How I feel about studying Japanese and using WaniKani after 8 months

WaniKani
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From the FSI website:

The following language learning timelines reflect 70 years of experience in teaching languages to U.S. diplomats, and illustrate the time usually required for a student to reach “Professional Working Proficiency” in the language, or a score of “Speaking-3/Reading-3” on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale. These timelines are based on what FSI has observed as the average length of time for a student to achieve proficiency, though the actual time can vary based on a number of factors, including the language learner’s natural ability, prior linguistic experience, and time spent in the classroom.

They make no pretense nor am I claiming that these categories are based on peer-reviewed scientific studies. Would I cite these categories in an academic paper without researching their methods a bit more? Probably not. But would I be willing to trust a government publication from a source that likely has more data on the topic than anybody else in order to at least claim that “Japanese is much harder to learn than many other languages for a native English speaker”? Yeah, sure.

It certainly makes me feel better about all the time I’m throwing into this black hole of an endeavor…

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Skimming through parts of the PDF “Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching”, it seems really well-researched and cites numerous references.

Introduction. This paper is about the interface among theory, practice, purpose, and result during the fifty years of existence of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), and the lessons that have been learned from that interface. We will present our view of what has been learned from FSI’s half century of practical experience preparing thousands of adult learners to carry out complex, professional tasks in foreign languages.

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Without a doubt FSI teaching and evaluation methods are well-researched and scientifically based. But of the categories themselves (directly from the PDF):

Two things need to be understood about these categories. First, they are based solely on FSI’s experience of the time it takes our learners to learn these languages (FSI recently had to start teaching several languages that had not been taught before in government language schools. We estimated that these would prove to be category II languages, and for the most part we were
right. But at least two of them—Georgian and Mongolian—have proven to be harder than that.) Second, the categories reflect various parameters of linguistic distance (see Child 2000). Stated simply, the more commonalties a language shares with English—whether due to a genetic relationship or otherwise—the easier and faster it is for a native English speaker to learn that language

So again, not quite scientifically rigorous, but most likely a good and generally accurate starting point.

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I agree, but it makes sense; I don’t think of spoken conversations as involving much kanji at all. :slight_smile:

Even if we’re talking about written conversations, Wanikani is very very comprehension-focused. It’ll help you understand what OTHER people write, but I would say it’s 100% completely unsuited for helping you decide what you yourself will write or say.

I think that’s the source of a lot of the points raised in this thread, like the relative inactivty in the Japanese-only section. Language consumption and language production are as separate as reading vs. listening, and they require different tools and practice. And for better or for worse, Wanikani’s very targeted at written comprehension, specifically. (and even a further specific subcategory of that)
And for me at least, that makes the vocab choices make more sense - I can’t choose what someone else is going to write, after all.

I’m not sure how to help someone hoping to prioritize conversational fluency (because it’s quite literally the opposite order of my own priorities), other than to try to spell out better what Wanikani does offer and what it’s useful for.
I hope there’s also great resources out there for the folks targeting conversation, though!

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Thankfully with the pdf title I managed to download the pdf so I can read it later.

It depends which language you mean by ‘other languages’, Chinese can’t be far behind I don’t think but I’m speculating. I agree that learning Japanese is harder to learn for a native English speaker. What I’m skeptical about was the initial statement of:

I was skeptical of this because of ‘asian languages’, ‘european languages’ and ‘4x times of study’. Keep in mind that there was no mention of the anglosphere at that point.

Later on, this was clarified and nuanced further. I didn’t know that the American Foreign Service Institute was the de facto reference whenever we quantify the time required for language acquisition so I learned something today. I’d say what I was (am) most skeptical about is the 4x claim. I’ll probably find out more when I read the pdf.

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Here I’m referencing all of the languages in lower tiers on the FSI charts. More specifically, many European languages tend to be in the lower tiers. In general, most languages in the Indo-European language family tend to be easier for English speakers to learn, as do languages that use the Roman alphabet. While it may be interesting to discuss, I think it would be very difficult to prove whether Japanese or Chinese is harder to learn for native English speakers (and the FSI chart reflects that by putting them on the same tier).

Because the forums are all English-based I think a lot of people forget that many people on here are not native English speakers. For those of us who are I think we often consider this implicitly, even though there are many situations (like this) where we really ought to clarify. If you speak Chinese natively you’ll obviously have a much easier time with the Japanese writing system and if you speak Turkish you’ll naturally have a much easier time with the grammar because the languages are structured virtually identically. But Japanese and English are about as different as two languages can get.

I think “European languages” was used here as a generalization of Tier 1 languages (i.e. Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish), which tend to be Proto-Indo-European derivatives and have a lot in common with English. Likewise “Asian languages” is likely a generalization of Category IV (i.e. Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic). These categories only include languages that are taught at the FSI and thus are non-exhaustive, but of the world’s most commonly spoken languages, East-Asian languages would require going the farthest back to find a common precursor with English. I’m sure certain African and Native American languages would be even harder for an English-speaker to learn than Japanese or Chinese.

The highest (2200) and lowest (600) class-hour requirements on the FSI chart show a 3.67:1 ratio, so saying 4x is a bit of an exaggeration but isn’t wildly inaccurate, although as mentioned above it’s not scientifically rigorous.

I would be curious to know whether any other organizations publish a similar list. At the end of the day I don’t think any of this has a big impact on how I go about studying (I certainly don’t have a 2200 hour calendar that I’m marking off every day), but I do think it’s a pretty interesting topic.

Edit: The James Child paper cited in the quote I posted above sounds like it might have some interesting info about language commonalities and their difficulty, but I couldn’t find a pdf.

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Of course, if learning a language is among the regular tasks of your job, you’ll have more time to put toward it than if your job is in another area and you have to allocate non-job time to language studying.

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It’s a fact that it’ll take years of dedication to be fluent in a language. I think it is important that you enjoy the learning process to avoid burnout and to get yourself out of the beginner (i.e. being stuck in grammar books) and intermediate traps (not “feeling” progress).

To be frank, focusing on “efficiency” is just an another trap as you’ll be bouncing from one “efficient recommended routine until burnout” to another instead of discovering one that works for you. Efficiency is just another word for cutting corners. So how could you cut corners if you don’t have a consistent study routine? It needs to be said: the amount of time (or lack thereof) that you spent and the results that you have in WK is an indication that you don’t have a regular routine. If you couldn’t level up in WK in a reasonable amount of time in the first place, how can you add sentence mining?

About the people that you talked to, do you share their reasons for studying Japanese? What are your goals anyway? You certainly don’t need to learn Kanji to get conversational in Japanese, but learning how to read is the best way of learning new words and phrases.

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Okay, that helps think of WaniKani that way! It actually makes me want to increase my study load.

I just looked through the lvl 1-5 vocab and it’s pretty much all commonly used words. I see them all the time. So it’s definitely not bad for you to learn them.

WaniKani is so backwards compared to what people tell me. They say to study vocabulary first and THEN the Kanji later. I’ll definitely tweak things significantly and try to go a bit faster to compensate for any differences.

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I started learning Japanese using Lingodeer. It taught me basic grammar and vocab. And they used kanji to write the vocab. So I knew at least a few dozen kanji before starting WK. But back then I knew so little kanji all of them seemed very different and I just remembered them as images. This falls apart rather quickly because there are a lot of kanji that differ only by a tiny radical.

I started doing WK and pretty much just focused on it until lvl 10. Before about lvl 10 it’s very difficult to read anything because I didn’t know most of the kanji and vocab.

But upon reaching lvl 10 I knew 300+ kanji and 1000+ vocab items. Reading became possible (still hard though).

I’d say you are still at a point that you need to work on WK without seeing much results. But don’t worry you will see a big improvement soon.

I’d recommend to also study N5 grammar and start getting into N4. Once you’re around lvl 10 you can start reading stuff like NHK News Easy for practice.

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I don’t think there’s much to add, you’ve clarified everything up and set the record straight. The .pdf is really interesting and there are certainly a lot of differences between how students of the institute learn languages and how Wanikani works.

What kind of goal have you set for yourself? I mean, you could blame your lack of progress on WK. I’m not being judgmental here, maybe WK really clashes on how you learn things in general. I understand the frustration of not reaching your goals and feeling like it’s taking too long.

This being said, why not adapt to WK? What have you got to gain by resisting the vocabulary being taught? Maybe eventually based on your feedback WK staff might rework their vocab database but it’ll likely take time and serious consideration. As you can imagine, the levels and content is probably 100% random. There’s a logic to it so reorganizing content is probably something they’d be careful in doing.

I feel like I’m white knighting WK here but that’s not the point. I feel like some things could be done better too but, from my anecdotal experience, it gives really good result if you try to make the most out of it. The time you spend commenting on how it should be different could be used to change your approach so you get better result (as this is something you can control).

What do you think? Do you think there are things you could do differently to make your progress more efficient?

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Yeah this also shows just how bad L2 learners are at determining what words are “useless” because I regularly use many of these words in daily conversation

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I’ve read, here and elsewhere, that one should not watch with English subs. I’ve been watching Terrace House and I’ll watch each episode twice. The first time with Japanese subs (thanks Netflix for including native language subs!) and the second with English subs.

Over the course of the months that I’ve been watching it, I’ve noticed my comprehension of the Japanese subs increase noticeably. And I’m only chugging through level 19. It’s really fun to have that character that you didn’t know suddenly pop out at you in the subs because WK just taught it to you.

I’ve also noticed, and this was unexpected, that watching with subs has increased my listening comprehension. This has always, always, been my weak spot. But being able to read has allowed me to map what I’m reading to what I’m hearing. It’s been quite revelatory.

As an aside Amazon, if you are going to bring fantastic shows like 福屋堂本舗 to Prime, why do you insist on excluding Japanese subs? And Netflix, less anime and crime and more traditional stories please.

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I have about 10 years of on again, off again, mostly off again, study including 22 weeks of study in Japan (at Yamasa in Okazaki) and I can absolutely say that kanji is essential to being able to study vocabulary. I resisted this for years because I thought kanji was an impossible mountain. But now with 500+ kanji floating around in my head everything makes so much more sense. I think a lot of the orthodoxy surrounding teaching of the language is backward w.r.t. both learning kanji, and verb forms.

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I recently finished watching all the Tereace House seasons with Wnglish subs (except 1 which has no English subs).

You’ve inspired me. Maybe now it’s time for me to rewatch with Japanese subs. Thanks for sharing :blush:

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Speaking of learning useless Japanese words, if there is such a thing… I’ve just learned the word for cassette player :joy: ラジカセ

But having lived in Japan for a short time now and seen the number of fax machines still in circulation I wonder if ラジカセ is as useless as I think it is :thinking:

I think so called ‘useless’ words are a good opportunity to learn a little more about the language and culture. I’d be interested to know what words people have learned that at first they thought were useless and later realized are used regularly in daily conversation.

For me recently I’ve started hearing 仕様が無い everywhere!

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We must have different experiences with educational science, lol. This is about as good as it gets!

Edit: what I mean is this is not a simple laboratory verifiable result. Probably only the people training diplomats have the data to show how long it takes to achieve practical fluency in various languages with enough controls over confounding factors. And it’s not like you could even design a randomized controlled trial for this. And I don’t know if anyone else except the FSI publishes data on this? Genuinely curious if anyone knows.

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Not trying to revive a dead thread but this sounds like someone who’s about to become an AJATTer lmao