I’ve been toying with the idea of making my own notes of vocabulary and kanji learnt through WaniKani but I’m not sure whether that would be a waste of time?
Should I be making my own notes or just kanji and vocabulary found in the wild and not encountered yet on WaniKani?
If you do make notes how do you organise them?
EDIT: I’m hoping this belongs in this subforum but I was toying with putting it the other one.
I dont see the need to make notes of something I’ll end up remembering in due time. I practice stroke order some time for tough kanji but that’s it
What do you mean by making your own notes? Like, are you talking about every time you do your lessons, you essentially make note cards? If that’s what you mean, I don’t suggest it. The SRS system is a flashcard system itself, so there would be no point in making your own notes/note cards except to help you learn the kanji/vocab the first time you see it. After that, you’d probably just want to discard your notes. You definitely don’t want to take notes and then look over those notes between review intervals since that would ruin the point of spaced repetition. You could look at your notes when reviews come up, but I honestly think you would be wasting your time with that.
I think it’s somewhat of a decent idea if you have the time and do it correctly, which is to only write notes in your lessons (WK has the option to let you write your own notes) to help you get the kanji/vocab down. Ultimately though, I think that it comes down to how you learn. If you’re struggling with remembering items, maybe you should spend more time in the lessons and write notes (in WK). If you aren’t struggling, just keep doing what you’re doing.
As for coming across stuff you haven’t encountered on WK, don’t bother taking notes. You’re going to run into so many different things you don’t know, especially at level 4. If you want to know what something means (you’re coming across it a ton, or you want to know what a certain word means), go ahead. It’s really all up to you, but you’d be wasting your time if you take notes on everything you didn’t know. However, you should probably supplement WK with a grammar guide sooner or later, and possibly vocab deck that doesn’t contain WK vocab (Torii is an app that does this).
What I think would be beneficial if you try to come up with sentences with the vocab you learnt and let it be corrected by natives on iTalki/HelloTalk/…
In that way you practice the usage of the words that you learnt.
That is a super idea!
I don’t usually take notes for WaniKani unless I’m really struggling (eg. if I do batches of lessons when tired, they become leeches that need more attention temporarily).
BUT other people do write down lessons or take notes, and it is not a waste of time for them! There have been a few topics around the forums about writing things down, tracking personal mnemonics in spreadsheets, etc.
Some people have filled entire notebooks – so I guess it really comes down to whether the act of note-taking helps you internalise what you’re learning. 
I don’t know whether you’d take notes for everything though – 2000 kanji + 8000 words seems like a lot of things to take notes on 
Yeah that’s actually a good point you mentioned. I think one of the reasons I thought about it in the first place was I made the mistake of doing a bunch of lessons when I was tired.
I guess that I’ll just re-read those when they come up next and then in future save lessons for when I’m more awake. 
Thank you for your response.
I’m going to be taking bunpro seriously soon and that’s probably more important to focus my notes on after all.
I’ll check out that app as well!
I do what I call the Reading Repetition System. It’s pretty simple. When you come across a word you don’t know you look it up. Every time you come across it, you need to look it up less and less. 
But seriously, I’ve only been able to do this recently given my WK level. There are only maybe 20% of words I don’t know for the material I’m reading, so I don’t have to look things up as much.
I think writing Japanese is an important part of learning it and you can become a fluent speaker,reader, and listener without being able to write. If you are already getting writing practice in somewhere else the notes don’t seem necessary, but if you aren’t, its a good opportunity to write Kanji and hopefully remember a few writings!
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