General feedback on WK

And here’s me getting all excited as I’m getting down to the 1000 mark for the first time in months…

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I can’t spend 4 hours a week. if I did that, I’d be already speaking 100% fluent japanese by now.

I think the problem here is that you are seriously underestimating the amount of work needed to learn a language, especially one so different as Japanese.

If you are not willing to invest time, Wanikani is probably not worth it. I’d go so far as to suggest you do something other than learn a language, perhaps you could take up another hobby?

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:scream::scream::scream::scream::scream::scream::scream::scream:

That sounds very stressful.

Oh, I see. I checked the Japanese course of the Faculty of Letters from my University and the program is just… painful. They have 4 courses, each one takes around 8 months of distributed classes (120h total) to finish. They only introduce Kanji in the 3rd course, which means 1 year and 4 months after you joined Japanese I. All 4 courses seem to be equivalent to N4 (some stuff is from N3 I believe) and it costs in total 2000€/26万円 (discounted price for students from that university, which is my case). My mom wanted me to join those classes, because you know… it looks cool to be studying in two different Faculties at the same time. I’m so better off saving for my trip to Japan though :roll_eyes:

Fundamentally, after several years, that they’re going to change the basic workings of the system. The system is meant to be used by a reasonably focused user, and after literally dozens or hundreds of requests to test out, or allow flexible timings, they have not indicated that this is an option that they’re working on.

They have already made the first couple levels way faster, and added typo detection, for meaning only. Putting meaning in the reading box and vice versa should get way better over time. Within a couple weeks, your brain will automatically associate one color or the other as you use the system more.

They tolerate and encourage people to use scripts to customize their experience. I highly recommend the override script (included in the mobile apps) if you are particularly prone to this sort of issue, and you trust yourself not to cheat. The WK developers have shown by action that they’re not willing to add in features natively that allow users to easily subvert the system (eg an override button).


You are only L1; give the system a few weeks to take hold. Like anything new you would undertake, it takes time to become comfortable with the system, learn its cues, and fall into habits. Habits take a couple weeks to form, give it a chance. However, fundamentally, WK does require 20 minutes a day or so at a minimum to make any progress.

If you are really short on time, keep your apprentice account below 70 or so. Don’t do lessons while above this number. This will keep your reviews around ~50 a day, which you can bang out in 10 minutes.


For people who want a lot more control, there are other systems. RTK is one: you can easily download a deck for Anki for it.

Dislike LOL…

Learning japanese is not my main goal in life right now. I’ve learnt english age 6 to 16 to a fluent level (not perfect), 13 to 25 arabic, and a little french on my way. So yes, I’m used to learn difficult languages and I try to optimize my time and what I do a lot. After 12 years from age 18 with different speeds of studying in japanese, I’ve managed to get to level B1, which is more than I’ve seen in general. That’s how fast I can do it right now. Kanjis has been the most difficult thing to learn, that’s I’m trying WK now.

Why the complaining about WK being slow then? Going full speed on WK can put you on B1 in terms of Kanji in 6 months or 24x more effective than your progress until now. I’m sorry if this sounds rude, it isn’t my intention at all. I’m just trying to show you that WK is far from being slow. Like you said, Japanese is not your main focus right now and that’s 200% understandable. Level 1 might be a little slow (3d10h?..), but that’s for the users to try and get used to the whole WK system. Making it faster than that would only bring problems to a lot of users in the short and long term.

WaniKani also uses their own radicals, which really simplifies the learning of Kanji. Most people can handle the first 500 Kanji without much bother, but past that they start confusing similar ones. WK radicals help you solve that. That’s why there’s no option to skip. Also, you said you know around 300 Kanji. I believe revising them in a new perspective will only strengthen your memories of them. As I said, later on people start confusing similar Kanji.

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I think he was referring to it being “mentally slow” because he had already learned all of this stuff anyways.

Honestly after reading through this, I agree with those who think WK may not be for you, darkgaze. Your pace is quite slow, and the fact that youll have that slow pace going through a lot of items that are already review for you seems like a waste. I saw someone recommend RTK, which I cant support nor hate on because ive never tried it. My suggestion is just to do something that you can pick up where you left off that supports a slow pace. WK does sort of support a slow pace, but it has its limits. As @LawlietBlack said, the point of SRS is to catch the items as soon as you are close to forgetting them. If you can rarely check in, you aren’t going to get the full effect.

I’m not sure if anybody addressed this because I was lazy and only got through about half the thread of really long posts but if someone did address this I’m sorry!

I just wanted to mention about the not “useful” words thing. I hear this a lot from people, I started looking at it as “If you want to be like a native Japanese speaker, all vocabulary is useful.” Maybe that’s the completionist in me but I feel like its important to learn it all. It really depends on what your end goal is, is it being conversational in Japanese or is it being like a native speaker? Some words may be rare or words you don’t like but you really, really never know when you might run into words like that. Sometimes, words that come up in books are rare ones, I’m sure its the same in your native language too! For example, right now I’m going though a writing practice book aimed at Japanese working adults, the goal of the book is to make writing neater, initially it goes through all the kana but then it goes into Kanji phrases that maybe you would never run across unless you were reading a letter to someone really revered. My point is that in that case it isn’t “useful” for me to know but now I know them in case I run into them. It’s kind of like being prepared for what may happen, you never know if the end of the world is coming so people prepare bug-out kits. You never know when you’ll run into a word but it’s not useless to know it.

Sorry for rambling. Hope that made sense.

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Considering I’ve done literally every single Radical, Kanji and Vocabulary on this site, I think I can talk a little bit more about what’s “likely”.

They did give you the choice, of using this site or not using this site. There are tons of good Anki decks out there.

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Well. I’m having fun learning the first kanji anyway. Learning new vocab. This is a game for me, mainly. Needs a lot of moments, which I don’t have, but slowly I add new lessons and I’ll do all this in a slow pace (not very slow). Hopefully I can learn something interesting in a couple of lessons.

I don’t want to burn out… but I already found I finally learned “shita” and “ue” for sure… and it took several years of regretting. haha

I guess most ‘words’ we’ll learn will have some use, even if it is only for a moment. For me, it’s when you to the end of a sentence to guess the meaning of something you don’t know. Or try to connect it to a word/radical/reading that looks/sounds similar to what you know already.

Same! Those words I thought I knew already. Left, right, anything number-related… (笑)

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