I just started WaniKani a few months ago and I am nearing the end of level 3 which is where the free part ends.
I want to know from people who have finished level 60 or are pretty far at completing WaniKani. Are you able to communicate with Japanese people? Can you have actual conversations? And can you understand anime without subtitles?
Well, what youâre describing involves listening and speaking, which are skills that WaniKani doesnât really help with beyond building up your vocabulary foundation. When it comes to reading, and to a lesser extent writing, it certainly does help.
I stopped around level 30 and can communicate with natives fine. I can read manga without furigana, and play videogames in Japanese. Probably not the norm to be able to do all that at this level, but Wanikani got me here.
Though Wanikani teaches reading skills, not speaking skills. Wanikani isnât a full language course, itâs a kanji course. Reading a lot will generally help give you a deeper understanding of the language in a more roundabout way though.
None of these things will be possible from level 60 alone.
The biggest thing that wanikani gives you is vocab in Kanji form and familiarity with Kanji by extension. Even in that category, itâs far from being a comfortable level to watch anime with Japanese subtitles even.
I did separate word study outside of wk (maybe a couple thousand words) and by the time I hit level 60 and tried reading my first book, here were all the things I didnât know on the first two pages.
As you can see, there is a lot. The book was probably on the easier side too. Still though, I could get through it with a dictionary and understand it for the most part.
Itâs a useful tool for learning to read kanji, and thatâs primarily what it teaches you. From my personal experience, it teaches you two things: the vocabulary you learn directly on the site, and a sense of how to deal with kanji you encounter.
For the second part, this mostly manifests as the ability to guess a kanjiâs reading or a wordâs meaning when you encounter it while reading even if you have never seen the vocabulary itself directly. This either allows you to continue on reading even without fully knowing all the words in a sentence, as you can get a gist of what all the words mean, or it allows you to look up words in a dictionary significantly faster (if you know the reading, you can type the word out, which makes using dictionaries a lot easier).
It wonât teach you all the vocabulary youâll need to read without issue though, and especially when you start reading youâll need to look up a lot of words. It also wonât teach you grammar, or teach you how to speak. As for listening, I found it helped somewhat. Recognizing words without their kanji is hard without more listening practice, so even if you âknowâ the vocabulary on wanikani, it isnât always a guarantee youâll be able to understand the word when used in speech, although it does help to know the word in at least one context.
But in general, it teaches you how to read kanji. So youâll primarily see the benefits when reading. Youâll need to supplement it with at least something to teach you grammar and additional vocabulary for reading though, and youâll need additional speaking and listening practice if you want to learn those skills as well.
It helps in a passive way. It makes reading bearable. It doesnât directly teach you the language as a whole, but by learning kanji, it takes language acquisition from improbable to relatively simple.
The people who have answered have already addressed your questions, but just so you know there is a whole section of the forum where people post when they reach level 60.
Iâm only L7 but have been really pleased at how many kanji that I can see already.
Thereâs so much that Iâve learned in WK already that I see come up naturally in native content.
For example, I was playing Onimusha today (PS2 classic) and found many kanji examples in the first 10 minutes of gameplay. ć ć·Š èĄ æ» æŹ äžž ä» ć€§ ć ćŒ æ© éŠ è ć ć°ćłâŠ loads more. It feels amazing to be able to read and understand words you learn in WK in other places.
However, itâs not a silver bullet. WK wonât teach you grammar (tenses, conjugation, etc.) and it wonât teach you about particles, sentence structures, differences between formal/informal language, etc. Also, thereâs cultural nuance that you wonât get (e.g. WK teaches ć§ćŠč as sisters but came to learn that natives typically only use this to refer to religious sisters).
Going back to Onimusha, you get given a gauntlet as a main part of the story/gameplay. The word for this is çŻæ. WK will never teach me this, so even getting to L60 wonât help. Thereâs no substitute for âdoing what you want to doâ (play games, watch anime, speak to people, etc.)
As others have already pointed out: no, listening and speaking is not taught by Wanikani. They are separate skills. However, I still think Wanikani is worth it, because it teaches you kanji and a good amount of vocab, which is neccessary for speaking and listening as well. Personally, knowing a good amount of kanji has helped me tremendously. Can I watch anime without subtitles? No. Can I understand most of it with subtitles? Yes, because I can read japanese. Can I read japanese because I know all the kanji? No, I needed to focus on grammar for a while to actually understand sentences and not just guess words and their function in a sentence.
Wanikani is a really great tool for getting into learning japanese. You inevitably will need to know kanji and WK teaches you them. From there you can branch out and focus on what you are interested in the most.
You can also do it the other way round if you prefer - start with a textbook or whatever, and only add in WK (or some other kanji-focused resource) when you feel like kanji are getting in the way of your progress. My experience was that itâs possible to get quite a long way (certainly out of âbeginnerâ stage) without throwing the full âmnemonics and SRSâ toolkit at the problem, though of course different peoplesâ brains work differently with this kind of thing.
The advantage of doing it that way round is that a few months on the âlearning the language via textbook or equivalent resourceâ path will give you a better idea of how it all fits together and what learning kanji through WK can and canât do for you. So youâll be in a better place to make an informed choice about whether to invest the time and money.
WaniKani (nearly completed) has helped me a lot in my acquisition process, which is far from being complete.
I live in Japan and get listening opportunities every day at home. WaniKani has helped me primarily in reading - but this includes street signs, medical documents, store windows and menus, etc. - and in some of my vocabulary acquisition. Iâve been able to hear words and recognize phonemes/morphemes in part because of WaniKani, but also because of other study.
My speaking skills are kinda a mess, but thatâs somewhat by my personal choice up to this point, in that Iâm motivated to have my family learn English as much as I am to acquire Japanese. Iâd say Iâm around a high-beg/pre-int level in speaking. In certain situations, however, I can make myself understood, and I use little Japanese phrases on a daily basis. WK does not teach speaking, but it (and other kanji/vocab resources) can help reduce part of the learning load along the way towards that.
