I wanted to ask other peoples experience for learning new vocabulary. Are you supplementing other resources along side WaniKani? Are you exclusively using WaniKani?
For instance, I am also using Anki, and a mobile app called Renshuu. But the learning methods seem to clash because WaniKani appears to be more about understanding the radicals and Kanji, and others are for vocabulary / grammar (not focused specifically on Kanji).
I would like to hear your experience in learning, and what you found most effective, whether it be sticking to one resource, or using different methods.
You definitely need to use more than WK. WK’s vocab selection is kind of limited and unusual at times since it’s all about helping you remember the kanji.
This is just one slice of Japanese, and honestly one with very limited usefulness taken on its own – the biggest thing you want to make sure to not neglect as a beginner is a resource for grammar.
Using Wanikani and nothing else is a bad idea. WK only teaches kanji and minimal vocab, so without grammar knowledge and supplementary vocab, all level 60 would mean is that you can recognize 2000 little pictures, not that you can understand Japanese.
You really only need one resource per skill. Anything more will make you to learn the same things over and over again and this will stagnate your progress. For kanji most people here obviously use WK. For grammar, pick a textbook, video series, Bunpro, anything, and stick to it. For supplementary vocab, theres Torii, where you can exclude WK vocab, jpdb, where you can study words found in books, or you can mine with Anki. Basic fluency starts at 10k words, and WK only teaches 6k.
Personally I used Genki 1 + 2 and Quartet 1 + 2, and used the Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar to fill in the gaps. For vocab I mine with Yomitan + Anki.
I think there is nothing wrong with using just WK so as to first learn all the necessary kanji and vocab and then concentrate on grammar. In fact, that was my initial plan when I joined WK.
However, I soon found out that it works better for me to study grammar in parallel, which is what I did.
And then, around level 20 I started reading first simple resources like
Another great (though, unlike the previous ones, not free) resource is
Anyway, the important thing is to keep moving forward. Whether you do various studies in parallel (which is what I ended up doing) or concentrate on some one thing first (which I planned to do but ended up deciding against), as long as you are learning something – you are moving forward. So, best of luck with your studies!
Good advice there. Just to add onto my first post, another thought I had –
From the way your post is written it seems like you want your resources to overlap, if I’m reading it right? @hotdogsuplex mentioned essentially having one resource per thing and I think that’s good advice, but to add, if reinforcement is what you’re looking for, the larger point I’d like to make is the reason we advise not bothering is because basically what you should be looking to do now is get enough of a foothold in the language that you can, with effort and outside help (dictionaries, etc) manage to start listening to and reading Japanese for real, and that is where you get all the further reinforcement you could ever want (and the best real learning of the language, too).
Thus, while I think it’s good to go on and start on kanji cause there’s a lot of it, it’s the least useful towards that goal in that it obviously doesn’t exist in spoken Japanese, and written Japanese with furigana, kana characters over the kanji to tell you how they are read, is also plentiful in manga and the like.
I don’t necessarily want resources that overlap, but what I wanted was to hear how other people studied, and what they found effective :). Thanks for sharing
Contrary to popular advice, studying from many sources is only going to slow you down. Pick one path and dedicate all your mental energy on it, until you feel comfortable with the basics. If WK is your main source, focus on it until level 10-15, than dip your toes in grammar somewhere, but don’t abandon WK. Around levels 20-30, start reading something, even children books are good.
The thing is, technically going wide and slow may give better results in a long run, but it kills your motivation. It places uncomprehensibly large mountain in front of you and asks you to climb it. It is pointless to focus on everything. Go in one direction as long as it is fun. Cut through the learning vertically, don’t just scrape it. Once you decide to go wide and tackle the whole thing, you will realize how easy it is now that you understand it better.
This is at least my approach. At the end of this month I will start burning my first items and I should be around level 20-21. Apart from one grammar lesson per day that I started doing recently, I focus entirely on WK. The important thing is that it is still fun. I studied every single day since I started. That will carry you further than doing it “the right way”. Many people abandoned it because they tried to do too much too soon.
At the end, everyones cogs turn differently and you must know yourself to choose the best approach. What works for me could be the opposite of what works for you. Choose wisely.
Unless your goal is strictly to learn kanji and a little vocab, you need resources that overlap.
That said, I did find it helpful to try out an Anki deck while using WaniKani/a textbook. If nothing else, it’s helpful to see kanji/words rendered in a different font, with potentially slightly different translations.
Absolutely agree that you should tailor what you’re doing to whatever interests and feels right to you, but this is just really far from my personal experience. Doesn’t varying what you’re doing in itself keep your interest? Having more time to grind more kanji straight in a row, to me, would be closer to the motivation killer. Furthermore when you spend a lot of time studying and find that you functionally know nothing useful, it’s hard. Studying in a balanced way means that your smaller progress is much more immediately usable, even if that’s just in graded readers and the like at first.
But mainly I disagree that it slows you down. Slows you at learning that one thing, sure, but language is made up of a bunch of things and I think you just have to face that. The main reason I want to press on it is in my view, from the learners I’ve seen here and in other communities (some friends who have learned Japanese to a relatively high level shared this sentiment in chats), there is basically one wall that separates those who “make it” and those who don’t, and that’s the leap from exclusively this style of learning to actually reading and listening. The people who fade away either spend their time preparing and never break through that, or kind of begin struggling up against it and more or less drop away before it’s become much of a regular habit.
If you reach the point where you’re regularly reading, no matter how strained and no matter how much free time you having leading to speed differences etc, it seems like you’re gonna make it, barring big life shakeups. Having a kanji resource helped a lot to get over the mental wall of figuring out how to learn them, so I don’t necessarily advocate dropping WK… but if you ARE gonna hard focus somewhere, I think this is the worst choice.
It IS an incomprehensibly large mountain, and learning to embrace that if anything will help when you start reading and learn how horrifying the number of words out there actually is.
I mean everything in the language kind of overlaps, can’t learn grammar without some words to put together either. When talking about if that’s what they wanted I meant in a more pointed way, because they were talking about other resources not focusing on kanji like WK does.
I personally prioritized WaniKani early on and I don’t regret it, but I also used a few secondary resources on the side. Then as I progressed towards level 30 or so I started switching away from WaniKani and more towards these other study supports because I wanted to work on my vocab and grammar more.
It’s very anime-centric but that doesn’t matter too much at this point. The basic grammar and vocab are mostly the same everywhere.
Tae Kim and Cure Dolly for basic grammar (free) and then Bunpro (not free for SRS) for more advanced grammar practice.
The N5~N3 grammar is by far the most important and going through it as fast as you feel comfortable is a good idea IMO. That’s around 500 items according to bunpro so you can go through that pretty fast if you’re willing to study 2 items/day or so. That stuff will appear everywhere all the time.
After that most other grammatical elements are set expressions and constructions that you can learn incrementally as you encounter them in the wild.
This anki deck to practice katakana more specifically. It may seem a bit strange to dedicate some of your study time specifically to this but I really found katakana super frustrating early on because my ability to read them lagged far behind my hiragana and you’ll see a lot of katakana as soon as you engage with real Japanese.
Conversely getting good at katakana can really boost your comprehension because most of those katakana words are going to be based on English so that’s “free” vocab if you manage to understand it. Note that when I say “getting good at katakana” I don’t just mean being able to recognize that ス is す, I also mean getting used to the way English is rendered in katakana which is significantly more difficult. Like how ツアー (tsuaa) is “tour”. It’s one thing to recognize the characters, it’s another to figure out the English word.
I agree with this and also I would argue that generally overlap is good, studying the same thing from different angles reinforces it. Getting through basic conjugations a bunch of time through different methods can really help hammer things in your brain. Japanese grammar really isn’t complicated, but it’s also very “weird” compared to English, so the more exposure you get the better. It’s one thing to understand how a grammatical construction works and it’s another to be able to work with it in practice.
That said if all of this feels overwhelming and you’re more comfortable focusing solely on WaniKani, then postponing all the rest until you reach level 10 or so is also absolutely viable and it will be easier to engage with general vocab and grammar if you have good kanji basics.
I use Bunpro for grammar and additional vocabulary. You can sync it with Wanikani, so that you don’t need to learn words, which you learnt already on WK.
I think MaruMori also had a Wanikani sync function. (MaruMori also has grammar and vocabulary. I like it too, but already using Bunpro more, so I stick with that for now.)
And sure Anki I used a lot too and added words, I found in books.
I also love using textbooks.
I think it would be helpful to write more, but I sure neglect it.
Else, I think immersion is important.
Like reading books, watching stuff in Japanese etc. (Start with easier stuff. But I feel like, if you have some basics children books can be a good start point. I found Magic Treehouse great, because it has simple grammar and vocabulary and a variety of topics, because they travel to different places and times in each story.)
Reading is also helpful to get those kanjis to use, which you learnt here. (Children’s book have different levels. Like for example Guardians of Ga’hoole, had for simpler kanjis no furiganas. And Beyond Wolves, albeit from the same author and universe, had even less furigana. (I would say like Ga’hoole was third grade level and Beyond Wolves maybe fifth grade level.) Not sure how to find different graded books, I just ordered those, because I loved them in English, and noticed how they had not everywhere Furigana. But maybe if you buy translations, you could check what age a book would be in English. Maybe the Japanese version is then also aimed at that age and assumes the knowledge one should have at that age.)
Watching series and reading Japanese subtitles is a good reading practices too. But you might need to know the kanji then, when reading. (I had some furiganas in Pokémon, when I watched it on Japanese Prime and used it with subtitles.)
I second this. I studied so hard, and the thing that made me start making noticable progress was a few years ago when I got super into a specific drama. I was obsessed with it and even though I didn’t understand 100%, watching it catapulted my abilities. The difference was so stark that I don’t think I can ever go back to exclusive textbook/memorization learning. With every language I “study” it’ll be early immersion for sure. It’s both faster and also wayyyy more enjoyable (for me).
