16 months later, here I am! My life has pretty much changed in almost every way imaginable since I started, but I stuck to WaniKani the whole way through and I’m glad that I did.
Adding in the ~400 kanji I’ve learned outside WaniKani, I’m up to about 2450 kanji total, with just 39 Joyo kanji remaining!
I started reading last May, so I really didn’t rush the last 20 levels; by level 40 I had reached the point where more than half of the new kanji I encountered when reading weren’t ones in WaniKani anyways. I’ve now been playing Final Fantasy 14 in Japanese for the past 3.5 months or so (I’m up to Stormblood). It’s still difficult, but practice makes perfect; just keep reading, and reading, and reading. I feel like I’ve read a half dozen novels worth of text at this point…
My journey probably wasn’t particularly optimal in any way, but I don’t really subscribe to that approach. I try to do what my mind is able to enjoy, rather than forcing myself to do something I find unpleasant (a fast way to get disillusioned with the language). For example, I only casually studied grammar with Bunpro, Tae Kim, etc, and never got beyond about halfway through N4 in terms of formal study of grammar points; past that I just read more and looked things up as I found them. I never even used a textbook – not that I would recommend such a thing, but that’s not what my brain wanted to do, so I didn’t force it.
I’m excited to (eventually) go back to Tokyo and actually be able to read this time… ahahahaha. Though perhaps even more than that, I just miss the Lawson chicken… and cocoichi… and ikebukuro… and functional trains… gods darned covid…
Nowadays I’m just doing lots of reading and sentence mining from the things I read (which is mostly Final Fantasy 14… ahahaha). My current process looks approximately like this:
- Read sentence. If I understand it, move on.
- If I don’t understand it, read it again. If I understand it, move on.
- Is there a vocab word in the sentence I don’t know? Look it up. Is it interesting? Does it have a new reading? Have I seen it before, looked it up, and forgotten it 5 times already? Add it to my vocab deck.
- Is there a grammar point in the sentence I don’t know? Look it up.
- Read it again: does it make sense to me now? If so, move on.
- Still don’t understand it? Throw the sentence into DeepL and use that for extra context. Ask questions if I have to, etc.
- Read it again. Does it make sense now? If so, consider adding it to my Anki sentence deck for practice. If not, the sentence is just too hard for me to understand even with help; move on.
Side-steps:
- Is there a new kanji in the sentence? If so, add it to my deck and make a note to myself to add some vocab for that kanji in a day or two (same way as WaniKani: learn kanji, then vocab).
- Do I keep running all the way up to step 6/7 on that list over and over? My brain is tired, take a rest, go meditate, or go read Japanese another time. Does that not fix the problem? The material is probably too hard; go read something easier.
And now, I just loop through this over and over, every day, and the next day I wake up and my Japanese is better! It’s like magic. Sometimes I can even read fast enough to keep up with spoken dialogue! It’s snazzy.
Thanks, WaniKani. I couldn’t have gotten here without you