Habits I know at level 33 that I wish I knew at level 0

WaniKani Tips & Tricks
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I have been grinding for some time now and these are 3 habits I wish I knew from the start.

Play Audio: Always play the audio for a word before moving on, listen and repeat the word. This way you can work on listening and speaking skills along the way. I cemented some pretty bad habits by saying words wrong in my head.

Review your mistakes: After each review session always always always review your mistakes immediately. This will increase your correct answers by at least 10% on future review sessions, while pushing things through to burned twice as fast, and more than halving the reviews you need to do in the future.

Always have Japanese subtitles on: Even when watching non-Japanese content, always keep Japanese subtitles enabled so you can spot Kanji you might know and improve your retention. If using a mobile device and I don’t see the option for Japanese in the limited list of languages I just need to add the language under my account settings first.

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Thanks , you saved me from speaking in a

..crooked way . :smiley:

CatThankYouGIF

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So true. In fact I go even deeper. First I say the word, then type it, then repeat it after hearing the auto-play. Drilling the sounds this way into my brain has one more effect: sometimes the word just sounds wrong when I say it. So I pause, reconsider, try other combination and realize that’s the one that feels right. Only then do I type it and it saved me already from several mistakes. (The mistakes I do make are quite enough for me, thank you. These avoided ones make me happy.)

Hmm, it takes all the mistakes from the last 24 hours, not just the last review session, doesn’t it? I’ve been avoiding this extra study in fear of it interfering with SRS. You seem to be convinced it works for you though. Well, it’s worth a try for a week or two. Thanks for the tip.

Btw, do you do anything special for critical items? I’d love it if those had “extra study” button, but sadly they don’t. They irritate me. :angry:

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Extra study doesn’t interfere with the main SRS review schedule.

You could also do things the old fashioned way and write the words down on paper a few hundred times. :smiling_face_with_horns:

I also sometimes do visualization- close my eyes and picture the kanji in my head. Sometimes my mind wanders and this happens naturally at bed time.

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I like to write down those in Critical condition haha.

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I don’t know if it says it anywhere in WaniKani, but you can press the J key on your keyboard to play the audio without clicking the button (on desktop). Just posting that in case that helps anybody.

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To me it seems the mistakes are only from the session I just completed as long as I go through them each time. Recently they changed mistakes to show only 1 at a time instead of all at once but it still seems to work for me by clicking through each one (you don’t have to clear the spoiler for each either)

I have not made use of the critical items category yet personally.

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As well as the F key to show the reading / meaning when you fail. I never touch the mouse when doing reviews unless I need to look something up like compare similar Kanji, etc.

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Playing the audio is good advice. Sometimes I think I know a word but Japanese people don’t understand me because I don’t use the proper intonation. It’s good practice to try to get it stuck in your brain.

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