This doesn’t mean you should drop SRS (at least not now), but WK is a suboptimal way to approach SRS. For a few reasons:
Learning kanji in isolation is a waste of time. Especially learning readings in isolation.
You should learn words, not kanji. Knowing kanji and their readings is completely useless if you don’t know the words, so why not just learn the words in the first place?
And even though learning kanji meanings in isolation might be helpful at the very beginning, to give you some sort of mnemonics, learning kanji readings is a complete waste, because readings are not consistent.
In WK, you basically learn vocab out of context, which is not good at all. The example sentences are mostly garbage, and they are not relevant to you or your interests because you haven’t picked them.
WK is designed so that you get a lot of vocab lessons using the same kanji in a very short time period. Studying very similar information out of context like this is only gonna cause memory interference, and you’re not gonna learn much.
The SRS of WK is very inflexible, and is purposely designed to slow you down so that you pay for the service for a longer time. It’s common practice to skip or delete cards while doing SRS, but WK doesn’t allow you to do that.
In my opinion, the best way to learn vocabulary is to read/listen to material that you are interested in (books, light novels, anime with subtitles) and source the vocab from there, using a flexible and customizable SRS like Anki (which is free). This approach has the advantages that (1) you automatically learn vocab that is important and relevant to your interests, (2) you learn it in a context that you have a personal connection with. Words stick more in memory if they come from a story you care about.
i’d finish, but mostly because i really need to finish things I start, even when it’s to my detriment. Since you can pretty much put as much or as little time into it as you want, I see no harm in continuing since it is extra practice for kanji no matter how many ways you look at it.
If you have visited or lived in Japan, you’d see fugu all the time. Usually it’s written in hiragana but if you end up in certain izakayas they will often write the menu plates on the wall in kanji. It’s also famous across the world because the fish is poisonous and can kill you if it’s not prepared correctly. The word has been adopted in English, similar to umami, and is in the dictionary. In other words, you picked a poor example of an esoteric word.
On the street through, there are usually other clues other than the kanji to tell you they serve fugu.
I don’t think is a fair, or accurate, characterization of Tofugu’s intent.
By the time you finish the free levels, you’ll have more lessons than you know what to do with.
They offer a pretty generous lifetime subscription which makes total sense if you aren’t speed running. They wouldn’t do this if their only intent was to squeeze more monthly fees out of people.
To be honest it feels this way to me too. Purposefully inflexible for the sake of extending subs. The “generous lifetime” costs more than 3 years of subs - how long do you need to use a system before you have acquired everything that it has to offer? Hopefully less than 3 years… and even with the artificially extended review times, 3 years still seems like a stretch to me. It’s just like having a lifetime sub for any other language system like Duolingo. Just constantly reviewing the same content (although in Duo’s defense, at least you get to PICK WHICH CONTENT AND WHEN TO REVIEW IT).
It’s probably time to tell you guys that I made this entire post just to remember the word Fugu. Sorry for any confusion & thanks for all the help… JKJK
I do not think that it is such a bad example given the fact that I do not live in Japan and never plan to. I would have eventually came across this word at some point in my learning career. However, like Vanilla mentioned, it is not a very valuable word for what I am doing right now and I never would have committed it to memory in sacrifice of other words.
Regardless, I think everyone should try some raw fugu, I hear its a once in a lifetime opportunity.
How would a new user know about said sale (I didn’t know about it)? Unless the user subbed in the last 1/3 of the year and then caught the end of year sale and got prorated, lifetime would still come out to more than 2 years of subs for most people, no?
I’m less offended by the pricing than by the artificial delay, and the double whammy you get for making a mistake (still being asked the same question, but still going down a level instead of simply not advancing if you get it correct on the first retry attempt). It’s a system that seems to actively discourage advancement. And getting a few items wrong doesn’t just hold you up from learning those items, but you are unable to unlock the things that are dependent on them or advance to the next level. Everything seems to be designed to severely punish mistakes with so much cumulative artificial delay.
Too late now. You’re never going to forget what a river pig is even if you try!
Funnily, there’s this other guy who is gave up WK because of fugu. Really? Hilarious.
Why not say you’ve learned enough to get by and leave it at that?
This is, at its core, how a spaced repetition system works. If you get it wrong, you see it more (it “moves down in levels,” though in many systems that might be a little more invisible). Anki is a totally free program which does the exact same thing. Say what you will about the levels – I think you are blowing them out in proportion in alleging some sort of artificial slowdown, and from being in the forums I can assure you there are very very few people who, once they see their full workload, wish Wanikani would let them do even more. It’s exceedingly more likely for someone to drown themselves in the workload WK already allows.
But regardless of that part, your other complaint is against the very definition of a spaced repetition system. Discouraging advancement is also probably a good thing to do if you’re proving you haven’t sufficiently learned the current material prior to advancing…
Anki doesn’t withhold new cards when you make a mistake - it puts the card back in the pile but continues to give you the specified number of new cards every day. My point is valid. A few mistaken items shouldn’t prevent you from unlocking new terms for several days.
Maybe you phrased it badly, but that’s not what this says:
the double whammy you get for making a mistake (still being asked the same question, but still going down a level instead of simply not advancing if you get it correct on the first retry attempt
The “double whammy” is SRS being SRS. But alright your problem is singularly with levels then. It’s just that SRS is going to interact with levels by being SRS. Do you think there should be no gating at all? Or that it shouldn’t be “a few mistaken items?” Because Wanikani is rather cumulative, with radicals and kanji building off others, some radicals being whole kanji. The argument in favor of levels then is both that it ensures you solidly know the prerequisites, and it stops people from taking on such an enormous load when they don’t understand the SRS and how much their workload will grow by the time burn reviews come up (which still happens within the system, though less than it could). And some people benefit from the gamification but I could take or leave that personally.
In that way it’s basically saving people from themselves, and maybe you totally think you aren’t in need of that. But I find it kind of irritating to immediately jump to it being a scam to wring more dollars out of subscribers.
By the way you could just get kanji info, even wanikani info itself on anki if you truly want to speed up that much.
I’m just complaining because complaining speeds up the learning process. There is no perfect, one size fits all language learning system, but I still want to complain, because I have feelings and they need to be heard!
I don’t understand what your point is, here. The free levels aren’t enough to read pretty much any Japanese, so they are pretty irrelevant. They are basically just a “free trial” of WK, which is great, but their existence doesn’t really go counter to my claim.
It makes no pedagogical sense to force you to go through radicals lessons (or vocabs) that you have already learned as kanji, or to not allow you to skip lessons for kanji that you might already know, or reorder lessons. The only reason for all this is to keep you playing the WK game for longer (and therefore pay more), a game which isn’t, as I tried to argue, designed to teach you Japanese in the most efficient and comfortable way as its primary goal. But as a learner, that should be your primary goal.
The lifetime subscription only exists because Tofugu would otherwise force you to pay to keep reviewing for lessons you’ve already done, a practice which already feels hardly justifiable. It’s not generious to offer a discount on something that is already overpriced.
By the way, I’m not necessarily criticizing Tofugu’s choices here. They are a business, so obviously they want to make money. I’m just saying we, as Japanese learners, can do much better than WK. Learning to read japanese shouldn’t, and luckily doesn’t, cost a penny.
Add to this that WK treats every user as a Day 1 learner, being unable to skip any lessons, do a knowledge assessment for placement, or do a quick remedial lesson to gauge their current knowledge.
