Finally hit level 10 this morning. The last 2 levels have been a little on the difficult side and I’ve slowed down a little bit to help keep a higher accuracy rate. It gets downright depressing when you keep forgetting things! Still I guess that 9 days for the last level isn’t completely awful.
Guess its time to start going back over my old Genki books. I never even finished the first one, but I should be able to review the old lessons and knock the rest out pretty quick given some of my other study over the years. I’m sure that not having to constantly look up the Kanji in the books will help a lot.
I’ve seen some people mention ‘graded readers’ but I’m not really sure what those are. Are there free things online I can read that mostly match up with at least milestone levels in wanikani to help with retention? I’d prefer not to have to constantly look up Kanji as I go because I know what will happen. I’ll just stop reading it lol…
Take material with Furigana, so you don’t have to search for kanji everytime.
Don’t expect to be able to read without reading. Yes, that’s a paradox, but It’s true… start reading It’s the only way to learn read japanese. If you got just a bit of grammar, Do It!.
I’ve finished the first Genki book. Now I’m at the second one and I’m going REALLY slow… I just do one argument per day, because I need to retain also old informations.
The only thing I can suggest you about that… speak with japanese people, read, listen… do It or you’ll never retain informations in your memory. Don’t just study hoping to memorize everything.
The ‘Japanese Graded readers’ are a series of books designed for quick reading without looking things up (“extensive reading” or “tadoku”). I cannot overstate how good they are. They start a level 0 with simple hiragana picture books and work up in a graduated way to complicated texts.
The wonderful feeling when I realised that I had absorbed a completely new story or information on a factual topic is amazing.
This is the maker:
However (and this is very big) they are expensive. It looks like there are some online and cheaper versions that weren’t available when I was buying them, so check those out.
Each book also comes with a cd, so you can practice listening as well.
Oh nice! I’m glad there are some free options out there. That will help in terms of allowing me to broaden things a bit without feeling like I have to sit through something in its entirety if it turns out to not be my thing. I will have to save all of that information for reference as I go forward from here.