I am fluent in Chinese but I still go through this so so slow, it doesn’t matter cause the pronunciation is a pain
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You’re not alone:
CHRIST! Why cant I remember the simplest things?! Things Ive done millions of times? No, I still cant remember any of it. No matter how much this damn thing displays this stuff to me. Nopes. Things Ive struggled with for days or weeks and POOF! Gone. Like I’d never even seen them before. It just keeps getting worse and worse. More and more frustrating. The moment you think you’ve made any progress this things there to remind NOPES. You havent made any.
And ofc it puts several of them into critical list just to demoralize you even more. Thanks.
My brain has been wired by society to associate bright red colour and down arrow with being wrong, failing or in some cases, not moving in the street lights. That is the message that my brain automatically reads from those symbols. Next comes bright red banner with ANSWERED INCORRECTLY just to hammer the feeling down. Just to remind you afterwards that no, despite weeks of work you don’t remember any of it, like getting them to guru was just a joke. And so it goes on and on and on. You think you’ve made progress but there wk sits, waiting to remind you that no, you haven’t.
Something I’ve found is that the kanjis and vocab start locking each other in once you’ve gotten past the first part. Every time I learn the new kanji’s I really struggle to remember them, but when I start doing the vocabs that use those kanjis suddenly I’m like “yeah I’ve known these kanjis my entire life, I’m actually a professional.” The further into it you get, the more it becomes a network of words rather than a list of them, and the easier it becomes to navigate your web of vocabulary.
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For me it’s that I remember the meaning of the kanji but reading? Or both readings? Nah, fat chance. Unless it’s something really, really simple or unique or doesnt involve the yuu or you sound. Those two can go eat flaming death. They’re the worst. From numbers to verbs to nouns theres always some yuu or you in there somewhere. Just waiting. Waiting for you to have to answer what they are. God.
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Are you using the mneumonics? And if so, are you using the ones WK provides? Because if so, I’m not really a fan of them, I think it’s much more helpful to make your own up. Make it about the first thing that pops into your head when you see a kanji, because it’s gonna be the first think that comes to you next time too. For me I find it really helps to link it to Japanese I remember from music and anime and various other things. For instance, I memorised 回 as soon as I learned it because I know it from Rolling Girl (もう一回、もう一回）So I didn’t even need a mneumonic there, I just know it.
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Don’t use mnemonics outside radicals. It becomes confusing for me. It feels like third thing to remember aside from meaning and reading. Also, for majority I have really, really hard time coming up with anything meaningful.
Somehow I have ended up in situation where majority of japanese bands I listen to have lyrics in english ._.
I’m not surprised you’re struggling this much. You’re not dumb or stupid, you’re just leaving out a vital step - using the mnemonics.
I’d studied Japanese before WaniKani and I still use mnemonics for all of the new kanji and vocabulary I encounter. Once you guru, master etc an item the interval between seeing the item will constantly increase. Sometimes I look at a kanji and feel like I’ve never seen it before even though I learned it a month ago. That’s where the mnemonics really shine - you can break down the kanji into the radicals and thus remember the mnemonics you created for the meaning and reading.
As an example, here’s a level 13 vocabulary item - 感謝. It would be inhuman to expect anybody to be able to learn the individual kanji (look at the number of strokes!) without mnemonics. And since a lot of the kanji have a similar onyomi reading you can reuse the mnemonics. And if you have a hard time coming up with mnemonics (either in English or Finnish) ask in the forums - plenty of Finns here to help you out, I’m certain. 
I have no doubt you can do this - just learn at your own pace and don’t forget to use the mnemonics!
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Mnemonics help to a point but when a cross turns into a narwhal it becomes just another thing to rote memorize. I’ve tried them with kanji and the level of abstraction is just such that it doesn’t help. I’ve ended up mixing the mnemonic and hearing up. Fun.
And goddamn. I just can’t stand this. Once again constant mistakes. Nothing ever changes. Stuff I already knew a moment ago I get wrong. So annoying. So goddamn annoying. Can’t shake the feeling that I should know this stuff but I don’t. I make same stupid mistakes again and again and again and it drives me up the wall. Same mistakes I’ve made hundreds if not thousands of times but I still keep doing it. Goddamn it.
Not sure whether to push onwards or to just give up and quit. The frustration is growing to such proportions that it’s starting to impede my focus on my school work and writing and I really need to be able to focus on my novel. I shoulda known it would be like this but nopes, I was stupid enough to buy into tofugus lies. To think that I could do this. Goddamn. I shoulda known it would be nothing but frustration upon frustration, failure after failure. Guess I’m just not meant to learn japanese or any other language beyond finnish or english. Can’t. Stand. This. Constant. Failure.
This is the exact same reason I quit duolingo for german a while back. Couldn’t stand the constant failing of word genders. Became too overwhelming. Drove me up the wall.
Patience. Don’t try and learn too many words at once, and review them after you learn them or get them wrong. Learning Japanese is a marathon, not a sprint, so don’t feel pressure to compare your progress to others.
If you’re feeling overwhelmeed you can reset to the start of your current level and then just do maybe 5-10 lessons each day until you have got them right a couple of times and feel ready to take on more words.
Take your time on each lesson and if you don’t like/relate to the mnemonic WK provides, invest in making your own. You can crowdsource them via a script or make one up with the sounds in Finnish if that helps you more?
Have you learned Hiragana and Katakana already (mainly Hiragana) as without this you will struggle with the early levels?
It may also be that WK/ SRS isnt the best learning method for you. Have you tried others? (Heisig’s RTK leaves out readings and just teaches meanings to start with) and there are other options too. Personally, none of the others worked so WK has given me a new lease of life, but that doesn’t mean SRS works for everybody.
Please don’t give up so soon, you can do it! It may just take a while to figure out YOUR way and YOUR pace
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The thing is, I just can’t memorize things like this. It’s been like this from the childhood up, no matter the subject. If it involves memorization, I can’t stand it. Maths? Genders of nouns? Chemical formulas? I remember way too clearly how as a child my father quized me on my math homework, I got something wrong, got frustrated, made more mistakes, got more frustated and to this day I can’t do anything but basic plus and minus calculations. It is the same with swedish or any language that uses gendered nouns. As it is with chemistry, any grammar or such. If it requires rote memorization of any form, I can’t do it. I have hard time remembering things, then I get quizzed, I fail, I get frustrated.
At the moment I do two lessons a day, both containin 3 new items. Even this seems to be too much for me, although at the moment it is not failing the new ones that frustrates, it’s when an old kanji/vocab comes that I’ve gotten to guru and I fail that. That is something that really, really, really frustrates me. It feels even more like I should already know these things and I don’t. Makes me so pissed off to no end.
I know hiragana. I might take a moment to recall one that I haven’t seen in a while but I know them. Learning them was easy since all you have to remember is the symbol and a simple sound. I haven’t learned katakana yet but it shouldn’t be a big issue either.
That’s the thing for me. It is easy to associate a single thing to single symbol. When theres two or more things to associate it becomes really, really difficult to do. Like having to remember not only a vocab, it’s meaning but also on’yomi or kun’yomi for it. Then theres another vocab that uses the same symbols but alternate reading. It’s. Just. Too. Much.
The good thing about wk is that it automatically gives you lessons and quizzes you. You don’t have to manually do anything and it isn’t too involved. I looked at heisig’s rtk and apparently I would have to drop 30+ dollars on a book to use it. There doesn’t seem to be a free trial or anything like that.
And I really, really don’t know. This just takes too much out of me. Unlike usual where I can do schoolwork, write my novel and read at least 50 pages after school I’ve barely gotten schoolwork done today with all the time and energy gone into being pissed off and angry at my inability to learn the kanji or vocab. It feels like the day has gone to waste and I haven’t made any progress. This can’t go on like this. I really need to be able to do all those things.
GODDAMNIT! Only two kanji to review and both wrong. I cant stand this! At all! I get so mad at this that I start throwing shit around my dorm room. This isn’t good. This isn’t working. I can’t do this. I can’t memorize worth shit.
Yeah I know that feeling. I can’t necessarily make the moment feel better. But I’d say that, while this will still happen as you go on, you get less angry about it cuz you’re just more used to it. You’re gonna get stuff wrong, and probably more often than you’d like. But the truth is that getting stuff wrong sometimes really is part of the process.
How. Long. I got shit to do. Shit that really needs to be done right now. I cant waste days being pissed off and getting nothing done. Already it’s too late for me to write my novel or read.
And I am not sure if it gets easier. Its just gotten worse and worse as time has gone on.
It’s difficult to get too specific with advice because everyone sorta finds their own path for what works best. My suggestion would be to spend less time concerned with Wanikani throughout the day, as strange as that may sound. Just make specific times of the day that you go do reviews/lessons and for the rest of the day, just don’t think about WK even if if you have stuff pending. Deciding on a regular schedule is definitely one of the things that helped me feel more successful. It’s really easy for it to become this omnipresent thing because you are eager to get better at it and you want it to happen fast. For me restructuring things so that it was intentionally only a specific part of my day helped shift my mental approach. It’s easy to say “just don’t worry about it so much” but that’s not actually helpful. But you are certainly capable of this, even if it feels like you are not. For some people, it just takes that kind of mental shift. I’ve seen it a lot for students who believe they “can’t do math.”
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You might be onto something here!
It certainly is really easy to let it become omnipresent thing since it shows that reviews will come on x time of clock and it keeps reminding you to do your reviews so you get sucked into doing them as soon as they become available!
Maybe if I will do reviews only in the morning, after school, after dinner and before sleep. That will mean that there will be a backlog of reviews but maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.That should also allow me to have more time for the other important stuff in my life. At least I hope so. I really, really want to get the rest of my current chapter finished and do more reading. I’ve got bunch of books loaned from the school and I need to get them read.
Yes, I do, or did, feel like quitting but at the same time I had bad feeling about it too since I really want to learn japanese. While I could list some reasons but in reality, there isn’t really any single reason, just a feeling that I want, or need to, or have to, learn japanese for whatever reason. Like it’s a thing I need to do.
I will try to do wk only during alotted times. See how that goes. Try to get into wk mental space and try not to get too pissed off at it, even if not remembering things you have gurued stings so so so bad.
Also, as you might have guessed, I am one of those people who ‘cant do math’. It’s so easy to start getting things wrong in the beginning, get reprimanded for it and from there on out you start feeling like you’re too stupid for it and eventually, due to negative expiriences, won’t be able to do more advanced math and conclude that you just can’t do it even if it’s not you, it’s the way you were taught.
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Yeah, this is very true. The vocab are important to locking in the kanji. That’s why kanji like 岡 that don’t have much vocab are harder to remember. I’ve also been embarrassed on burn reviews for really basic kanji sometimes when I can remember the kunyomi but not the onyomi thanks to vocabulary.
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this is an incredible beginner’s thread
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