I’m content in learning the proper spelling later if i’m able to understand the number.
Yes, i asked to know which were the cons to focusing on the kanji. Maybe i’m prioritizing them because i am frustrated at not knowing them when i encounter them. It is not necessarily more efficient but i’m trying to see what would work for me best, i chose wanikani because i found it better in my case for retention compared to similar SRS apps.
Thank you both for the help.
The Kanji/English comparison that I’ve found captures the importance of vocabulary is if you imagine you are learning English and you’ve already learned the alphabet, roman numerals, etc. (think, Hiragana and some Radicals) and are starting to learn words (vocab), before learning words you start learning common English letter groupings (Kanji), how their pronounced, and some context on when/how they are used.
You might learn something like:
~ed : ‘d’ or ‘eh d’
~tion : ‘shun’
~sion : ‘shun’
a_e : ‘ey_’
etc.
Learning these patterns is great, but without vocab not only do you only have a fraction of understanding the ‘Kanji’, but you don’t have any applicable utility of it either (other than identifying that a word ends with the pattern ‘ed’ and is therefore likely the past tense of a verb it is attached to).
For example, let’s look at the word 精密 (せいみつ). It’s made up by kanji that mean “spirit” and “intimate” (from jpdb). Can you guess what an intimate spirit is? Probably not. This word means precise or accurate. Does an intimate spirit have anything to do with precision? Not really. So very often knowing the meaning of a kanji is mostly useless for guessing the meaning of the word it’s used in. Memorizing lots of kanji will not help you understand lots of words.
Knowing both kanji could help you type it in a dictionary faster than if you had to try to look it up by radical or something.
I do think there’s value in learning lots of vocab, but I just wanted to point out that it’s much easier for me to look up new words that include kanji I already know compared to kanji I’ve never seen before.
I agree, looking up words gets a lot faster the more kanji you know.
But it gets even faster the more vocab you know.
If I want to enter multiple kanji for a word I want to look up in a dictionary, it is even faster
to enter vocab I know and then remove the kanji that are not relevant for my look up.
Let’s say I wanted to enter the kanji 最 as part of a word to look up.
I might know, that it has a reading of さい. But if I enter さい in my IME, I might have to scroll through 10 different kanji with the same reading. Instead, I just type さいきん which gives me 最近 immediately and then I delete the second character.
I’ve been doing this approach myself a little bit of doing a prioritization of radicals → kanji → vocab and I’m sure this is echoing a lot of what’s being said but it definitely is very person-to-person.
I came back after a long break myself and have stayed consistent for the last 22 levels taking roughly a week each by following that sort of optimized method. To share some perspective the way I look at it is: Leveling up is not a promise of mastery, it’s just a reasonable progress point that you are likely ready to learn more items now. Wanikani itself is a tool operating on a sort of curriculum, guided format (compared to like say other tools that might just let you cram as much as you like).
So within a curriculum format one thing is that you have to know which ways your learning styles match and don’t match it. The recent daily lessons update tends to automatically focus on a balanced spread of radicals, kanji, and vocab all at once (if available of course). That is what will generally work for the widest amount of people. You can take the time to decide if it works for you too.
Skimming a lot of the replies in this thread has kinda seemed like a bit of a question of “is language made of letters or is language made of words” and honestly it doesn’t really matter because by the end you will need to know them both.
“Is there any reason not to focus on leveling up and learning all the kanji before going for the vocabs?”
I could get like overly philosophical from here and say “what is reason” and “it’s all subjective” but I’m going to assume for the sake of brevity you very likely learn at least some degree similar to me and the others in this thread. So the subjective answer that you can ignore if you really truly want to is that It would be really really helpful to you in the long run to at the very least, if you are going to prioritize kanji, to keep your lessons queue trimmed down and at least learn the vocabulary for a level within a few levels of gaining it
So like, I hit level 38 but I still have a little bit hanging on from 37. At worst, my lesson queue grows to something like 200 vocabulary, but it’s on average under 100 and at least once per week it is cleared back to 0. Part of this is from also being someone who reads outside of wanikani and looks up grammar and linguistic things about japanese just out of pure interest. before level 25 though I was just only focusing on wanikani.
if I were to try to keep it short from here and summarize:
-Doing only the kanji is not a viable long term approach, but if it works for you in the short term, that is your method and nobody can take that from you.
-Prioritizing the kanji but still keeping your vocab lessons flowing is a much more sustainable method and what I personally do myself and recommend. It has caveats.
-it ultimately depends too how much time you want to spend on wanikani after you hit level 60 still burning your unburned items. If you feel you wouldn’t mind an extra year or so spent burning purely the vocab, go for it but also Buyer Beware.
my last personal note though is that I do think it is best above all to try to empty your queue frequently and make the mistakes in a healthy way. If your level ups are gated by radicals and kanji, optimizing your pace with them means that there is not really any harm to making your mistakes with vocab in the interim. The time is going to pass regardless, so again consider what you want your workload to be, but also consider that there really is no harm on like, spending 4 weeks getting 大仏 wrong because you intuitively answer “Giant Buddha” and get flagged as wrong for not adding the word “statue” even though you know there arent exactly any flesh and blood buddhas standing around and walking at 50 ft tall. Wanikani isn’t a class you get an A in, it’s something meant to give you what you need to build a solid foundation for learning a language. Mistakes are the absolute best way to learn, the faster you fail at something, the faster you’ve learned what you did wrong.
Hopefully this was not too wordy. Sorry if it was.
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