How the hell do people go through levels so fast?

Oh, also, lvl 3! Also mastered few kanji and a boatload of radicals! Yet to master any vocab but I’m sure that I’ll get there!

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I hear your pain. I had been doing duolingo - which required one to keep going, even if I didn’t understand a thing. I’m not exactly sure how much I learned with duolingo, but I did learn persistence. I did learn that just hammering things into your brain works.

You really have no idea where these other people are coming from. As a teacher (NOT a language teacher), comparing yourself to others is a bad idea. You have no idea where other people are coming from. In addition, they may just be bragging. Since I saw the test scores of students, I can tell you that many of them lie about how they are doing.

Also, some exposure to these visuals, in one way or another - could be very useful. I am guessing an artist background could help a lot! I keep hitting my head against my keyboard, because I don’t slow down and see the difference between the visual.

Also, at the beginning, I did not understand the difference between the Kanji reading and the vocabulary. I’m still not exactly sure I understand all of it, but I now realize the colors are different! (It took me a bit.) So, that slowed me down considerably where you are. Maybe that’s not the issue you’re having, but clearly, your brain is super busy trying to work on something, and hammering away will guarantee it breaks through! Maybe you’ll get other parts easier then others.

Hope that helps!

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Another important reason to do vocab: learn alternate readings for the kanji and learn the contexts the different readings are used. Knowing 人 can be read にん or じん from the kanji item doesn’t teach you that it’s read ひと on its own.

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人 is my nemesis. I’m going to be level 60 and I’ll 52 apprentice items left and they will all be にん・じん variations.

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The only thing worse than nin/jin is shou/sei.

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This may be of interest:

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For me it’ll either be jyu, jyo, jyuu, jyou or such variations or something really simple like ni, where my mind always goes ‘it cant be just ni’ and inputs ‘nin’. Happened several times today. So. Frustrating.

Oh, also, 人 isn’t always にん or such, it can also be an ひとri! Fun fun fun!

(I swear I’ll get around installing hiragan on my computer one day)

In my experience, the multiple possible readings aren’t really that bad by now. When I do lessons and reviews, I say every word out loud every time it comes up. After reading “白人” as “hakujin” a few times, I don’t get it wrong anymore because “hakunin” or “hakuhito” just sounds wrong. The only instance of this that trips me up right now is 毎月 because “maigetsu” and “maigatsu” sound too alike or something, but compared to the large number of multiple-reading kanji I’ve encountered at this point, that’s a drop in the bucket.

So my advice would be, listen to the pronunciations and repeat after them every chance you get. Makes reviewing slightly slower but helps with the accuracy. Also, you learn some pitch accent along the way which is going to be helpful later on.

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Neat! I’ll try to apply that today :slight_smile:

Hey! I resemble that remark!

sometimes. Since I posted that I blasted through levels 8 and 9 in two months.

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Three vocab mastered!

Also, gogatsu and itsuka can go jump off a goddamn cliff. After a whole day I still can’t remember gogatsu. Drives me up the wall.

The good thing is that the pattern that you learn with 五月 can be applied to all other months as well. You only have to learn that number + gatsu is a particular month of the year, so you don’t have to learn 12 separate vocabs like in English (“January”, “February”, etc.). Even if you didn’t have that vocab yet, you’re going to understand what “ichigatsu” or “kugatsu” refer to.

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I noticed that when rokugatsu came up! Now, to remember the numbers, heh :slight_smile:

Still having issues with all the yuutsus and yootsus and chyuutsus though. . .

EDIT: Of course IF I COULD PAY ATTENTION TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN SIX AND FIVE JESUS CHRIST >.<

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I was just thinking this. It takes me a good 2-4 weeks per level to actually grasp the content. Mind you I am also a full time teacher, so I get bogged down with other things. I miss the days of being under level 10 when you can easily knock off a level in about a week or week and a half tops.

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For me it would go in week or two if it was only radicals or kanji but the vocab makes things grind to halt, so to speak. Not only do I make much more mistakes and have harder time remembering the vocab theres also so much more of it. Whereas for level 2 there was round 30 of radicals and kanji theres 80 vocab.

It gets better eventually. A lot of the later vocabs are two or three kanjis combined, and in 90% of cases their reading is just the kanji readings combined. (There are still some things to look out for, but those you’ll pick up over time.) That makes the average vocab lesson easier (at least for me) than the average kanji lesson. My daily lesson session is either 15 vocabs or 10 kanjis for that reason.

Strange. For me it has gone so that radicals are easy, kanji relatively easy and every vocab review just makes me really, really frustrated and pissed off due to the mistakes. Every single review something goes wrong and it pissess me off to no end. Just don’t seem to be able to get over it.

Well if it helps you feel better, vocab reviews don’t matter for leveling up and unlocking new items. Perhaps if you spend more time on the individual vocab items when doing the lesson, it might stick better? I find that reading the example sentences really helps me get vocab items faster.

EDIT: Just had a thought. You might be having trouble with rendaku! There’s a userscript called WaniKani Rendaku Information which adds information about why a word does or doesn’t have rendaku in it. Also looking up rendaku rules to get a general idea might help you out! Hope this helps =)

Nothing can help with being so stupid that you remember a word BUT STILL DECIDE TO PUT A WRONG ONE IN! And then it gets dropped back into apprentice JUST BECAUSE YOURE STUPID ENOUGH TO IGNORE YOUR GUT INSTINCT. GODDAMNIT!

On the bright side, you’ll probably definitely remember now huh. :thinking: