Keep in mind, I’m still just a foreigner trying to learn my way around here and settle in😅. So don’t take what I say in Japanese as correct or fact🙇🏼♂️. But, from my experience, saying that to locals has generally resulted in very friendly interactions afterwards.
By being a bit open, vulnerable, and apologetic with a phrase like this, most of the time the person I’m speaking to immediately tells me “it’s ok” or “don’t worry” and then it just feels so much easier to continue speaking to them. They are usually very kind, patient, and supportive of whatever I attempt to say next.
I’ve said something like this to various shop/store workers, restaurants, government employees at city hall, housing agents, locals, and to a few others, and they were all very nice and polite to me. But… this is mostly anecdotal and just what I’ve done here, in Tokyo, so far😅. I’m by no means an expert and still have a lot to learn.
First, congratulations on finishing Level 60! That’s really impressive. You’ve pointed out several things I agree with:
WK’s onboarding process is great! It was the first Japanese language tool I stuck with successfully.
Damn that “sugar sculpture”!
In another thread, someone else had suggested if we could add kanji or vocabulary to our own review queue without having to wait for WK to bring it up for us at whichever level they had it. I am not a gamer or sports fan so normal, daily life words is what I’d rather learn. I’m shocked that 現金 is not in WK.
As for ‘single-word SRS flashcards’, yep, just referred to my retail store boss 親分 to my Japanese language teacher. LOL.
Out of curiosity: How did you learn grammar? How did you improve your speaking? I’ve paused learning new items on WK as I am focusing on grammar more right now.
And thanks for mentioning ConfusionGuesser and Wanikani Double-Check. I’ve never heard of them before.
Sure no problem! Honestly, once I discovered how to use ChatGPT like this, it really accelerated my learning for me.
What has worked wonders for me has been reading a Manga or playing a Jrpg like Persona 5. In ChatGPT I write something like “Translate the following Japanese into English and provide a breakdown”. Then I write everything that is written in Japanese into chatgpt and to me it’s incredible how detailed it can get. It will explain things word for word and why it’s said the way it is. It even explains slang and more colloquial style speech. And if you probe it by asking it creative questions like “why not say it like this instead”, “is it common to use this word to express this”, etc., you can really get a lot out of it. After some time you begin to pick up on a lot of patterns and you can then ask Chatgpt stuff like “so it’s saying this becuase it means that”, “it used this word to express this”, etc., and chatgpt will answer with “Right!”, “Exactly!”, which reinforces your own understanding😁.
I especially recommend a jrpg like Persona 5 because it’s delivered in a visual novel style, which gives you time to understand each bit of dialogue before you press a button to move on to the next piece of dialogue. Plus, much of the dialogue is voiced so you can practice your listening, and there is a “Log” feature that pulls up all the dialogue that has been said so far and you can click on various sentences and it will replay them. So you can listen repeatedly to dialogue over and over again.
Plus, all of the Japanese you are writing into ChatGPT is also reinforcing and reviewing your kanji and vocabulary😁.
To answer “How did you understand what they responded to you with”:
I could understand most of what they responded with simply from already understanding some Japanese in general. It’s still much easier for me to understand Japanese that has already been created (reading and listening) rather than creating it myself (speaking and writing).
So from using Wanikani and thousands of Anki flashcards, reading through Genki 1 and 2 several times, doing what I mentioned earlier with manga and Persona 5, and roleplaying with Chatgpt, I can understand most of the meaning of what people respond to me with or tell me.
Mate, this is too close to my reality. I’m glad I’ll be done with this app in a few months, but indeed, my scheduled was organized around Wanikani for the last year and a half
I completely understand the undertaking of learning this much kanji, but it really does feel excessive at the end. You can do it though, just start peppering the things you want to do when finished
Grammar is harder to tackle and admittedly something i need to put more time into, but there have been a few things that helped a lot:
At the start I went through genki 1, 2 and Quartet 1 via Tokini Andy’s website. I found the community, video tutorials and homework very helpful to learn the basic grammar points.
Once I had a foundation, I moved over to 日本語の森’s Website. Here you can learn all the JLPT content, but fully in Japanese. I would watch the videos, check the grammar points on a site called BunPro since they game great examples, and then make Anki cards for anything I didnt know.
Between all this I have also been doing Italky calls (though my speaking is much lower level) to help solidify some more simple concepts and ask questions, as well as reading. I think reading really is the glue that sticks all the information you’ve learned together, and it has done wonders for my grammar understanding. You will never be ready for your first novel so just go for something simple and continue from there (a common beginner recommendation isくま クマ 熊 ベアー)
Thanks so much! You’ve basically confirmed that I’m on the right path. Doing Genki 2 with an online tutor and then using Tokini Andy’s website and BunPro to reinforce the concepts. Thanks for reminding me about 日本語の森. I have it bookmarked somewhere along with all other resources others have recommended but forgot about it. Will definitely need to get into reading again when time allows.
This made me smile. WK resisted adding kana vocabulary for many years, and only added them fairly recently. Oddly, some of the more demanding user clamoring died down a bit just before they were added. (Murphy was an optimist.)
Personally, I feel a bit differently about vocabulary. To me, the ENTIRE point of WK is to memorize vocabulary. Memorizing individual kanji is just a means to an end. One can argue about the ordering and obscurity of individual vocabulary, but everyone is exposed to different words in the real world (different likes and interests). Maybe it’s just a disagreement on definitions: 本 is both a kanji character and a vocabulary item, but sometimes people don’t think of it that way.
More context, usage patterns, and links for further study on the lesson and individual item pages would always be welcome, but WK continues to do a pretty good job of constantly curating and clarifying (not a trivial undertaking).
Context seems almost always sufficient to me for 名詞 but 動詞 can sometimes be confusing.
Regardless, an SRS is just one (very powerful) aid in learning Japanese. It can never replace the need for reading and conversing to better understand nuance and experience things in surrounding context.
Congratulations! Hoping to be at that level at some point! Thanks for the feedback as well. It’s helpful for starting on the platform just to know what to use it for and is just good to know. Thanks for including it.
I agree that the vocabulary is the important thing and individual kanji study is an intermediate step that’s worth focusing on only to the extent that it helps with vocab. But I’m not sure that’s really the philosophy that informs WK’s design. The on-rails fixed level progression and the vocab choice seem aimed more at “learn a fixed number of kanji and then you’re done” rather than “learn an almost unlimited set of vocab words, and you’ll be doing this for as long as you’re learning the language”.
I’m not a WK user, but it would be a tool I’d be happier recommending to others if it started out on rails for the basics and then gradually became more flexible and adaptable to the words the individual user is encountering and wants to learn. (If you want a video game analogy, tutorial level/area followed by open-world game…)
I’d love for there to be a practical solution for this. I don’t see myself doing more than about 200 reviews a day to balance against other Japanese studies (not to mention whatever else).
By the time I make it to later levels (currently 33), I see myself having built up a bunch of leaches I probably don’t care about anyway relative to exposure to the rest of the course.
If I get an item wrong 5+ times, even 10+ times, for whatever reason I’m not learning it via SRS. It’s not working. Maybe it’s being misremembered or confused and SRS is actually working against me (e.g. I think the wrong answer is the right one, only to find out that’s what I have memorized).
These items should be treated differently: put in a separate queue or suspended. They add friction to the course and make the daily burden very high towards the end for diminishing returns.
