I’m at that slow starting stage where I’m still asking myself “will this really help me break the mysteries of kanji?”
I already have some Japanese experience having graduated two college language course and the Human Japanese program.
So progress is just idly waiting to see if this let’s me actually read something with all that knowledge.
Assuming you already know the early stuff, you can blitz the levels pretty quickly and work up to a level that suits your current experience. There’s plenty of vocabulary throughout that takes advantage of the kanji learned in current and previous levels, although I think it requires subscription past level 4.
I’ve been eyeing the Human Japanese program myself. Having completed it, could you recommend it?
I definitely would.
It has a few quirks, some things are taught in an odd order, but having tried several, I would call it the best system for learning grammar and structure.
The biggest downside is a limited vocabulary. It teaches you the language well, but just uses a basic set of words and assumes you will expand your vocabulary elsewhere (another thing I’m here for).
Also, and of course the main reason I’m here, it doesn’t cover kanji, except a small list in the intermediate program.
Phew, it’s been a rough couple of months for me. I limped my way to level 20 trying to stuff everything in my brain and now I’ve been stuck here for some time just trying to keep the review pile down. Stopped entirely for long enough to get a 600+ review pile. Tackled it in one very long and exhausting session, never again friends!
But Im finally clearing reviews daily again and doing lessons so I will escape level 20!
Just happy to still be here tbh
I’m hanging in there, but it is a real slog at the mo (but still enjoyable 
).
After blitzing the teens, I had starting getting cocky - but the death levels have knocked me back down to earth. haha
In summer I work ridiculous hours, so squeezing in reviews is pretty difficult - and some of my leeches need serious attention, which i don’t have the time to give them.
I’m determined to hand in there thought - so wish me luck !
After being AWOL for a year, I’ve been making steady progress from where I left off at level 2, but I’m running into some snags in level 4 with things like the meaning of 切手 and recalling the reading for 号, which I can chalk up to not thinking through the meaning explanations/reading mnemonics as thoroughly as I’ve been doing up to this point. It really chips at my sanity when I keep mixing up kanji like 午 and 午 though, but at least my most consistent errors force me to burn the differences into my brain, lest I lose it altogether.
Hoping to reach level 10 by the end of summer so I can dig into Genki I, and I’ll see about getting as close to level 30 as I can by the end of the year.
I’m going to spend a bit of time on level 10, probably 20 days or so (double my average speed) to get as many items to enlightened before I move on to level 11. Target is probably around 750 enlightened (currently 400).
I just started and i think im about to get some of my radicals on guru im really serious about Japanese do you know any other websites for Hiragana?
Hiragana can be learned in a matter of days— weeks is a bit much, and some people knock it all out in a day.
Try looking up some Youtube videos to get a feel for how they should be written and how to remember them, then practice writing them a lot. You’ll need Hiragana to go anywhere with Japanese, but it’s honestly not too bad.
Katakana is arguably easier because the shapes are more straightforward, but it’s easier to forget because it’s not used as frequently. Still, you’ll definitely want to learn Katakana the same way you learn Hiragana. Katakana is probably more fun to master as a beginner too, because ~90% of the time you see Katakana words they are sounding out something you recognize in English… which means you have a fair chance to read and understand words you’ve never seen before 
I reached level 5 last night and my number of reviews has already skyrocketed. I did well over a hundred when i woke up and it looks like I have 180 scheduled for tomorrow (I suspect there’s a big chunk of early stuff ready to be knocked up to ‘master’). Up until now 40 reviews was considered a sizeable amount. This happened a bit earlier than I expected but oh well, i’m not out yet!
Looking forward to finishing my exams so I can focus on this even more.
The people who made WaniKani also made this for learning hiragana:
Have you been doing all your lessons in one sitting?
That’ll cause all their reviews to show up in the same batch, which will stack with previous levels’ reviews too if you’ve been going as fast as you can. People often recommend spreading your lessons out to avoid this, and downloading a Lesson Reorder script so that you can sort radicals/kanji to the front of your lesson queue since those are what you need to Guru to progress.
So far I have been doing all my new lessons at once, so that would definitely be it. It hasn’t been my intention to go as fast as possible, but I check this site frequently enough that I guess I have been. If I still have a big, unruly pile when level 6 comes around, i’ll be sure to start taking it in chunks. Thanks for the advice!
I like to have separate batches no closer than 4 hours together, so that even if I don’t do reviews right away they’ll still resurface at different times as Apprentice items.
Apprentice 1: 4 Hours
Apprentice 2: 8 Hours
Apprentice 3: 23 hours
Apprentice 4: 47 hours
For example, if I do a batch of lessons at 8am and another at 9am, those will both become a single, larger batch unless I’m consistently able to do the earlier one immediately (which is unrealistic). A four-hour gap between lessons goes a long way towards minimizing this, giving you only a single batch of Apprentice 1 terms at any given time.
I didn’t start doing this until the mid-twenties range though. So, do whatever works for you
Following a massive break in study then a trip to Japan I realised how much I’ve forgotten, so today is reset day. Back to level one to start the basics, because when your friend messages you 大丈夫 and you have to look it up, you know you’ve got problems.
Anyway, WK did an amazing job in the past and I’m annoyed at myself for giving up. Back then it was just to learn some kanji in case I went to Japan, but now I have a personal incentive to improve my Japanese in general and WK definitely beats writing them all out over and over!
To those just starting: keep it up because it’s a great system. 頑張ってよ！
Edit: skim reading my post I read “Andrew WK did an amazing job in the past”. This is also true.
Between this and my dyslexia confusing similar Kanji will be the death of me.
Making stupid mistakes like always (I really don’t know how I could mess it up that bad), but despite that pretty good. My first burns are appearing now too 
I had been approaching this with the idea of being able to break apart each kanji and vocab into something with a bit of a pattern, and while they are there are nothing like english patterns, which were what I was searching for. Once I hit Vocab my reviews starting going worse and worse. However one of my friends has the ability to learn a language by simply hearing it a lot and picked up nearly the whole Japanese language through anime (can’t type it tho… been trying to get him in here as well) and having discussions with him on things that were not going well with me, I finally switched my approach from one where I can look for logical patterns, to one where I treat each entity as its own, despite it’s similarities. Now I am trying to learn each word and their meaning and writing without worrying about what similar meanings sound like with a different word (hold up that sentence is confusing…)
Things are going so much smoother now, and I think I should make lvl 2 and 3 go by faster than my lvl 1 has been so far!
Also @DwrleskyI keep doing that too ;_; it is painful. At least I mostly do it to apprentice lvl 1 items so I can retry in an hour… going to cry myself to sleep when I reach Burn items.
Err… this waiting until 750 enlightened is taking too long. I’m getting bored with only 100 reviews per day. I think I’ll move on after I reach 500 enlightened anyway.
i’m learning japanese really just for the fun of it without any goal or purpose and it shows - but after some years, many little and big breaks and a couple of level-resets i’m still at it, whereas many more people quit long ago and in earlier stages. so that’s something, i guess.
also i completely foresaw that it would go that way and that’s exactly the reason why i bought a WK lifetime account it’s what makes me go back to studying japanese.
