How do you decide which vocabulary you will learn?

WaniKani Tips & Tricks
1

Hey beautiful people, I’m trying to figure out the best/other ways of deciding the vocabulary to learn when you have a pool of vocabulary to go through on WaniKani?

Some ideas I have tried first hand

  1. Kanji errors - Learning vocabulary based on kanji characters that you are struggling to remember.
  2. Repeating the kanji via the vocabulary - For example, learning 鍋 as a kanji and then repeating 鍋 as a vocabulary word once you’ve guru’d it (Of course, the readings aren’t always the same)
  3. Verbs first - Pretty self explanitory, can also be done with adverbs and adjectives.
  4. JLPT Level - Learning vocabulary based on their level in the JLPT index
  5. Ask a Japanese person - Give your vocabulary list to a Japanese person and ask them to pick a set number of words that are probably the most popular/important.
  6. Vocabulary found from outside resources - Saw a word in a piece of reading you were interested in? see if it’s in Wanikani and add it to the bank.

Let me know if you have also used any of these methods (Or even your own methods!) and what you found worked best for you.

Much love!

5 Likes
2

I always picked words that are related, so if I see for example 4 words that all use the same kanji, I would pick those in one session. Eventually I go through all of them anyway, so no need to get complicated. It will all get mixed up anyway once I make few mistakes.

3

I personally just let WaniKani decide for me. I just hit the start lessons button and let it give me what it gives me (15 a day for me). You’re eventually gonna have to learn all the words anyway so it doesn’t really matter what order you see it in (at least it didn’t matter too much to me when I was doing it), I would just let the SRS system do its thing.

2 Likes
4

My current method is:

  • Vocab with one kanji (with or without okurigana or repeater)
  • half of the rest on the next day (prioritizing anything that got unlocked from the previous level, and anything I already know)
  • all the rest on the day after

I will likely change it in the future as I feel that any rules I make will evolve based on my progress. But this allows me to still do the 0/0 challenge while going full steam ahead.

5

At this point, having finished all the WK vocab, it’s a mix of the bunpro N3 deck and stuff I encounter reading native material.

6

I don’t like doing multiple in a row that use the same kanji if I can help it, so I’ll just pick random ones with no overlap, generally prioritizing words I’m less familiar with over ones I’m more familiar with

7

I create a jpdb deck with all the vocab and kanji from a WK level on level up, and let the SRS magic do the rest. The extra practice with context sentences and sounds help me a lot. After a few rounds i see what give trouble and create specific mnemonics as needed.

Also check the frequency of the words across corpus, not all words are equal :slight_smile:

1 Like