Getting slowed down after level 16

[kuroneko1983]

Hello guys, my story with Wanikani is similar to many I’ve read around this forum
I started an account and never really went through it, 4 years later after trying to write kanjis on my daily, going through the Kumon material all the way to level K, I took a year break from Japanese learning, mostly because family and I took a 10 months trip back home from Japan so my kids could learn my language.

Upon my return to Japan, I started classes in a Japanese school, at this point my Japanese was advanced beginner, basically starting the course at the 5 last chapters of the book Genki 2, by mid-March this year, 4 and a half months ago, I came back to Wani Kani and finished the first 3 free stages in a matter of a month and kept going ballistic on it.

I believe I was reviewing everything that I have studied inconsistently all this period I have lived in Japan, up to level 15, it’s when I felt things started to become a bit more difficult, but it was now on level 16 that I thought that things stopped to stick right away, I repeat so many times the same mistakes in the same kanjis. At this point, I believe it’s imperative to anyone studying Wanikani to start delving into reading, whatever it be, Easy NHK website, mangas with furigana and eventually try to immerse more and more.

My kids do speak Nihongo, yet very simplistic since they’re 4 and 2 but I don’t speak Nihongo to them, mostly my mother language, but I do try to pay attention to their conversations with the mother. Talking to my wife is a lost battle, I tried too many times to impose at least an hour a week for that but it doesn’t work, one has to be willing to be your teacher, out of pressure things don’t work and I don’t want to add more burden to our lives, given the fact she is in corporate Japan grid and we have two small kids, which turns our lives pretty stressful on itself.

Well, I just needed to vent a bit and tell about my experience, and I would like to have feedback from other people who went through similar situations, and what worked for them. I do feel like now I can read way more kanjis than before, even if I don’t know the pronunciation, I can get the meaning, whether it’s street signs or watching Japanese series on Netflix with Japanese subtitles and pausing every 10 seconds to read it slowly (it’s a f#cking hell, but what isn’t when you’re getting started with something important?).

Thanks for your time and attention

[Lisaveeta]

I’m at Level 16 too & I do seem to be spending more time reviewing (I guess there’s just more to review) so sometimes I just do my reviews & leave learning new kanji/vocab as I’m not here to speed through the course (from the outset I decided 3 years was a doable commitment).

And yes, definitely, using the kanji you learn from WK is the best long term way of making it stick (and more enjoyable too!). I’ve joined the WK Community Reading and Listening challenges & am finding them a great way to keep me motivated and on track.

[servette]

Another level 16 here…

I’m finding that, unlike, say, level 12, a lot of the vocabulary that I’m encountering here is just the kanji for words that I already know, which is a lot easier to handle than situations where both the word and its kanji are new.

I have seemingly been learning Japanese (or, actually, ‘not learning Japanese’) for what feels like forever, and so I do already know a fair amount of vocabulary. I get a lot of satisfaction out of discovering “oh, so that’s how to write that word that I previously only knew in either romaji or kana”.

It may be a reasonable approach for you to hold off from taking a lot of lessons, and instead spending more time on reading and listening and textbook grammar practice.

[kuroneko1983]

Yes, at this level I left a lot of new lessons pending for much longer than before. I am following a rule of thumb I saw several users mentioning here to keep apprentice + (guru/10) =< 150 to not feel overwhelmed and trying to do more Bunpro N3 level vocabs and grammar rules because I feel I am really falling behind on that. Also been trying to watch consistently to the dorama Midnight Dinner and others with the captions on. To be sincere from the level 13 I felt that some vocabs and kanji kind of didn’t stick but I kept moving and I feel like 80% of them came to terms of my knowledge, the other 20% I am planning to do a few crude camming sessions, plus handwriting to create muscle memory.
I am in a state of desperation to be able to properly communicate in different settings and move from the current stage in my life but I don’t blame myself since lots of things were going on simultaneously in my life and I was stretching myself too thin.

Thaks for your input anyways

[Otoko68]

Similar story to you (except I had stopped japanese for many years when starting wanikani). The first levels where fairly easy for the reasons you outlined. What I can contribute to your observations:

• For me the first levels were about creating a habit, more than learning lots of new words. It’s only after that, that I had to commit to memorization fully. The mnemonics were very useful in that regard.
• What worked best for me is to read without pausing every sentence to look up the words. I had to battle my instincts to just read one manga cover to cover without look up and see how much I could understand. By doing so, I really appreciated how every wanikani level did add up new understandings.
• Level 25 onwards is where I really felt more ease to read and it got more and more comfortable after that.

[Soggynachos1]

I’m a level 15 and really felt the burden befalling upon me around here.

I actually significantly slowed down so I could lower my apprentice count from around 200 to 100 before I went back to close to full speed. I was getting way more reviews wrong than made me comfortable, and the looming piles of reviews were starting to annoy me. I was going full speed, though, and just started learning Japanese in March. I’m making significant progress using Wanikani for kanji and some vocab, and then MaruMori for grammar studies. I also read satori reader and watch one Japanese show a night before bed.

It’s hard because I still understand maybe 5% of what I’m immersing in and I’m spending 3-4 hours a day on learning Japanese. It’s important to just stay motivated and also know your limits to ensure you’re soaking in as much of the new daily knowledge as possible

[talkingalone]

11 or 10 days per level is quite fast, at least by my standards. Don’t feel bad about slowing down. The important thing is to keep working on it, it doesn’t matter if some levels take you 14 or 15 days as long as you don’t leave it.

This is my chart, and sometimes I feel like I’m going too fast.

For instance, I have been on level 12 for 5 days and I still haven’t learned any kanji for it because I have a pile of vocab from the previous one. So what? This is all about learning, not about levelling up.

[DuoLingo]

Yeah, we’ve been there! I used to have about 100 to 120 vocab remaining from my previous level whenever I leveled up. But now, with Lesson Picker, I usually have about 5 (+/-) vocab left over

[RainbowBrite13]

I’ve been going really slow on WaniKani, but I noticed quite a few vocabulary on level 15 vocabulary I already know. Immersion definitely helps for sure like anime with and without Japanese subs, manga, otome games, and other games in Japanese. 上司 is a level 15 word and it’s come up quite a bit in Even if Tempest.

I don’t think you have to pause for the subtitles, just let them go through and notice what you happen to pick up.

There is also Japanese language learning video games you can do too.