Oh yeah driving too, especially if you live in an area where there is no romaji under the signs of towns. Plus just trying to figure out what something is without being able to see it right away since japanese roads are so small.
Being able to read books would be so wonderful! I see the kids I teach try to show me cool things in their books like ghost stories or just cute animal facts, and I cannot for the life of me even figure out a 4th grade book which is embarrassing. I also can’t just pull out my phone because while google translate is wonderful in a pinch, it does not do well to have a teacher say “don’t use google translate! Its wrong!” and then do it right in front of them myself…
Well some name of the places are really really hard even for the natives.
When my daughter started reading books in hiragana only, I was surprised how hard is to read them, even if I understand them perfectly if someone read them to me, but just to make sense of the words without spaces. Kanji are useful for that.
she could also ignore the vocab entirely if it’s too much work. nothing stops you from doing WK radical and kanji only and quite a few people finish with 6000 vocab lessons left at the end.
She’d be missing out on at least half of the kanji readings if she did that, though, since WK generally only teaches one reading with the kanji. She’d also be missing the vocab that use irregular readings, which she might not recognize as words that she knows if she sees them in writing.
the readings are in the lessons. am not saying she should, am just saying it reduces workload to a quarter and might make it practical for that person. it’s just an option.
i don’t know how a person who is fluent but can’t read kanji feels in front of written japanese but it may be quite easy for her brain to fill the gaps.
Maybe, but at that point, I’d say she’d be far better off using a different tool to learn kanji. The SRS would only be testing her on one, maybe two of the readings, and it would still take just as long to get through all the kanji. I feel like there’s an argument for skipping some of the vocab, but honestly if anyone wants to skip all 6,000 vocab, WK is just not the right tool for you.
Raised in the US and Japan but mostly the US. I can speak to Japanese people like a native, listen to news programs, dramas, variety shows, random conversations on the train, most dialects etc without any issues. However, I would have some problems if they use some deeply specialized vocabulary that you wouldn’t normally use in everyday life (scientific terms like chemical elements, some medical and history terminology, deeply religious words etc)
I can’t really define my kanji level using school grade, J1-J5 or Kanji Kentei levels since that’s not really how I learned most of my kanji. If I had to guess, it’s probably somewhere between the 1000 or so that elementary school kids know but much, much less than the 2100+ Joyo. My kanji writing level is much less than my reading but currently don’t have a lot of interest in writing as the computer takes care of that for me.
I wanted to get better at reading more kanji so started looking around for different methods and settled on Wanikani.
Here are some of my thoughts:
I’m currently at level 15(?) or so and it’s sort of painful because I know the kanji and the vocabulary already and there’s no way to skip levels. I probably won’t get into learning new kanji for quite some time.
Once in a while there will be a kanji that I won’t know or won’t immediately recognize because a lot of the kanji I’ll be able to read because of the context but in isolation I would have to think about it. WK definitely helps to learn those.
One of the really painful parts is that I’ll have my own definition of what a word means as a native speaker, and my definition won’t always match with what WK expects and WK is pretty picky. Even with the SRS system, I tend to default to my own native definition since that definition is stronger in my mind and so I’ll have to think about what the WK definition was.
Someone wrote a user script that will catch typing mistakes and will allow you to retype the answer. I can’t recommend this add-on enough. I’d probably have quit if this didn’t exist since WK doesn’t have this feature built in and if you mistype something, the world gets put in your “don’t know it” list. Plus I tend to go on autopilot when doing lessons and reviews because it’s still at a a level where I know everything, which results in a lot of unintentional errors and there are a lot of vocabulary that would get flagged as an error because I typed in my own definition first.
I can get through lessons and reviews pretty quickly at the moment and can do everything as soon as it’s available (assuming I have the time to sit in front of the computer) and progress at about 1 level a week.
I expect that when I start learning new kanji that this pace will slow down and will get a much better idea at how effective it is.
The SRS system is convenient as it automates telling you what you need to learn and when you should review. Anki cards are similar but for some reason I don’t like it as much so don’t use it. It might be because WK already has all the kanji organized into levels and lessons. I also think the nice layout and colors/fonts sizes and such help in a small way.
I’m not the type of person who’s going to open up a set of workbooks every day so that method wasn’t going to work for me.
If you don’t have any kanji but speak like a native then this should definitely help with reading kanji so long as you’re consistent with the lessons.
This sounds like really great advice to me. Your Japanese is far beyond my own, but everything you wrote resonates.
For words you well and truly know, creating a synonym using the romaji for the Japanese word is probably safer. Less chance of forgetting exactly which English words you entered. I still do this occasionally (especially for words with no exact English equivalent).
This is good advice.
Normally, I’d advise people not to sweat typos — at most it’s just a couple of extra reviews. For someone that’s already able to read the most common 1000 or so characters and is trying to get to past the stuff they already know as quickly as possible, though, this seems like an excellent use case.
Once you start seeing enlightened items (a little more than 6 months after you started) you’ll know what your steady state workload looks like.
One warning: countless times I’ve missed reviews for common, simple characters that I already “knew,” because I mix them up with similar, less-common characters that are taught on higher levels. It’s often just different 部首, but sometimes the characters are utterly unrelated but my brain mixes them up regardless.
I had the same reaction. I tried it long before WK and I just couldn’t deal with all the tinkering. People I respect have since pointed me to several really excellent resources, though, so I think my issues were mostly from not knowing what I was doing.
Still, I think Anki isn’t ideal for people that can already speak Japanese. I agree that WK is better (it actually feels to me like it was designed by people in exactly that situation).
I doubt this applies to people that can speak/read/write Chinese and are learning to read Japanese, though.
My friend who is teaching English in Japan doesn’t want to start WaniKani because she thinks she’ll get annoyed with meaningless radical names and picky definition choices…
I find that it SIGNIFICANTLY increases my recognition for a large number of kanji in a short time. My ability to immediately bring a meaning, on’yomi and kunyomi to mind when I see a kanji has increased A LOT. And I enjoy visualizing the kanji when I hear spoken Japanese… it gives me additional meaning and understanding. I still have poor listening comprehension now overall, though.
[just woke up and forgot I was watching this thread. I thought you were asking me for some reason! Apologies, but what I wrote holds true! ]
Whoof.
Useful doesn’t begin to cover it. Wanikani has improved my life immeasurably.
I half-heartedly tried to learn to read Japanese several times over the years (books and finally Anki a few years ago), but never made any real progress.
I can’t guarantee that it will work as well for others, but in 2.5 years, WK has me regularly emailing friends, family, and professional contacts in Japanese; (slowly) reading Japanese books I purchased in the eighties; and even translating poetry. Without exaggeration, that’s life-changing.
I’m profoundly grateful to Wanikani and can’t recommend it strongly enough to anyone with an interest in the language, especially if they already know how to speak a bit.
Ask her if she finds the “meaningless” ones in Japanese annoying too.
Like のぎ (禾), named so because it’s a 木 (き) with a katakana ノ on the top (the actual meaning is a rice plant).
Or ふしづくり (卩), named because it’s the right side element (つくり) of 節 (ふし) (the original drawing represents a kneeling person).
Or うかんむり (宀), named for the fact that it resembles what would happen if you stretched out the katakana ウ over the top of something else (the actual meaning is a roof).
Plenty of Japanese radical names just work as plain descriptors of where they appear in kanji and relate their shapes to things that are useless to new kanji learners.
what’s funny is when I first studied Japanese 30 years ago and was practicing kanji, this is exactly how i made my own “mnemonics” of radicals or just the various squiggles:
彳 I would literally say “left side of GO kanji”
Or instead of Wanikani’s “Viking” radical it was “Top of gakusei thingy…”
yeah I’m finding it super useful. Frankly it definitely exceeded my expectations.
I find useful the funny radicals (scooter, zombie, drunkard, etc.) and the whole system really work.
My main complain is the order of the kanji. I’ve already learned 800 kanji (level 23) and I can barely read a manga without a dictionary because there are so many common kanji yet to learn.
My lesser complain is the radical inconsistency: it would be more useful if when a radical is also a kanji we just learn the kanji. Having to remember a separate meaning is confusing and I finish to add the kanji meaning at the radical.
But all in all is really changing my life in Japan. Being able to read things is a big difference.
Note also that I’m 54, not exactly a green mind, but I can still keep my accuracy at 95%.
Mine’s usually closer to 85% … I mix up similar ones for a long time… but eventually they become recognized.
I wonder how long it will last! (I’m older than you, Umbertoさん) I feel like I will need to keep reading almost every day, so I don’t “lose the ability”.
Is the person fluent in English? Can the person read English at an intermediate level or above? In my opinion if the answers to these two questions are no, then in my opinion this will be a total waste of time and maybe it would be best for them to get native books meant to teach kanji at the elementary level.
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what’s funny is when I first studied Japanese 30 years ago and was practicing kanji, this is exactly how i made my own “mnemonics” of radicals or just the various squiggles: