How do you supplement Wanikani for common vocabulary in games?

[brianfrost]

Hi all!
I am a Level 18 user who has been using Wanikani for about a year and a half, and I really love it. It has greatly improved my recall, and I see great improvements in my reading comprehension. However, I’ve recently run into a “happy” issue with reading comprehension that I imagine is common, so I hope some people will have good advice for me.

My goal with Japanese has pretty much always been to master reading so that I can read books and play games entirely in Japanese. Early on, I found that playing games in Japanese was not a good way to learn as I did not know nearly enough vocab or grammar. After three years of studying grammar in structured courses and one and a half years of Wanikani for vocab/kanji, I still find that I have to look up new words almost every sentence in games made mostly for younger audiences (recently Pokemon Legends Arceus). That said, once I have those words written down, I am proud to say I know enough grammar to be able to understand the dialogue 90% of the time. But it is a bit frustrating that I can only do this with Jisho open to check a word every minute.

So what do you do to improve your vocab on top of Wanikani? I try to do 50 reviews a day minimum on Wanikani but am still plateaued at 300 reviews available, so it takes me months to level up. Should I keep trying to learn words from games? That seems to be unsustainable and slow at this point, but maybe I am just not trying long enough. Should I be finding the time to do more reviews per day?

Thanks for any and all help!

[PotatoDancer]

What I’ve been doing is keeping a running list of new words (and what game they’re from). I’ve told myself I should consider using Anki for some of those words, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Instead, I’m just referring back to the list as I play, because it’s faster than looking up words again.

Basically every time I start a new book series or game, the beginning has me looking up 50-100+ words. Then by the middle ish, it starts going down because they’ll reuse words from the beginning. I still try to be slow with sentences and read them out loud (or at least mumble them to myself) because that practices the readings of those words I looked up earlier.

I guess part of the question you have to ask yourself is: are the words you’re looking up on wanikani? If they aren’t, you might as well consider Anki for them. If they are, then you might want to consider doing more reviews to level up faster. The first game I played had a bunch of words that were just a couple levels ahead of me, and I used that to push leveling up.

[brianfrost]

Thanks so much for the reply! That is smart. I think what I get most from your advice is that I should push through the beginning of the game at least before giving up, and write down and speak words I do not know. I will try that.

As for Anki, I find that when I have time to study vocab I just jump to Wanikani. In the past when I put words in Anki I would not review them because I would rather spend the same time on Wanikani. I don’t actually know if these words I’m missing are on Wanikani, but I will work harder to level up and hopefully see them in the future.

[PotatoDancer]

One option is to join a book club or something on the forums, because they have nice vocabulary lists to save time on looking up words.

Jisho also lists wanikani level for things, though it can be a little tricky to find if you’re just looking for a kanji.

I also use 10ten extension to look up kanji/words frequently if they’re in my browser, and I configured it to show wanikani levels for everything. That’s how I usually check if something is on here or not. This also leads to me posting my lists of “new words” in my study log, because then I can hover over them with 10ten if I’ve forgotten them.

[servette]

I don’t have a great answer to your question, both because I haven’t yet attempted to play any games in Japanese (although I do have one that I will be trying ‘soon’, based on train travel), and also because right now I’m more focused on listening comprehension than I am on reading, but…

My short-term plan is to try to find common situations that may contain a relatively fixed or specialized ‘corpus’ of words, record a number of examples, and then play them back and listen repeatedly until (I hope) those words become second nature to me.

The first example that comes readily to mind is weather reports. Many of the words are common and repeated (sunny, cloudy, windy, rainy, temperatures, etc.), although there are occasional exceptions for special circumstances (typhoons, flooding, etc.).

In particular, weather forecasts typically dispense a rapid-fire barrage of information, often with a lot of repetition as well as variations on a common theme. Even in English, you need to rapidly comprehend and process a ton of information, and hope that your short-term memory does not get overloaded. I might try supplementing that with self quizzes - such as, after hearing a long forecast, write down what I heard of the forecast for, say, Tohoku, over the next three days. If I can get to a point where that becomes second nature, it will be a milestone for me.

Some other areas that come to mind which have similar, somewhat constrained vocabularies would include reports on business and economic factors (such as stock markets, exchange rates, interest rates, company and government news items), sports (including results of individual games, upcoming matches, player and team statistics and standings, etc.), transportation and traffic reports, and so on.

I do have a paid subscription to some domestic Japanese NHK broadcast content (which I expect to use as my primary source), but there are also various other online sources where I can find such content, without English subtitles.

I hope to supplement that with reading of NHK sources such as News Web Easy (and, IIRC, there are also student-level NHK news sources).

I’ve been planning for a while to dedicate a single PC or tablet to Japanese-only usage, and hope to get that set up soon. The idea will be to improve my focus, so that when I’m studying, I can resist the temptation to randomly surf the web, browse the WK community, and otherwise get distracted (which is unfortunately much too easy for me).

Will I be successful? Not going to make any predictions about that

[polv]

I think it might not be necessary to SRS common vocabularies, if you had your hands full with WaniKani, or to be exact, ordered Kanji and limited vocabulary sets.

Nonetheless, vocabularies can still be added to Anki via Yomichan, and perhaps take notes / add tags inside Anki. Most Japanese dictionaries don’t allow taking notes for some reasons, not to mention creating custom entries, but Anki doesn’t have that restriction. I think it’s OK to use Anki for archival purpose too.

Removing barriers to looking up may help, also. So dictionary apps might work better than websites like Jisho. Yomitan might too. Some texthooking / OCR setup too. But I feel it is important to not only lookup, but also take at least some effort to remember, and that may including typing / writing something, in Japanese or in English…

[zucchi]

In terms of general useful kanji/vocabulary, I think there’s still a lot you could do with WaniKani. According to wkstats, in order to study 90% of the 500 most common kanji in Japanese, you would have to reach level 24. So it’s worth experimenting with, say, 60 reviews per day instead of 50, and seeing how that feels.

Still, that’s a long-term thing. When it comes to how you can better enjoy playing Japanese games right now, I think it’s important to consider your priorities. Striving to understand every word in every sentence is admirable, but as you’ve said, it’s very slow, especially at the beginning.

The WaniKani Absolute Beginners Book Club I’m in expects us to read one to two pages of text per day, which gives us the time to make sure we at least roughly understand every sentence. It’ll take us three months to get through one volume. It’s a great way to study, but it isn’t exactly casual reading. If I remember how much text Legends Arceus has, finishing it at that pace could take years.

So it’s worth asking yourself, are you okay with playing at that pace? If the amount of effort you’re currently putting into the game feels sustainable to you, it’s okay that it’s slow. You’ll learn a lot by pushing through step-by-step.

Also, an RPG like Legends Arceus will certainly have a lot of repeated text. If you don’t know them already, I’m sure you’ll quickly absorb the Japanese words for things like “fight,” “potion”, and “tackle”. So as has PotatoDancer said, it gets easier with time.

But if playing extra slowly is so frustrating and unfun to you that you just want to give up, there’s another approach you could consider. When I play Japanese games on my own, I usually don’t bother looking up words that I don’t know, as long as I have a rough sense of what’s going on. There’s a lot of games you can play even if you don’t fully understand them.

That isn’t to say I don’t try to learn at all, of course. If I see a word that has kanji I recognize in it, I’ll guess what it is, and see if my guess makes sense based on what happens later. If I see a word attached to an image, I’ll think, “oh, maybe that word means the thing in the image!” If I don’t understand something that seems important and comes up a lot, then I’ll look it up.

I find reading like this can be a lot more interesting because I can read at a more natural pace, and be surprised and excited when I realize I understand what’s going on. It’s very satisfying to learn a word purely from its context and/or component kanji, and I think the vocabulary sticks better when I learn it that way.

So yeah! If it’s important to you to study each sentence as you come across it, a slow and methodical approach makes sense. If you just want to play, and you’re okay with your understanding being kind of patchy (though it will still improve with time!), consider playing more casually and not sweating the details.

[simias]

@brianfrost

My goal with Japanese has pretty much always been to master reading so that I can read books and play games entirely in Japanese. Early on, I found that playing games in Japanese was not a good way to learn as I did not know nearly enough vocab or grammar.

I had exactly the same objective! And I also started playing game seriously at around your level.

Here’s what I remember of the ordeal:

• Pick a game that you already know when you start. You mention a Pokemon game, that’s probably a good entry point but only if you’re already familiar with the game in another language IMO.

• Looking stuff up everywhere all the time is unavoidable. Yes, it’s frustrating, but it’s not time wasted. It’s not as fun as casually playing a game in a language you understand well, but it beats doing flashcard reviews IMO, so see it as study time. To give you an idea the first game I even played in Japanese was Final Fantasy VIII and I spent literally over 10 hours in the tutorial section, just talking to everybody and deciphering the text:

In a normal casual playthrough this would usually take maybe an hour. Overall it took me 148h to finish the game.

If reading content that requires too many lookups is really frustrating for you, try graded readers or maybe something like Satori Reader. I personally prefer to engage with “real” native content like games, but then dealing with slang and tricky vocab is unavoidable. These games are meant to be played by fluent (if perhaps young) speakers, not noobs like us.

• Don’t hesitate looking up longplay footage of the English version of the game on Youtube to use as a “cheat” when you really struggle to understand something.

• If you want to do flashcards, it may be worth adding words you feel are important in an Anki deck. Personally I’m very selective when it comes to that, the way I tend to do it is that I won’t add every unknown word I encounter, rather I only add them if I notice that I encountered it a few times already and I still can’t remember their meaning or reading naturally. This is optional though, if you find flashcards boring then just skip that and use the free time to read more instead.

For me games have been a really good way to practice. You get a lot of inconsequential and generally easy dialogue in those JRPGs and I find it a lot more motivating than reading textbook lessons. But it won’t be easy at first, I probably have around a thousand hours of reading practice in mostly games and manga at this point and while I improved a lot over this span of time (and reached Wanikani level 60 among other things), I still need to look things up regularly while playing.

EDIT: I also now realize that I haven’t really tackled the core of your question: I personally find that WaniKani does a good job of teaching kanji, but not vocabulary. As you near level 30 you’ll probably find that kanji are not the limiting factor for playing most games and you’ll want to spend more time reading and working on your comprehension in context.

Wanikani cannot and will not let you play games without looking up words everywhere.