discussion that I would feel the need to footnote.
motivation: I think that if you see yourself making clear progress in getting better at what you want to get better at, you are more likely to put in more effort and less likely to get discouraged and quit. (The most common outcome for anybody starting WK is that they quit partway; studying in a way that provides motivation is important.)
Everybody has things they either want or need to do in the language that are part of why they’re studying it. Not all of those require perfect fluency. If you can get to a point where you can do the easier ones of these, then you’re getting return on your efforts (e.g. you can accomplish some task you need to do, or you can get enjoyment out of reading an easy manga, or whatever). As you start to get benefits from study this is both directly good and also means you start to use the language in situations outside “I am studying”, which means you are putting in more time and will get better faster.
Essentially I do not believe that anybody is capable of “work abstractly on a task with no meaningful intermediate returns for a decade”. You need to structure your studying so you get some benefits out of it as you go along (whatever those might be for you), because otherwise the overwhelmingly probable outcome is that your brain will decide that this effort is not going anywhere and you will quit.
(“I enjoy the actual process of studying” is also a kind of intermediate return; but for that you want to organise your study plans so they incorporate a good chunk of what you enjoy, not merely the most efficient path.)
PS: I also think that all language skills tend to reinforce each other, and that “real world” interaction with the language beats pure study, so I think “move forward on a broad front and try to get to actual use quickly” is more efficient than “max out one stat then start on the next” anyway. But I’d still recommend it even if the “one stat at a time” plan was theoretically more time efficient.
y’all didn’t attend some amount of mandatory schooling? i find this hard to believe.
if we start to think about “intention” or “motivation” on that time scale, obviously we’ve lost the plot. everything you’ve done for a decade (and i don’t doubt that everybody in this thread has done many things for much longer than a decade) is something you’ve felt maaaaaaaaaany ways about, not all of them positive, but kept doing anyway.
The compulsory schooling system is set up so that people in it do get some benefits as they go along, and so that if you exit it early you still got at least something out of it. And of course it has that element of compulsion to it…
Absolutely. My point is that you want to construct your study plans with a pretty strong emphasis on building in more opportunities for the positive experiences and being able to say “this is hard work but it’s worth it”, and less of the “this is a horrible slog and I can’t see the end of it” negative moments. I think doing that has higher priority than a pure efficiency “minimize the time until I’m done” viewpoint (not least because in my experience there is no point in language learning when you are “done”…)
I think you get a lot of fast profit by reading graded readers. No need to wait until level 35 you can start reading Japanese and using your early level kanji today.
In think for early levels one easy graded level reader is best. Not sure about the rest of the levels.
Paper graded readers as well. They are extra challenging because there’s no crutch of listening or clickable grammar.
I started WK about four years ago and stayed with it for a year until I discovered that I also really wanted to learn conversational Japanese. I stopped WK and have continued studying conversational Japanese since, which is also quite challenging for me, but I enjoy it. I restarted WK several days ago and am finding it so interesting to now be able to more fully grasp the on’yomi and kun’yomi readings and am impressed how some things have stuck with me.
As others mentioned, I recently learned how humans are driven by goals, achievement, getting things done, which is essentially living in the future. “When I get there I’ll be happy and content.” Sometimes that’s true. When I was in Japan recently I wrote the following (along with a modest amount of collaboration with ChatGPT)…
ペースを おとして、
たびを たのしんで、
こころは ひらかれて、いる。
Slow the pace,
enjoy the journey,
the heart is open.
For me, the line “ペースを おとして” is especially helpful as it reminds me that it’s okay to move at a healthy pace and, of course, everyone’s pace is different. I suggest experimenting with how you feel at slower paces.
from my experience i tend to be happiest when i feel like i have something to strive for and feel capable of steady progress towards it. without motive i feel lost and aimless. likewise, achieving goals can be rewarding, but there is an emptiness that always follows in the wake of completion… only to be filled by setting a new target.
as cliche as it sounds, life truly is all about the journey, only rarely about the destination
. If you have many words and grammar then speaking would be easy right?