As I am already Level 45, the end of WaniKani approaches for me and approximately by the end of this year I will have finished all 60 levels. Of course I am still nowhere near fluent in japanese and already forgot some of the here burned Kanji, but after reaching level 60, I will have lots more free time to learn japanese again.
Thats why I wanted to ask, what do people usually do after being finished with WaniKani? To give an approximation on where I am excluding Kanji, on an online N4 test I did around 50-60%, I still havent tried to write properly, and I can speak a fair bit if the phrases are simple. I also have the Genki books lying around, shich I should definitely read when I have free time again.
Up until now I also usually read abd tries translating song lyrics of japanese songs I like and also going on japanese videos and trying to comprehend the comments, of course always looking something up I dont understand.
What did you all do after being finished with WaniKani or already now to improve your japanese knowledge skill, I would be very interested to know. Already thanks in advance!
Immerse. Read manga, light novels or actual novels whichever you prefer. Watch anime, livestreams or drama shows. It sounds like you’re almost exclusively doing wanikani at the moment, it might be a good idea for you to already slow down the pace right now and replace the time you saved with any of the activities I mentioned above.
Edit: seems I didn’t read your post well enough, you did mention translating song lyrics so you can disregard the ‘exclusive’ part of my comment. Might still be a good idea to reprioritize though.
I have just about finished Wanikani. Next I plan study the top 10000 vocabulary via Torii SRS, which has a study mode where you can exclude Wanikani vocabulary (approximately 5000 words).
Do you by any chance know good places to read manga in japanese on the internet? I tried tl search it myself, but I mainly just find them available in english, but not japanese. For anime iirc with Crunchyroll you can out japanese dub with japanese subs, so I guess it might be a good idea to purchase, since I couldnt find a website where I could do that without spending money
Bookwalker JP is as good as it gets, I recommend making full use of the coin-back actions that they offer every couple months.
For anime, the best way I’ve found is netflix while using a VPN. Having JP subtitles is better for learning than having no subtitles at all.
Use ‘learnnatively’ to roughly estimate the difficulty of what you may want to watch.
Finally, there’s a good chance that even the easiest manga or shows will be headache-inducingly difficult for you at this point. If that’s the case, Satori Reader is a much better way to start. I spent maybe 200 hours (very rough estimate, I don’t actually keep a log) reading and listening to most of their stories before moving on to native material.
Go out into the wild. That said the gap is there, you can’t just pick up any book and expect to be able to read it all the way as you lack the vocabulary, grammar and experience. So you should practice. Start with the easy things you can handle and build from there.
Look up vocab/grammar you don’t know and consider extracting them from a source. This is where the srs comes back into place with anki decks or the like. I personally use jpdb, but there’s also other sites and of course anki where they all based it on.
Gonna go against some of the advice here and say this is a great time to use textbooks. You could learn grammar from immersion but that’s a long trial-and-error process; textbooks are basically shortcuts to cover a lot of grammar in a short amount of time. You’re about to hit level 51, which means you’ll have all the N2 kanji down, but still have some gaps in your grammar as low as N4, which will make native materials potentially frustrating. Because your kanji and vocab are at a higher level, you should be able to fly through a textbook to fill in that gap up in no time, then dive into native materials with a much stronger foundation.
You’ve gotten a lot of advice so I won’t repeat those, but I do want to say at least, be careful not to forget the kanji you’ve learnt. Forgetting some are inevitable but it’s something to watch out for.
I went straight from Genki I and II to the Quartet series, which basically picks up right where Genki leaves off and continues through to just before N2 or so. It takes a similarly comprehensive approach with reading, listening and writing sections that go along with all the new grammar points. I thought it was pretty solid and the grammar I learned from it has stuck with me pretty well, but if you get bored of that kind of textbook learning, it’s admittedly a bit of a slog at times, and I did skip a couple sections that felt like they were dragging on. I’d take a look at it online and see if it’s a good fit for you.
If you’re looking for something a little leaner and speedier, I really liked the Try! JLPT grammar books, though I’ve only used the N3 and N2 ones myself. They’re really straight-to-the-point, with short reading passages, then just a bunch of grammar points with example sentences and quizzes after to make sure you get how they work. The tradeoff I’ve found is that though the speed is super satisfying, the grammar points didn’t stick with me quite as strongly as with Quartet. As a pre-test review, it was a perfect resource, but for teaching new grammar points it might not be thorough enough on its own — I could see it working excellently in tandem with other resources like grammar dictionaries, Bunpro, or consistent reading immersion.
