Handling Wanikani with other resources

Well today is not the best example but I have 500 reviews today and just finished my first 200. Like Alan234 says, you become quicker and larger batches wont take up hours and hours so don’t worry. I also spend around 15-20 minutes for 100 reviews.
You also probably wont get 500 reviews in a day at 50 if you just spread out your lessons instead of doing them all on the same day.

It’s very difficult to focus on multiple things, so when I’m studying seriously I choose like “one-and-a-half” things to study. One is my primary thing and the other is what I do when I have extra energy.

So back when I was doing WK, Wanikani was my main thing, and I made sure that no matter what happened I did at least that every day. Then when time permitted and I had the energy, I would do my grammar. I tried not to spend more than two hours a day.

Nowadays vocabulary is my main thing and reading is my ‘other thing.’ I only read when I’m feeling up to it, but I do do vocabulary reviews no matter what.

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WaniKani was my most important resource for a long time. This led to pretty funny situations in which it was easier to recognize obscure words such as 閣僚 (WK level 29) from text than to understand a sentence like 「今朝は寝坊したからバスを乗り遅れた。」

At the same time I hadn’t made much use of other resources. Being over level 40 in WK without finishing Genki 1 was unbalanced to say the least. About half a year ago I decided to stop studying new lessons in WaniKani. I still do the reviews, but the new lessons will have to wait until Genki 2 and some other books are finished. Maybe I’ll even let all the reviews become burned before going to new lessons again. And then I have this huge backlog in KaniWani

Another resource I use is www.iknow.jp. It’s a vocabulary SRS system whose main strength in my opinion is a huge amount of example sentences that are read aloud. It has improved my listening comprehension.

This is my resource plan right now. The bolded ones are what I’m using at the moment, others are for the future.

WaniKani: keep doing reviews. Start new lessons when KaniWani backlog is cleaned.
iKnow: do reviews and new lessons
KaniWani: on hold, start doing reviews when all WK reviews are burned
Genki 2: finish the exercises
Basic Kanji Book: finish volume 1, then start volume 2
2000 Japanese Vocabulary Words for JLPT N3: finish studying the book
Sou Matome N3 books: start when Genki 2 and the 2000 vocab book is finished.
Tobira: start in the distant future when the previous books are finished

So there’s a lot to do! I also use about an hour for studying every day, so it will take a long time to clear through this. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to start new WaniKani lessons before the next decade. :grin:

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That’s what I want to do as well. End this Kanji nightmare so I can see Japanese as any other language without an incomprehensible writing system…

But just wondering, I guess at level 60 you still get reviews but no lessons anymore, am I right?

@Uzuki I am in the same situation haha, have a lot of resources but no time to go through them. Do people actually use KaniWani here? With this it’s gonna be even harder to find time to use other resources :smiley:

Good luck anyway, you will need it :slight_smile:

I don’t know how popular KaniWani is, but it looks like it compliments WK really well. If I were starting now, I would use WK, KW and iKnow at the same time and try to progress equally. I would also try to finish Genki 1 before WK level 10 and Genki 2 before level 20. But well, that did not turn out to be my path, this did. :smiley:

Thanks, you too!

Yeah, I’ve been done with Wanikani for like a year and a half now. Although I make my own lessons now, so there’s still plenty of work to do.

Okay thanks! Good luck with your “special” lessons :smiley:

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Tofugu’s article on studying Japanese notes to wait until after level 10 to begin with Genki or a similar book for the reasons that Draga states. Being able to focus on grammar rather than looking up every other word is fairly helpful. I think that’s why Japanese gets the rap that it does for being a “difficult language”, even by difficult language standards. I find it far easier than German. Gendered words, cases with changing noun endings…

Can you link me that article pls?

Here you go. Important to note that that is a living page, and it gets updated on occasion. There used to be an entire timeline that said what you should be doing outside of WK at certain levels, but I didn’t know that page gets updated and I don’t think I wrote it down.

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すごい。ありがとう!

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Here’s one of the only other references I found to the leveling guide. It gave ranges and said what to do in that range. Beginning grammar and using a textbook was recommended at a minimum of level 10, ideally level 20 if you didn’t want to mess with kanji at all during your early grammar study. I’m not sure why it doesn’t recommend level 16, where you max out the N5 kanji.

I never understood Iknow, with the first few lessons I seem to give up. Maybe I’m not doing it right idk. Also not too interested in added another subscription though. I use memrise for a lot of stuff and like it with many the custom decks that are made for Genki, lingodeer and others.

Kaniwani works well, I don’t keep up with it at the same pace as wk but it’s good to improve you recall ability which can be useful especially when trying to speak.

Ya it’s difficult to use a lot of higher level grammar without knowing alot vocabulary/kanji. I can only use simple nouns like cat and dog so much lol. Genki teaches a lot of vocabulary in hiragana but then you have to relearn them later in kanji.
So there is something good to learning a lot of kanji and vocabulary first though wanikani before going too in depth with grammar

Has iknow really been that helpful to you? What deck are you on at the moment? I’ve been debating on whether it’s worth getting a monthly subscription or not and I needed some perspective from an iknow user.

I’ve read some negative comments on reddit about iknow being only good for the first 1000 words. They say the srs system tends to fail after you complete that deck.

I find there is little time for anything else. I’ve spoken Japanese for years but not formally studied for over 20 and I’d never really done much kanji. I think if I didn’t know any grammar or vocab I’d be doing that instead of WK. As it stands I can put the advanced grammar on hold for a bit until I’ve finished level 60. I have to say though - it’s far easier studying when you can read everything so despite WK being a slog and time consuming I feel it’s really beneficial.

I was in a similar boat to you, and some of the pain points but so far pulling 10 items a day to my KameSame regimen has been a gradual offset and I can already tell I’m able to produce words a lot better (and with an interface that I can stick to, which I struggled with KaniWani). If you want to give it a try feel free to reach out!

That’s interesting, I just couldn’t get into Memrise when I tried to use it. If I remember correctly there were lots of different courses to choose from (users made them themselves?), so it was difficult to choose what was suitable at my level and where to go next. With WaniKani and iKnow it’s nice to know you can go from level 1 to 60 and everything builds up, because it’s made by the same people.

Today was actually a milestone for me, since I started the first deck of Core 4000 series. So (hiragana and katakana decks not included) I have started 3005 items and there are 2995 items left! :grin:

I got a lifetime membership for iKnow in 2015. At first I kept it really slow - WaniKani was my main focus and did iKnow only when there was extra time or energy. But at some point speaking and understanding had become much more easier and it seemed the chief culprit was iKnow with its example sentences that are voiced and translated. WaniKani has example sentences too, but it’s the voicing that really matters in my experience. It’s important to hear the word and other words it usually comes with. So about half a year ago I stopped taking new lessons in WaniKani and focused on iKnow. At that time I was just finishing Core 2000, so I’ve started 11 or 12 decks in six months. Since then I’ve usually clocked 3-4 hours into iKnow every week.

This is the first time I hear about SRS failing after Core 1000, and I don’t really get it. The system works the same before and after that point. Maybe it’s because iKnow doesn’t burn items the way WK does? :thinking: Instead, when a mastered item comes up again and you get it right again, it shows that the next study is “over a year from now”. But having items I mastered 1-2 years ago showing up doesn’t bother me. It’s good practice to hear and read those sentences again. Maybe that’s it? Can’t imagine anything else.

Thanks! Looks nice. :smiley: I’ll try it when I have the time!

Maybe I’ll take another try at it. This was while back ago so maybe I might have different views. Ya most of memrise is user made stuff. They do have a offical Japanese course, there are a couple of them but they were not too exciting.
I’ll be taking a college Japanese class here soon and I wanted to focus on genki and there are memrise decks just for genki. I could also use anki but not crazy about anki even though I spend like the $20 bucks for the Apple app lol.

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