I recently only began level 3 of Wanikanki, i’m really excited about the future but also really happy with a slow and steady pace. I also use Genki 1 at a slow and steady pace for the grammer aspect of Japanese. My question is at what point should i start trying to find some piece of media which is native japanese. Should i just not think about it until a hit a certain Wanikani milestone? At the moment i feel encouraged whenever i get an answer right on the reviews but i fear that i might only be able to recognise the vocabularies if they are presented in quiz format. especiially if there are a string of kanji and hiragana i fear i won’t be able to distunguish when a word starts, ends and when a particle is a particle and not just a component of another word. What are all your experiences with this?
Edit: When i say japanese media, i am obviously referring to something that is appropriate for a very basic beginner such as myself. I would be really happy being able to read something like NKS easy web even though i’m sure it’s a far away goal.
For reading, immersion is less about kanji knowledge and more about grammar and vocabulary.
The Absolute Beginner’s Book Club has furigana so knowing kanji isn’t that much of an issue, though it’s recommended your grammar is about N5 level and knowing some kana words will help. Here’s ChristopherFritz’s guide to joining so you can check for yourself how ready you are.
If that seems a bit too much for you, you can also try the free Tadoku books. They start off really simple, I reckon you could probably read the Level Start books even without knowing much grammar, though I already had a decent grammar basis when I found these so take that with a grain of salt.
For listening, you won’t need any kanji at all, just grammar and vocabulary. My recommendation would be videos like Comprehensible Japanese. Other people like podcasts like Nihongo con Teppei.
As for when to start, that depends. You could start today and struggle through deciphering sentences, or you could start once you’ve finished Genki 1 and struggle through deciphering sentences.
I think this is something that will come from having a better knowledge of grammar and vocab, more so than just Kanji. If you want to get started early on, which is good, Reb’s recommendations are great. Though if you’re going through Genki 1, you might not get very much out of any native material before you’re close to finishing it. If you’re not already, I’d recommend also using another vocab source too on top of WK, due to the amount of simple vocab it doesn’t cover - something like a core 2k deck like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2141233552 to prepare yourself a bit better for reading, or make your own anki cards for the vocab from Genki etc. It’s always difficult when you jump into reading though, no matter how much you’ve completed before, so you may as well jump in relatively early and learn as you go!
Thankfully once you see a piece of vocabulary that you’ve learnt decently well through SRS out in the wild, it tends to stick pretty well. I wouldn’t worry too much about this.
My other recommendation would be to have something to aim towards, like a manga or book you really want to read. Even if it’s something that you’re too early to start now, or for a while, having something you periodically use to check your progress with and motivate yourself with is good, and eventually you’ll get to the point where it’s difficult but possible to work your way through it. It’s a good feeling when that happens. Good luck!
To expand upon what @RebBlue said, that kanji aren’t all that important when it comes to starting immersion and it’s mostly about vocabulary and grammar, recommending a WaniKani level for when to start isn’t really possible because WaniKani doesn’t teach you (enough of) the vocabulary you need. WaniKani vocabulary is mostly there to reinforce the kanji you’ve learned, it doesn’t follow some kind of frequency list. Some very highly frequent vocabulary isn’t taught at all or only very late into the programme. So not only do you need additional grammar study, but preferably also additional vocabulary study to make immersion more accesible.
How and when did you al start immersing yourselves with Japanese?
Personally I started immersing in native Japanese material what I’d think many people would consider fairly early. Somewhere around ~N5. However, this was mostly due to me not being able to stand material target at Japanese learners like graded readers.
Back then books intended for native speakers were either much too hard or much too boring for me to enjoy them. While easier manga like よつばと！ was fine, I didn’t really like reading them.
So I went with listening. Lots and lots of listening. I’d watch an easy’ish anime like 干物妹!うまるちゃん, record the audio, put it onto an MP3 player and listen to the audio again whenever I had the chance. Grocery shopping? Doing the dishes? Cleaning the bathroom? Going for a run? Whenever my brain wasn’t occupied with something else I’d get some passive immersion in.
When I’d first watch an anime I’d barely understand anything, but even when just re-listening to it for the first time I’d already understand so much more. And even if I didn’t fully understand everything, I was still able to follow what was going on and get some giggles out of it because I’d seen the anime first.
I’d like to think this worked really well for me, though it’s hard to tell. I’m fairly certain my listening has always been much better than my reading, and I’d like to give this (at least some) credit for it. Though this approach certainly isn’t for everyone. I liked it better than reading because not understanding things bothered me less this way, but I imagine others can’t stand the idea of listening to the same material multiple times.
This approach isn’t something new (or something I came up with) either. If this sounds like something for you just google passive listening japanese or passive immersion and you’ll find plenty other tips and explanations.
I think WaniKani Level 16 might be a could start to read If the books don’t have furigana. At Level 16 you have learned all Kanjis from JLPT N5 and a Lot from N4. I want to Finish Level 16 in the next 6 month.
Until then I will learn as much Grammar as possible with Japanese from Zero 1-5 and Genki 1&2.
Thank you all so much for your kind replies, I really feel like i’ve received the guidance that i wouldn’t have found otherwise. I will look into the recourses listed. I had no idea that some of the most frequently used words are only presented later in the Wanikani so i will definitely try my best to reinforce this area.
At some point in my SRS journey I realized that I won’t be seeing cards for months ahead. So that’s when I started immersion. I find running into vocab, kanji and grammar in the wild really helps to reinforce it into my memory. And helps connect the dots on how to use the grammar outside of SRS and textbooks
I’d say Tadoku for reading and Nihongo Con Teppei for listening are a great starting point for immersion.
But don’t be afraid to immerse with things beyond your level as well! It does require coming to terms with being okay with not understanding most of the things you come across. But in my experience, it allows you to interact with more interesting topics that align with your interests more.
Edit: Oh! I forgot to mention that I have an Anki deck dedicated to new vocabulary I come across. That has really helped support my immersion especially in topics I like. Can recommend!
You can start immersing yourself now. I’m also a beginner. If you asked me to say something in Japanese not even a month ago all I would have for you was ありがとう or こんにちは, and it wouldn’t have been in hiragana.
But I’m having some success already by shifting my focus on immersion. I know I won’t be able to translate at this point, so I’m watching anime with English subtitles on and actively listening to the way Japanese sounds. Listening for vocab words and grammar points that I know. Listening for repeated phrases. Rewinding to hear certain phrases again.
For reading, I see both were already mentioned but I’ll second the point: check out the absolute beginners book club and NHK easy news. For now as a beginner my main goal is to get used to reading Japanese, sounding it out like we did as kids learning to read our native languages. Every time I pick it up it seems like there’s another kanji or vocab word that I recognize, or if I learn a new grammar point I start seeing it all over the place. There are online tools to help you decipher the text, like ichi.moe and jisho.org, and the book club threads on each chapter are great resources to refer back to.
Music is another fun resource to immerse yourself in. Make a playlist of Japanese songs that you like and you might start picking up more of the song’s meaning over time. Anime soundtracks, Japanese rock or pop, even cover songs in Japanese. One I have in daily rotation is a collection of Japanese Black Sabbath cover songs.
One trend across the content updates over the last few months is that they have been gradually taking more account of frequency than the prior ordering, but yeah, this is still basically true.
The 39th most frequent kanji is taught at level 32, so after around 1000 other kanji are taught first. You should definitely try native content before you’ve spent that long at Japanese practice. WK stats only shows kanji frequency and not word frequency so there are certainly more examples with words too.
However, even if you had an SRS that was organised by pure frequency and covered every topic (grammar, vocab, kanji), no amount of SRS is going to make your first time trying native content anywhere near as easy as reading content in your native language. Lots of SRS might make it easier than no SRS as a starting point, but in terms of how slowly it moves the needle, if your goal is to handle native content at some point, you’ll need to push through that initial difficulty curve and work on it.
At the same time, native content can complement the missing topics from your SRS. Take a dictionary and vocab sheet and be prepared to look up words you don’t know. Make a note of those you have to look up often and maybe spend some time learning them. After you go through that with the most frequent content, and you build your muscles for processing native content, then it will get easier.
I agree with those who say that it’s not really possible to come up with a minimum WaniKani level to start consuming Japanese material but I would say that by level 20 or so you should really consider investing some time doing so or at least studying other aspects of the language.
Eventually if you don’t get any practical use out of your kanji you’ll start forgetting them, and by level 20 you’ll already have a strong kanji foundation to tackle vocab and grammar at large.
The kanji being 党, I think it showcases the limits of frequency lists because obviously it’s extremely common in newspapers that discuss a lot of politics but at the same time if all you read is shounen manga, it’s probably not going to be top 1000…
That’s why I wish the structure of WaniKani eventually relaxed a bit to let you pick what to study based on the kanji you encounter in the wild.
I started learning kanji before WK, though the method I used to learn kanji was very similar to WK, it just happened to be a very manual one. I have to kind of convert it, but I would say the equivalent would be around WK8 and grammar JLPT N5. This covers a lot of core grammar, all the grade 1 kanji, and a mix of other grade kanjis. At this point I was reading short stories and kids’ novels.
Please note that things aimed at very young kids tend to be more difficult. I would actually recommend a full furigana novel aimed at kids of all ages, like the Disney Movie books, or short stories aimed at the very least to 4th graders. Anything lower than that and it can get hard to tell where words start and end because instead of using furigana, they often opt to write the words entirely in hiragana. I don’t really read much manga, even though that can be a good starting point, so I don’t have recommendations at that level.
I’m only WK11 right now but my actual knowledge is probably somewhere in the 20s due to past experience. If I were to estimate, WK16-20 is when I started reading novels without full furigana. Once again, easier novels. Natively can be useful to estimate difficulty.
No matter what, expect you’ll have to look stuff up. You could do all of WK and every Japanese learning course that exists in the world and you’ll still end up having to look stuff up. Nothing can cover everything, especially as you get to higher and higher level materials. So do not get discouraged if you end up having to whip out the dictionary every other sentence, or if you don’t understand a verb conjugation. Just keep at it and keep doing your daily WK and grammar studies.
You can start immersing even without learning japanese. I started long before seriously learning japanese with watching japanese TV and music (and quite a lot stuck even like this). They were a reason for me to start learning.
I guess for reading you need a descent kanji level depending on what you want to read…
