Can anyone learn kanji (or Japanese, or any language) for free? Sure. It’s possible.
Personally, I was spinning my wheels before I started WaniKani, constantly hovering around 500 or 600 total kanji and not progressing. WaniKani pushed me over that hump.
Was a bargain as far as I’m concerned.
So they’re scamming people, but you’re not criticizing that?
“Forcing people to go slow so they pay more” is not the only possible reason for the design of the site, but if that’s what you think they’re doing, that seems worthy of criticism.
To be serious for a moment, I think letting off steam is fine and complaining helps with that. The danger is when you spend more time “about” a language instead of “in” it.
Actually I am serious
It 's not my intention to criticize others for complaining, I think complaining is often necessary.
BUT, in my experience, really, like I am living in Japan for altogether more than 10 years now and so I heard many many stories from others (beginners, intermediate, long time residents…) about their ideas of studying Japanese and there is a very strong correlation of complaining to quitting. Even people who actually studied Japanese in university have fix ideas like Kanjis are inferior to the alphabet or that their brain is not suitable for learning more than intermediate Japanese because of all kind of circumstances.
I don’t think I am smarter than all of these people but what I tried to avoid is to overthink difficulties and instead just do something (anything) even if it turns out to be a mistake. The more mistakes (strategy- wise) you are willing to make the more you learn in the end I think. The more you “think” about learning the less of an outcome there will be. There is something like a butterfly effect your initial attitude has on the end result after years of performed Karma . Start with a small doubt and suddenly you end up in an all English speaking environment, start with complete naivety overestimating your abilities and you end up fairly fluent in an all Japanese environment. Not to judge which is better btw, both has pros and cons.
Because complaining is very unjapanese of them and it presents an insurmountable roadblock on their path to becoming a literal nihonjin.
Reading this thread, part of me wishes wanikani forums displayed levels based off your ability to pass certain language quizzes like certain discord servers do. As gatekeepy and elitist as it is, the low level people suddenly get a lot less bold about complaining and arguing about everything lol. Methodology and japanese learning arguments become rarer and only amongst people who have…learned japanese really.
I think it’s natural that these discussions appear frequently, it is a natural consequence of how the human mind works actually. To take past experiences and project them into the future. The problem is, that you don’t have any experience on what is necessary to study Japanese (thousands of Kanji) so the thought process is based on wrong assumptions. If people would just trust more experienced learners not so many would quit. Don’t know how to help beginners here. It’s often the case that recommendations are backfiring. I would like to write a level 60 post with recommendations for beginners for quite a while but somehow I have the feeling that it is better to just keep these ideas to where they are now
Ye, things are always gonna end up polluted with opinions from all sorts of people even if they aren’t qualified. My man is asking what he needs to do in order to read a book with no dictionary and is probably getting a lot of advice from people who have never read a book even with a dictionary.
To me thats like going on a cooking forum asking how to make a bomb ass lasagna and 40% of the replies are from people who have never cooked, and 40% are from people who have experience cooking but not lasagna, and then 20% are from people who regularly make lasagna …but you don’t know whos who lol. If anything it just makes stuff needlessly confusing and difficult despite the fact that everyone had good intentions.
I think it’s more like a person trying to learn how to cook a lasagna, and weighing the glut of options available for learning, and thinking that a specific cooking instructional resource might not be the best for them, and asking opinions. And then other people that are also learning how to cook lasagna are chiming in their learning experiences.
TL;DR: You don’t have to have mastered a skill to have valid input on learning it.
idk man if i wanna learn how to make lasagna imma take advice from people who learned it and can make a lasagna and not people who are currently learning how.
That’s what it all comes down to: preference. Even if the experienced lasagna chefs chime in, their experiences and techniques might not yield the same results. YMMV and whatnot.
Reminds me on the pitch accent discussion really. Not saying I am completely innocent here but what is going is basically:
10 there is no accent
20 if there is an accident it is not relevant
30 if it is relevant I can do it automatically
40 if I can’t do it automatically I will not spend money on doing it because it is not relevant (goto 20)
all im saying is if we were at a lasagna cookoff fiesta and I went around trying hella peoples lasagnas and in one corner we had some godly lasagna and in the other corner we had the students of a cooking class and their first subpar lasagna…if imma ask someone to teach me how to make lasagna you bet you its gonna me the god lasagna man
So you think only successes can be learned from, and that there is nothing to be learned from failure? Seems to run contrary to most of the common advice I see about language learning and it attempting to prepare others for frequent failure.
