How the hell do people go through levels so fast?

Your 3rd language! That’s amazing!!!
Fun reasons to learn Japanese too. Try translating those readings now and come back to them in a few months.

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Hello there and welcome,
WaniKani introduces quite non-intuitive system even if you totally know how SRS thing work.
It actually artificially slows you down for some unknown reason by design, so it do actually take some time to figure all the backstage mechanics to promote your level properly.
So just take a deep breath and check some guides mentioned by fellow people above, lv2 is just right time to think about it…
…since for me it was like only ~lv10 when I realized something going wrong, resulting in this disaster :grin:


still, as you can see, everything is managable and one actually can 7days/level just as promised on WK main page.
Good luck and see you @ lv60 with the cake!

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What else are you doing to learn Japanese (grammar, vocabulary, etc)? It’s hard but it gets easier when all the pieces start coming together. :slight_smile:

I’m a slow learner but even I’m managing! It’ll come right if you’re stubborn enough to stick with it :wink:

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I am not entirely sure how I became so good in either finnish or english. Yes, finnish is my mother tongue but that doesn’t mean you are actually good in it. Everyone probably knows cases where people speak their mother tongue but are actually quite terrible in it. For both I never really studied either. My grades were pretty horrible at school for both and to this day I don’t actually know grammar in either in a way that I could actually write out the rules. I just sorta picked up both from books, movies, music and talking with people. Saddly, with japanese theres this hurdle of three syllabaries in the way of that.

I will look up the tofugu article and try to look up the stroke order. I’ll try to write things down and even note my own mnemonics of them or some sort of special feature of each which would help me to remember. For some kanji I already did that. Not sure why I stopped. For example, nine in finnish is yhdeksän, so to remember Kyuu (sorry, don’t have hiragana on desktop) I focused on the K in the finnish word.

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Welcome to the community!

As somebody who also learns Japanese as a third language (Russian Native, English 2nd), I can imagine the frustration. For me the main issue is that my English isn’t that good to understand absolutely everything the same as I do in Russian… that said, I started to add synonyms to words in Russian so it would be easier to memorize them (reviews accept answers you added in synonyms so you basically can translate the entire vocabulary to your native language instead of struggling with English in case you don’t know it perfectly). Maybe you should try to add synonyms in Finnish as well.

Also out of all the other advices the generally good thing would be not to compare your speed to others. Everyone have their own different speed when it comes to studying, and somebody gets things easier, that’s completely fine. Unless you want to participate in some strictly limited in time challenge or have some concrete deadline - just go at your own pace.

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That’s a really good way of remembering it if it helps. Like anything you need to take and use what helps and abandon what hurts.

Your English is really good so I wouldn’t have guessed it wasn’t your first language so take heart.

If you want to install a Japanese IME on your computer for future reference here’s a guide.

THIS is really good advice. You’re at a disadvantage because you’re learning a third language in your second language, so why not make your life easier and use the synonym function.

You can install this script here so you can add synonyms directly from the lessons.

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At the moment only kanji. I began studying japanese only month ago and only know hiragana thus far plus little grammar (how sentences can be as short as one word, the different honorific ‘styles’, such bits and pieces).

Thus far my plan has been kinda see if I can get through the third level and at that point start to look into grammar and other material. Atm my dream is to have enough vocab, kanji and such knowledge that I could order some children’s book and try to see if I can make my way through that slowly and maybe see if I can find some language exchange thingy online where I can learn from a japanese person and they can learn from me so I can pick up the colloqual way of speaking.

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Sorry, it’s me again.

There is a website called Aozora which is an online library of books whose copyrights have expired.

https://www.aozora.gr.jp/

The language is old and suspect sometimes but there’s a lot of children’s books on there that you might already know which might make the reading easier when you come to that point in your studies.

OK then the frustration is normal :slight_smile: You’re at the beginning of your journey!

A good text book and/or app and/or teacher will help structure your study so it doesn’t just feel like random memorisation of unconnected characters or words. I’m not sure if you’ve already decided on your main resource, but most good beginner-level grammar resources use kana and/or kanji with furigana at the beginning – so you’re not limited by your kanji knowledge.

Once you’ve made progress grammar-wise, and started trying to read (text book readings, graded readers, books for young children), it will get easier to memorise words because you’ll start coming across them in other contexts!

Just keep pushing through, there’s no reason you can’t do this :muscle:

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Actually I felt the same like two days ago, but then I tried like taking breaks between lessons, like not doing the whole new lessons at once. Try taking the lesson, learning 5-10 things, then leave the lesson, practice those, and when you’re confident that you learned them start with the rest. I think learning too much too fast doesn’t help.

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Thanks but I really need to have a physical book, especially for something like this. Reading physical book secludes and forces me to pay more attention since it removes me from other distractions like youtube, irc and such.

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This is something I’ve looked into although I need to order it as a book for proper study. Seem’s like it’s simple enough, gives you basics and gives you both keigo and non-keigo forms of phrases and such. It does seem to require some knowledge of kanji though.

I know what you did. You immersed in English, that’s why it became so good. Finnish dubs? They don’t exist.
The internet only in Finnish? Cozy place, not that interesting.

My mother tongue is German, for us it is a biiiit harder to fully immerse, because of our extreme dubbing culture. People often say, that the Germans speak good English. They actually don’t compared to people from the Netherlands or Northern Europe.

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Some people really like Tae Kim’s guide, other people hate it…
Personally I struggled with it (mostly because of the refusal to use furigana), so worked with other text books that did use furigana, and came back to Tae Kim’s later and found it much easier second time around.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this already, but there’s a great post here with resources others have used and enjoyed, which might help you: The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List!
There are also online courses like Marugoto, or Youtube channels dedicated to teaching Japanese that you might find useful.

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Pretty much. Although children’s cartoons get dubbed here too and I personally, just like most finns, can watch only the finnish moomins. After childhood with the finnish dub other languages sound so intolerably bizarre. The voices just sound wrong.

Hopefully I can manage to get to the point where I can do this with japanese!

\textcolor{pink}{\huge \textsf{WELCOME! ^-^}}
@coriolani

Second welcome post of the thread, but as Oprah would say if she were here; “you get a welcome, you get a welcome, everybody gets a welcome!”

welcome gif - crabigator

Take the time to check out the FAQ and GUIDE if you haven’t already.

There’s also a lot of good stuff on the forum to help you, like:

The Ultimate Guide for WK
The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List!
The New And Improved List Of API and Third Party Apps

I hope your Japanese learning journey goes well and that you enjoy your time with us on the forums.

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Thanks. I will check those out.

As for Tae Kim, well, you can’t please everyone. I will see if I can get along with it once I’ve, hopefully, learned a bit more kanji and also katakana. If not, I’ll look into other sources.

So you’ve already mastered two of the most difficult languages

Sorry, but I’ve gotta say this, even if it’s OT… Since when was English considered to be a difficult language? As far as learning is concerned, no language could possibly be easier to learn, especially for Europeans. Of course, close sibling languages (Russian/Ukrainian, Czech/Slovak/Polish/Croatian, Spanish/Portuguese) are a bit of an exception here.

Back to the original topic… For me, one level takes 7-10 days depending on how many times I mess up kanji readings or forget the oftentimes rather ungodly radical names that just don’t stick in my head.

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English has always been considered to be a difficult language to learn due to its unpredictable grammar and spelling.

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What? I must have missed the memo then. English grammar is the easiest out there. There’s nothing complicated about English. Only verbs are conjugated [no idea what these concepts are called in English because I didn’t learn English in English, duh] and even that’s super easy and pretty consistent for virtually all of them. Sure, there are a couple of irregularities and the pronunciation of words feels oftentimes rather arbitrary, but I could never see it as a difficult language. No other language has nearly as many resources in any language as English does; at least in European languages. I can’t see how the grammar is unpredictable, nor the spelling. For the vast majority of words, this shouldn’t really be an issue at all.