I started using WaniKani near the start of the year. After about two and a half months, I reset. And then not too long after, I reset again. Motivation has been quite low. At level 4, I felt so overwhelmed with the amount of lessons and reviews I had to do. The lessons were the toughest, being more of a pile of work to do than actually learning anything. I let my reviews pile up too. I’d get through 5 or 6 reviews, look at the remaining amount (which was usually over 100) and I would just put it off for later. Eventually, it ended up being too much for me. Now, I’m back where I started.
I reached level 2 with the small amount of motivation I have right now, but I’m already starting to feel unwilling to continue. Is there some sort of strategy to effectively get through my lessons and reviews, while still feeling motivated to push on?
All help is appreciated. (Especially from @Belthazar)
I also want to say thanks to everyone in this forum, I really appreciate the support. This community is awesome!~
I got all the way to level 20ish a few years ago. Drowned in reviews, dropped out, reset and come back at the beginning of the year. For me, it’s important to go slow. Last time, I had more than 150 apprentice items and it was too much. Now I do 10 lessons per day, no more, no less, and that keeps my number of reviews at an OK level for me. Maybe the magic number of lessons per day for you is 10 or 5 or even 2 lessons. Start with just a few and build up.
Other than that, ask yourself why you’re here. WHY do you want to learn kanji? Want to read? Want to go to Japan? Want to get to level 60 just to get to level 60? Whatever your WHY is, use that as motivation when it gets hard.
Me? Why? My review habit was broken back in 2019 when I was unexpectedly without internet for a week, and I still haven’t gotten back into it. Currently have 3868 reviews waiting, though almost three-quarters of those are burn reviews.
The trick is not so much motivation as discipline.
Mistakes are a normal part of learning, especially in SRS but slow progress and a big workload are disheartening. If WK is for you (and it might not be), slow and steady wins the race.
I purchased lifetime membership and I guess I will continue towards level 60 but my immediate goals are about one level a month and to do that for the next 6 months. I might slow down further and if I need to, I hope to invest more time in writing notes with new lessons and also using kanji.sh printouts to write new Kanji.
This to be honest. Motivation is nice in the early stages. But discipline gets you through when that runs out. Which is definitely will sooner or late. If you can make it a habit to always do X and always do Y every day around the same time, you’ll find yourself doing it even when the motivation is gone and you’re wondering why you’re still doing this. Since it’s just That Thing You Do now. Much like brushing your teeth or washing your hands.
Habit forming is extremely important if you want to do something long-term, and knowing how to form habits like that requires discipline.
My motivation for learning Kanji is simply learning Japanese. And partially so I can watch anime without subtitles. This language and all of quirks are beautiful to me, and learning it is my dream. A dream that won’t be achieved if I don’t learn kanji!~
(Just learned about @ replying.) @DaraM18 I think that was my problem before, I went way too fast. As soon as I would level up, I did the radicals immediately, which was a horrible idea.
As others have said, discipline beats motivation for me, always.
Also, another important thing that I often use when I want to build a habit: break it down into very small steps. Make them so small you have no excuse NOT to do it, because it requires no effort at that point.
I have wanikani on my phone and keep my reviews manageable by squeezing in little amounts of reviews here and there.
The idea of sitting down at the end of the day and doing 100+ reviews all at once is daunting, so I break it down in little batches during the day (this also allows me to clear them up as soon as they come or nearly so so they don’t pile up too much).
If 100 reviews is too much, start small.
Put an objective of clearing a certain amount of reviews every day, in little batches of say, 5.
If I’m having a coffe break I can open wanikani and squeeze in even just 5 reviews, then close it (by reviews, I always mean 5 reading/meaning item pairs so it’s effectively 5 items rescheduled for review. Otherwise it won’t count. It literally takes me a minute or so since I have it as a rule to not spend too much time on a single item. If the meaning/reading doesn’t come immediately, I will just fail the item, reread the mnemonics and try again later)
The important thing is making the single objective so small you absolutely have no excuse to not do it: it’s a common technique to fight things like procrastination or infinite social media scrolling and I think it works fine for SRS systems.
EDIT: Reaching your small “objective” helps in making you feel good, build a habit, and you usually end up doing more anyway. With Wanikani’s system I find it especially effective, because often I will say to myself “All right I did X reviews, but it asked me only for the reading of this kanji and not the meaning, let me do just a couple more reviews until I clear the meaning too” which will snowball into keeping you going.
If by that you mean no subtitles at all, then kanji is not an issue, you need to work on your listening first, if you mean using Japanese subs then that’s a different story…
Perhaps at this point of your Japanese learning journey learning in a way that introduces kanji gradually and in context would be easier for you? Human Japanese for instance uses only katakana and hiragana and you learn quite a lot. Learning kanji first is doing it the hard way, it might make recognizing kanji easier but you still need grammar, and that is something you can learn without knowing kanji, heck, you can even learn it without knowing kana just with romaji, it’s all about finding the way that keeps you motivated enough to build a base.
You still need to be motivated to build a habit, and discipline is about starting small so your motivation won’t dwindle, it’s not instead of being motivated but about using the energy being motivated gives you in a sustained way until you build a habit and about long term goals.
I’d say commitment. Converting motivation into commitment, and having intention not to discontinue for at least a year.
It’s OK to do more than planned on some days, or many days, as chance provides. On some days, maybe minimum, so as not to let commitment die. Burning out is to be careful of, but not to overly fear.
Struggle in every way, to make WaniKani meaningful, if WaniKani is the plan. Work hard to crush it and reap everything.
Don’t overload yourself. It’ll be easier to motivate yourself to do just a handful of lessons a day and keep your reviews pile smaller.
What I’ve found rewarding is those moments where things click - where you start to see words you know written in kanji and you grasp their etymology, or where you’re reading something in Japanese and realise that you didn’t hesitate at the kanji but just kept going. If you keep at Wani Kani, those moments will come and I bet they’ll make you want to keep going.
In the end though, your end goal needs to be enough. You want to understand anime, you love the language - so honour that with your time and effort. It feels like pennies in a bucket when you’re starting out, but those will add up to riches in the end.
Other posters have mentioned pacing and habit which are the only ways to do SRS really.
You haven’t said what you’re doing to actually learn Japanese though. Reading? Listening / watching Japanese content? WK is best suited to complementing reading, and it helps build and maintain a habit if you can see the effect it’s having, so reading beginner books / graded readers works pretty well. Sometimes you’ll read something that you’ve learned in WK, and sometimes you’ll already know a WK item from reading, both of which are good motivation boosters. After a while this will happen a lot.
If you’re into anime, it’s worth watching first with subtitles, and then without, listening for words and phrases you know, or are repeated frequently and can be matched to the translation. This also causes little pings of recognition when you read them or come across them in WK.
I agree with the discipline. And focusing on reviews only for a while if you start to feel mentally tired. Days where i dont want to do wanikani, I do wanikani. That mindset kept me going, I took about 3 breaks in the past year for about 2-3 weeks each due to life things, and when reviews piled up over 600-700 those were the toughest days but just kept hammering reviews only and next thing i knew i was on pace again. Don’t give up if you truly love the japanese learning process! Also when I read satori reader or textbooks, and I can recognize the kanji learned from here, i get small motivation boosts.
I just recently came back to wanikani too. Previously was level 35 or sth. Then the world got infected,life goes upside down and i stop. I put it on vacation and few years goes by. Now that I reset and go again. I can say that pacing is a double edge sword. It can make you more motivated if you see yourself levelling and learning fast or you get so over encumbered and lose motivation. (faster learning>faster lesson came>more reviews pile up) . On this run, i take it slow, i don’t chase a target like lv60 in 1-2 year etc and it’s been softer on my brain. Also its ok to make a mistake. There’s only so much your brain can remember at a time.
On another note, try to surround yourself with kanji outside of wanikani. I personally read one or two raw manga. i can read kana at a glance now and pick bit and pieces of kanji that i learned from wanikani. Main point is to read and familiarize, understanding the meaning is a bonus because thats for wanikani to teach you
TLDR : Take it slow at your own pace and read kanji media (light novel,raw manga etc)
I post this to someone every year or so since it’s such a common feeling:
"Motivation is an enemy disguised as a friend. Motivation gets you excited to the point you dedicate yourself to taking on a long-term activity, then it runs out on you.
Discipline is a friend disguised as an enemy. Discipline forces you to do things you don’t want to do, when you don’t want to do them, and it’s always there to nag you when you don’t do what you’re supposed to."
)
My review habit was broken back in 2019 when I was unexpectedly without internet for a week, and I still haven’t gotten back into it. Currently have 3868 reviews waiting, though almost three-quarters of those are burn reviews.