Sounds like they were effective, lol. But your method of learning by drawing pictures also sounds effective!
I had to hunt this down, I’ve never used it (it’s only for Windows), but it may work well for you: Houhou SRS
Looking up words is good, but you know what’s better? Not having to look up words. You know, because you already know them.
In Houhou, you can decide to learn any word or kanji that you look up, just by clicking a button. Houhou will handle the rest, and make sure everything stays in your long-term memory.
Build up your vocabulary knowledge, day after day. Never look up twice. You will feel awesome.
Aren’t images essentially physical mnemonics? Maybe you could try drawing/photoshopping your mnemonics, or whatever you decide to use instead of them.
Taking your example of 雨 (あめ), the picture will help a lot for the meaning, but how will you remember the reading? That’s far more abstract. If you can remember it just like that, good for you, but what if you can’t?
Maybe you could add some stuff to the picture. Like replacing the rain drops with あ’s and め’s. Or some depressed guy going “Ah, May…” because it’s raining all the time. Or a U.S. flag where only the left side is being rained on (あめrica. No? Okay…). Or whatever あめ makes you think about. Instead of stuffing your brain with mnemonics, you could stuff your computer with them
If you really don’t want to use mnemonics, you could find words using those Kanji, and sentences using those words, and study those to have more concrete stuff to work with. I’m not sure how that would really work out, but maybe you can figure something out.
That’s not quite it, I only use the pictures to associate the words- the actual meaning of the symbols so far is coming fairly easy. 雨 is a good example of that because it already looks like rain to me, but the pictures added to the symbol help me associate the sound to it also. My first kanji app was/is kanji repeater, which gives you the kanji in the same units learned by Japanese children. Doing that matching the kanji to their meaning comes very fast- like going from zero to 160 in a week or so- but the sounds that go with them is so much slower, partly because for so many of them it isn’t obvious which KUN/ON is the most used. Also of course though because there are so many to remember in one sitting. That’s one thing that attracted me here at first, the claim that wanikani filters out the less used ones so you learn the most common faster.
I’m not sure if you’re claiming that this isn’t the case, but if you’re talking about readings, basically what is meant by that is that WK doesn’t bother teaching you な and む and き and は for 生 right away (or at all in the case of some of those) because they’re less common.
If you mean common kanji, we already addressed that everything in the first 10 levels is quite common.
I have no reason to doubt that wanikani has chosen their ON and KUN for each kanji well, and so far they have helped me with a lot of the second grade kanji that I already knew by sight.
haha yes, you can see I’m focusing on the words more than sentence building, you’d probably freak at a lot of the other constructions in my diary
Well both my posts here have been productive. I’m amazed really at how active this community is, and it’s not so hard to stay civil when you can see once people get past being defensive about the site they are very willing to help out.
But no not really. It’s not a matter of changing my mind. I know how I learn best and right now I need to be learning different kanji than are being offered here at my level.
What people are trying to say here is, put to simple word, that it seems that you are not learning Japanese, but just random stuff.
For example, if you do not know 入れる you really are not going anywhere with Japanese because it used everywhere in compounds.
Not that this is a problem to anybody, if this is what you want, but people who probably have more experience than you, at least on this topic, are trying to help you avoiding taking a way that, probably ,will not take you so far.
From your answers I presume you are a young person, so you should feel free to try and learn from your errors, and this is good, but since Japanese is a very difficult topic, you should not underestimate it, because with the wrong approach you could end up in a dead end and abandon it.
Which is probably what the community here, maybe uncounsciously, does not want to happen.
Haha okay! I was curious about it.
If you find some good resources though don’t hesitate to make a post or something because it might be interesting for more people!
Language being just about input is such a big bs… Somehow I find this being said a lot more by Japanese learners (where the main reason to learn in the first place is read/watch media). But I can’t handle this anymore. Sure, it helps a lot… But I can guarantee you that if I had started speaking/writing in English early on my journey, my 2nd language would be so much better.
As I said the order of learning is vital to me- I’m not trying to avoid any words I just need to learn what I can use right now in the Japanese world I make around me. I don’t live in Japan, I don’t speak to Japanese people, don’t have to buy stuff or catch trains or taxis or ask directions etc. so a lot of the lessons that are useful for others just have no meaning to me right now. And kanji- so learning things, nouns, objects I use every day for example and other words I’m actually seeing and hearing every day. I’m not doing that here so I’ve wound back on my time here heaps and from now on will probably just do one lesson at a time until it is learned so I don’t frustrate myself.
I am actually 52 so have learned, and taught, a lot of different things in my life. I know a lot about what works for me when learning stuff, and even more about what doesn’t. lol To me, wanikani is random- I fully understand the reasoning behind using stroke order for their lesson construction but it just doesn’t work for me, the words and themes of words are what I need right now because right now they are the easiest things for me to learn. So I could waste days trying to learn a few words here or learn a couple of dozen elsewhere in the same time because they are words I want to learn and stick far more easily. (and this is what I have been doing since I started scaling back my time here)
And yeah I do see that the people here really do want to help.
I do bounce around a lot as you can probably tell from course to course. In the last week or so I’ve learned a ton of words using Transparent Languages. They have basic courses teaching conversations like most others- which aren’t much use to me right now as I want to learn the words first before diving into conversations. But they also have a heap of vocab lessons and a lot of different ways to learn them- listening, speaking with voice recognition, word recognition, and they use a lot of kanji which of course I love since I don’t just want to learn the words but the kanji for them at the same time.
The other one I’ve just found that has a lot of promise and I’ll be diving into is japanese-lessons.com It actually looks to be genuinely free which is a rarity. They have kanji lessons broken up into groups of 10 and then have drills of 20 questions with the kanji in different words so that you have to choose the correct ON/KUN out of conflicting choices. So for 3 日 you have to choose from 日、か、ひ、び which seems like such an awesome tool to me. I’m not sure how many kanji they actually have but this should keep me busy for a while.
It’s not just about input, I think the amount was like 80% input? I think their reasoning also was that we can make more mistakes early on and those mistakes can become habit forming and never leave us because most people just won’t correct you in day to day conversation if you are ‘close enough’. But if you wait until you are at a fairly comfortable level of understanding you’ll be more able to correct yourself when you actually start ‘outputting’.
I do think some of that is less of a problem when we can actually record ourselves and listen back to recordings and then compare them directly with native speakers.
And I do like writing up my posters with the words I can’t learn on lessons anywhere. So definitely both, but I still get a LOT more input every day as a rule than output. And I just love that input.
You’re not getting a different order on WK. WK’s order exists for a big reason. So because of that, I’d suggest finding another tool.
If you have time to study Japanese though and you wanna continue using WK, you could have gone faster. Leveling up twice in 1 month isn’t max speed (level 3 can be reached in 7 days).
Ummm, I read through all the posts and it looks like OP’s stand is pretty clear on the issues. He wants to be able to modify the way that WK works, which is definitely not in the vision of Koichi or the Wanikani team in overall.
A more suitable tools for OP would be Anki or some other SRS, not Wanikani.
