Hi ! I’ve been attempting wanikani from the start again after leaving for a while, and I’ve been having an issue that I also had the first time around : when you frequently confuse two items (typically for me a kanji with another kanji that is is a part of), how do you make sure that you truly learn to distinguish them ?
Because with the SRS system, when I confuse two items, I find that I sort of internalize the frequencies and that I know that a kanji is one of two because I have seen the other recently. If I see one of them “in the wild” I’m pretty sure that I would have a 50/50 chance of getting it wrong. Sometimes I catch myself guessing randomly between two possibilities and I intentionnaly fail the item instead, but I don’t realize every time. I feel that when I mistake a kanji for another, sometimes, I should get an error for the one I did wrong AND for the kanji I think it was, and sometimes I enforce it myself if I see them both in a short time.
Do you have any tricks to ensure that you truely memorize the difference between two kanjis, and not just get good at guessing which one pops up with the right timing ?
I guess that could help but I haven’t quite found something that I can read at my level, any advice on that ? I read a magasine called Makoto that have sentences explanation and vocabulary, but it only comes once a month
I make a note of these pairs while doing reviews, and later on write out both kanji with the pronunciations in hiragana/katakana and the meaning. Then I look for which elements are making me confuse them and try to find a way to distinguish each. I have a long list of these errors which I doubt I’ll ever make my way through, but it does help me.
One thing, that could help is, when you go onto a Kanji’s page, there is a “similar Kanji” tab. Looking at the related Kanji and identifying one aspect along which you differentiate them can be helpful.
But, as others said, context is often the solution. And it comes with practice. I would not worry too much about getting some of these wrong (I have a couple of pairs that I never get in reviews, but there’s also pairs that at some point I ended up getting). As long as it’s not dozens of items clogging your review log, having a couple of leeches is not the end of the world.
Regarding content you can read, there’s beginner book clubs and lists of reading resources somewhere on the forum, you can go looking for those.
When I started reading, I used to read the NHK easy news articles.
I think there is also the point to be made, that it’s ok to work on content you don’t feel comfortable with yet. If there is something you want to read, just start with it and slowly work yourself through, trying to mainly get the main series of the events in the beginning.
Also, many beginner listening videos on youtube come with subtitles, so you can try reading along, or reading the text after listening, which is not pure reading practice, but can help with associating what you hear and what you see.
But overall, don’t worry too much about mistakes on WK, regularly engage with the language and many problems will disappear automatically, without you specifically studying that point.
I wrote down a lot of visually similar kanji and their names. There’s typically one radical that separates the kanji from each other, and you have to identify which one it is. You could think up your own mnemonic to help you remember, too.
For example, two kanji that usually get me are 諦 and 締. 諦 has the “say” radical, and 締 has the “thread” radical. I distinguish the two by thinking, “You say you give up,” and “you tighten something with a thread.”
But I did get one of them wrong and didn’t think about my mnemonic, so you have to know that you will make mistakes sometimes, too. As long as you know what’s different among the kanji, you’re on the right track
I’d recommend the ConfusionGuesser script. When you get a review wrong, it guesses what other items you confused it w/ so that you can study the differences between two kanji.
native content/reading works, but it’ll probably probably take a while to run into those specific kanji.
I also made an app that creates short stories using your WaniKani items (requires a WaniKani api token). Anything you look up while reading gets repeated in later stories until you stop needing to look it up, so you can somewhat drill seeing them “in the wild”.
It’s not smart enough to know which words you mix up though, so you’d have to search for those and add them to your deck yourself if you want it to focus on exposure to those ones.
Yeah. These type of issues are (mostly, there are always a few weird exceptions) a case of the SRS being more difficult sometimes. You take a kanji like perfect 完 and sell 売 and in a hurry on the SRS they’re pretty similar - but in the real world the context is usually wildly different and it should be easier to tell which you are dealing with. Having the reading and meanings for both should help you recall the relevant one much faster.
but I haven’t quite found something that I can read at my level, any advice on that ? I read a magasine called Makoto that have sentences explanation and vocabulary, but it only comes once a month