How much has WaniKani helped you in learning to speak Japanese?

How much did this website alone help you guys? Share your stories how you found it too! I wanna learn it. I found it when someone was saying knowing romaji only is bad and doesn’t help much so I decided to learn hiragana and katakana then next step was link to here :smiley:

You can’t learn Japanese without Kanji, and WaniKani teaches Kanji VERY WELL, so yeah, it is guaranteed to help you. Good Luck!

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Do you mean learning specifically to speak Japanese? Or just in general with Japanese as a whole?

This site is great and it’s helped me in learning to read immensely.

In terms of helping me with speaking, its effect has been negligible. I’ve come across lots of new words here, but very few - maybe even zero - that have entered my active vocab through this website alone.

I already knew how to speak but this has been helping me increase my vocabulary. For me it’s mainly a kanji-learning tool (as is its intention), but as the reading, speaking, listening, and writing complement each other it’s been beneficial.

On this site you learn Kanji and how to read individual Kanji and associated vocab words. So your word knowledge base increases. But you don’t learn how to speak. That is a different line of study…i.e. particles, verbs/conjugation, sentence composition, etc…
You have to combine WaniKani with other resources.

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WK will only help with speaking indirectly, if you happen to pick up a new word here or there, but as many people have noticed, WK’s lack of detailed usage notes means you often won’t get much context from the vocab, which means breaking it out in conversation is a bad idea until you’ve heard it used or researched it.

It’s a site to improve your reading ability, and it works wonders there.

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Because of this site, I can read. I’m confident in my reading ability. So it wasn’t as much a direct influence, as riccyjay mentioned. The confidence, though, does allow a person to try other things. With simple sentences, I was able to approach people and ask, “What is this word?” or “How do I pronounce this kanji?”

I’m very happy I found and use WK. I even had a conversation with another Japanese learner at a company that specializes in a language learning database. I mentioned WK as one of the tools in my arsenal, and she said she had a membership, too.

I deffinently use other ways of learning but first I do need to know enough words to actually learn grammar :slight_smile:
Thank you guys alot and koichi actually said that by level 10 I should know enough to get a grammar textbook and you go and study that way

You know enough to do that right now. There are lots of people who learn to communicate perfectly well in Japanese without ever tackling kanji. When you’re a beginner, you should be learning grammar and vocab hand in hand.

Check out these forums - there are lots of threads suggesting material to use for every level of student and every specific skill. In fact, other than learning kanji from the site directly, one of WK’s biggest effects on me has been discovering a host of other resources through the forums.

As mentioned:


Also, this is taken from the FAQ and is very important to remember:

Will WaniKani teach me Japanese?

WaniKani has a very specific goal: teaching you Japanese kanji and vocabulary. These two things are often thought of as the most difficult part of learning Japanese and hold most students back. If you are comfortable with kanji and vocabulary, literally everything else gets exponentially easier.

Although WaniKani doesn’t teach EVERYTHING, it does what it does well, thus helping your other Japanese studies and providing what you need to get better.

I personally really enjoy Wanikani. It does what it’s supposed to very well: Teach kanji and vocab associated with it.

But again, as everyone else has said, more is required to become fluent.

Thank you!!!

My goal is to learn to read and speak Japanese. I don’t focus on writing as everything is electronical more or less so I’m putting that aside

The guide actually suggests starting around level 5.

But, by level 5 you’ll have completed most of the kanji you’ll find in most beginner Japanese textbooks. This is a good time for you to start grammar study.

Around levels 7-9 I felt pretty comfortable digging into Tae Kim’s guide, which initially felt like a unconquerable wall of kanji. Genki doesn’t start kanji until chapter 3 or so and Human Japanese doesn’t use any throughout the entire first volume. Both of those also have furigana so they’re pretty safe to jump into as well.

I’ll toss in a disclaimer as well. At level 13 I frequently encounter unknown kanji in all three of those. However, thanks to Wanikani + radical practice I’m much more comfortable distinguishing and learning new kanji compared to before. Makes a huge difference in learning.

I have been living in Japan for 20 months, with hardly two years of language classes in college three years before that. For the first year WaniKani was the only thing I used to learn Japanese, and I still find the vocabulary slipping into my daily conversations quite easily. I essentially passed N3 with it as my only study tool. Now I’ve started using the N3 &N2 grammar books of the 日本語総まとめ series to support and advance my speaking. If you’re able to interact with Japanese language on a daily basis, I think it will help your speaking ability simply because learning vocab is so much easier. (However remembering burned ones get to be difficult.) If you tend to shadow shows, anime, or music, I think it will definitely help you recognize words your hearing in which case you can respond better.

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Too bad I don’t know anyone who speaks Japanese :frowning: I don’t really like to watch anime but I do listen to Japanese music. I’ll a hang of it in speaking manner eventually

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Speak? Not much. Picked up some vocab, I guess. For speaking, you need a lot of listening and speaking / shadowing practice, which WaniKani isn’t good at.

However, it has been tremendously helpful for my reading. Before I started WaniKani I was proficient enough at grammar to struggle through texts with a lot of dictionary-fu, but now I am pretty good at going solo, and its much faster.

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