Hello there! I’m up to level 15, finally catching up after having taken a long break. But I was quizzing myself on vocab to catch up, and I realized suddenly that I can’t recognize words without the kanji. Like, sometimes I can remember words through the kana alone, but most of the time if I hear, say, “ろうどうしゃ”, I have no idea what that means, but I instantly know “労働者” means “laborer”.
I’m not sure what to do about this, outside of throwing together an Anki deck using the kana for words instead of kanji. It’s funny, since before Wanikani I didn’t know any kanji and so relied totally on the kana to learn words, but now I’m having the opposite problem and I’m not sure what to do about it.
I have a hard time reading kana-only text for this reason as well, and by extension, listening is kind of difficult to.
The easiest way, I suspect, is a lot of immersion. Whenever you come across a word you don’t know, look it up in the dictionary, after enough lookups and in context it might start sticking.
That’s exactly what I did for a long time. My thought process was that there are no kanji when a person talks to me either But it also had the amazing side effect that I have almost no issues reading kana-heavy texts.
As an experiment, I stopped adding this third card to my Anki deck (I still do J->E and E->J) recently because it’s a bit time-consuming. I‘m curious to see how this works out. If I‘m not happy with the results, I can always go back to adding them back in.
Can you recognize pitch accent yet? If you can, I would install the pitch accent script and memorize that with the readings. I have a lot of trouble with kana only texts as well, but I can generally recognize words I’ve learned in conversation due to a combo of pitch accent and context.
I have the same problems as well. Without kanji I find text much harder to read.
But I remember reading a Japanese story. The main character was comenting on how hard it was to read his friends letter because it was entirely in hiragana.
But it also had the amazing side effect that I have almost no issues reading kana-heavy texts.