Help with a Huge decision in my Japanese Journey: To drop WaniKani or not

Kumirei gave a fact and didn’t draw a conclusion from it, but since I think that fact could be misleading to a newer learner I would like to extrapolate on it a bit. 河豚 is an indispensable word when talking about the subject of puffer fish and a highly common one in fishing situations I presume. The nature of the word will cause it to be concentrated in some contexts and virtually non existent in others. Thus a balanced dataset can actually be misleading since usually our selection of texts to read for fun aren’t balanced at all. Thus, you have to consider the frequency in what you plan to read as well, and for these two its literally not even remotely close.

Of the 70 books I had and could check, 自業自得 was 26 times as prevalent as フグ and 河豚 literally never showed up.

On jpdb.io, 自業自得 is in 42% of novels while フグ is in 3%. 河豚 is in 1%.

At the end of the day, if you are gonna read light novels like youjitsu, 自業自得 will be infinitely more valuable. And that point extents beyond this case. Wanikani and other pregenerated wordlists are going to have you prioritizing a lot of less valuable words over more valuable words for what you wanna read. Thats just what you’re sacrificing for not having to pick what to learn.

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Use wanikani as a pronunciation-learning tool, not a vocabulary-learning tool. It was created to help people read kanji, and that’s pretty much it. Study the words you come across in your other methods because it will expand your vocabulary, and use wanikani to make reading (and looking up) new words easier.
I am constantly googling the difference between words in wanikani because they are listed with the same English translation.

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I think you just unintentionally made my decision.
I leveled up to level 27 yesterday and was greeted by 6 kanji that I already knew. I’m sure once I Guru those I will be meant with multiple words that I already have in Anki as well. (Clarification, I do not think that I am anywhere close to the level that you were when you quit WK, just saying that you captured my frustrations pretty well.)

I think you just intentionally made my decision. I will eventually learn all the words that are on WaniKani as they come up in my readings. But I should prioritize the words that are appearing right now first.

I’m gonna try doing a WaniKani-less month (expect for reviews, I believe in SRS too much). And just see how it goes. I plan to add the kanji that I see often and probably even write them out to help them stick in my mind. I know waiting until 40’s would be a good idea because you will have more of the higher frequency Kanji learned by then. But, if they are higher frequency then I’ll probably see them all the time in my readings.

Been thinking about adding Quartet to my grammar studies for a while now, but thanks to you I think I’m gonna pull the trigger. I’m certain it will be a great addition to BunPro or vise versa.

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But like… you know blowfish/pufferfish right? We use fugu in English when talking about the food since we tend to use borrowed words for cultural things, but it’s just a kind of pufferfish.

Honestly never heard of it until WaniKani. Always just called them Pufferfish.

Right… so you did know pufferfish. I have to think the decision to make “fugu” the primary meaning is heavily influenced by the fact that the company is called Tofugu. If that wasn’t the case, they’d probably have it as pufferfish with fugu as alternative.

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TokiniAndy or however his channel is spelled, the same guy that made a comprehensive Youtube study series for Genki, chose Quartet for his intermediate textbooks and made a comprehensive study series for them, plus there are many online services that have additional content for Quartet. It’s a bit more comprehensive than An Integrated Approach, which is most people’s next step after Genki, and an easier transition than going straight to Tobira Advanced.

I am still working my way through all of my N5-N4 textbooks, and then I too plan on going to Quartet.

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Yeah, he might have unilaterally made my decision lol.

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Also, I don’t see it get a lot of mentions, but the Marugoto series is phenomenal. Most of the content is accessible for free from their website, but I also purchased the books, which are admittedly a bit pricey for what they are. Marugoto lives up to its name, however, because it really takes you through Japanese in its entirety. At least up to the intermediate level. There’s benefit in reviewing the lower-level content because there’s a lot of knowledge gap fillers in there. Marugoto uses the CEFR progression measurement as opposed to the nonsensical JLPT, so it doesn’t quite align with JLPT, and that’s a good thing.

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Haven’t read any of the other replies here, but if you want a perspective from the quitting side, I’ll give some input. I started Wanikani in October of 2020, about a year after I started teaching myself Japanese, and it was great. I honestly think this site is the best way to learn Kanji from zero. However, about a year ago I started shifting more of my time towards immersion, and soon after I learned how to mine my own Anki cards from said immersion. This was after I had read through AJATT and refold (by which I mean the free, non-scam parts of both lol) and nowadays, like you, I’m starting to think immersion might really just be king.

Around Wanikani level 20, I started noticing that I had way more fun with my daily Anki SRS than with Wanikani. My Anki deck was full of material I actually cared about and wanted to understand (for me it’s video games, manga, and anime) while Wanikani started feeling more and more like work, or even worse, school. So about a month ago I decided I would quit Wanikani and simply replace it with Anki and immersion, with the occasional grammar study, all of which I’m honestly finding to be way more fun than stressing out about the hourly Wanikani SRS.

So yeah, I’m now level 25, and I’ve stopped doing lessons. My subscription runs out in three months since I had bought the yearly plan a bit ago, so I’ve decided to just do reviews now until my sub runs out. Nowadays I’m having fun watching anime, reading manga, and playing video games all in Japanese. I don’t understand a lot, but I’m enjoying what I can understand. My thinking is that if something isn’t fun for you anymore, there’s no shame in quitting and trying something else. So that’s where I’m at right now, idk if this is useful for you or not lol.

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I think I ran into fugu within 15 minutes of playing Animal Crossing in Japanese. Probably the best reason to know that word, however, is for reading restaurant menus.

That’s the same thing, fugu is just the Japanese word for pufferfish.

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I forgot to mention, if your goal is to read any book you want without a dictionary, you’ve got a very long road ahead of you. Shameless plug, but I have a video linked on my profile of what I did getting to essentially that point and my thoughts on getting there in general. Might be something you would be interested in.

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Here I am contemplating resubbing to either OSRS or WoW and I see your ironman btw comment x) Part of the reason I’m hesitant with that is because I know I should be putting the time in Japanese lol!

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I guess another perspective - I’ve just started reading 夜カフェ as my first Japanese book in a while.

I started WK early in my Japanese learning in October 2019. I also used Bunpro for grammar and Kitsun for vocab, and I’ve never managed to get on with a textbook - I suspect due to lack of discipline!

I think I started reading an ABBC book a few months after starting WK and while I battled with it, I finished it. I then read Kiki’s delivery service, a couple of the わんわん series and battled my way almost halfway through コンビニ人間 before I fell behind and stopped due to lack of momentum. (I plan to go back to it.)

With all of those books, I had to look up tons of words. I then stopped reading for maybe a year, but continued my SRS (hit level 60 in October 2020 but still trying to burn everything!). Now I’m reading again, I still find I have to look up lots of words, but I almost always recognise the kanji. Even if I don’t know a specific word written in Kanji I can often guess it. my main hold up is colloquial speech which I guess just means I should read more. But having gone through WK I now don’t think kanji knowledge is holding me up, especially for basic books.

Like I say, just another perspective. For me WK has been worth it, but different things work for different people.

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Making people give up WK:

Fugu: 2
All other vocabs: 0

It’s like the other vocabs are not even trying :sweat_smile:

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里心 tried, but was sadly defeated :pensive:

Gone but not forgotten…

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In all fairness I’ve seen 里心 like once which is more than I’ve seen 河豚.

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Ok I’m sorry but I’m lazy and didn’t want to read your whole story but I wanted to help. So from what I got from the short amount i read (again sorry for that) is that one of your main sources of learning Japanese is wanikani, which to be honest is good but not greatttt… Wanikani is not a great source for vocab as when going through learning it teaches you some unnecessary words that are just to help learn kanji.I have also been a procrastinator for all my life and I also took a break from wanikani… Anyway I think instead of just doing srs systems you should apply your knowledge to other things by watching stuff and reading.And if you don’t understand a grammar point watch a video on it.Also 10 Anki cards a day doesn’t seem enough to me.Also as you said your struggling to get through 1 page in a book that probably means your book level is way to high. I’ve done the same I mean I’m talking about this like i don’t have a dozen books on my shelf that I can’t read. Reading children’s books is boring I know but maybe it will be better just to build the basics.

I’m sorry if this doesn’t make sense again like I said I didn’t read the whole thing…
Byeee- Imtryingjapanese

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WK is only teaching you one aspect of Japanese. And to be fair, there is no resource that teaches you all aspects of Japanese language equally well. Nor can there ever be one because that would be one monster of a website that is not very wieldy to navigate. So just use whatever motivates you, either reading NHK Web Easy News or using BunPro, iKnow.jp, Glossika, Memrise, Lingodeer, etc.

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Yes agreed. I started with Irodori plus Marugoto online so that when I do see the grammar explained by my tutor, I am not coming from a place of understanding the language through grammar but using grammar to understand what I know.