I am new to WaniKani, but I have been studying Japanese for almost 2 years, and I have been doing so mainly using Anki and mass input. I learned a lot of words just as they are, words, and over time I’d get an intuition for kanji as time went on. However I wanted to start WaniKani to better understand Kanji and the Radicals as well, and am already at a level where I’m reading a novel, but I want to know if theres a way or a userscript or something that can make it to where I can use WaniKani soley for Kanji and Radical studying, and maybe also vocab that isn’t just hirigana or katakana vocab that I already know. Does anyone have advice on this?
I don’t know if there is such a script – I hope you would be able to find one.
Keep in mind though that vocab items are also used to teach alternative readings for kanji.
Also, WK radicals are not the same as official Japanese radicals, because WK radicals are made for mnemonics and official radicals are made for categorizing – here’s a comparison table:
With the caveat that I haven’t done this so I can’t say for certain how or if it will work, I think what you’re trying to do is possible. As far as lessons go, I think it’s quite possible to use the advanced lesson picker to manually choose to do just the radicals and kanji (once those are unlocked from the radicals). Level progression is gated by kanji, so not doing vocab won’t be a roadblock for level progression. There should be a userscript that allows you to order reviews, I think - I thought I had seen or had that installed but I don’t seem to, so I did a quick search and [Userscript] Reorder Omega might work at that.
So I think the steps would be:
set the max recommended lessons to 0 so it doesn’t autopick
do the advanced lesson options and pick out radicals to unlock kanji and kanji to progress levels
Figure out the script and have your reviews ordered or filtered in a way that only radicals and kanji show, or at least are sorted first and you just stop the review after. You’d probably need to have the reading/meaning pairs appear together too.
I assume vocab that you don’t do the lessons for won’t show up in the review queue, so other than any you already have in the hopper plus any you choose to do, you should have a fixed number of vocab items in the queue (say it’s 250 - then you know if the dashboard shows 261 reviews available that there are 11 that you care about).
I see! I guess I’m still considering whether I should subscribe and continue with WK after level 3, as I’m studying abroad in the fall in Japan and I’m unsure if its the best and most efficient way for me to learn radicals as well as how they built kanji. But this list is very useful, thank you!
The way I think about Wanikani is that it teaches individual “radicals” and individual kanji just as temporary scaffolds to make it easier to bridge to full word recognition. So, I wonder, if you’re already at the stage of full word recognition, do you need the scaffolds? I read Japanese every day, but in the long term, I forgot most of Wanikani’s names for radicals and kanji, because I do not use them outside Wanikani. (Which is fine, because they served their purpose as scaffolds.) Also, like Trunklayer mentioned upthread, the “radicals” in Wanikani were chosen for ease of memorization and do not always align with how Japanese people discuss kanji or with the etymology of kanji.
What specific types of knowledge / skills are you aiming for? E.g. would you like to be able to handwrite kanji, look them up in a paper dictionary, discuss them the way that Japanese people discuss them, know their orgins, etc.?
I’ve pretty much learned vocab thus forth by of course after learning hiragana and katakana, I did Anki flashcards and have gradually learned words and readings intuitively solely off looking at the vocab. However, there are a lot of kanji that are similar, and also, I felt as though without being able to distinct those radicals from similar looking kanji that it would slow down my progress. I am getting to a point in my reading where Satori Reader is fairly simple, and I’ve been able to move on to a novel, but if I don’t know the word before hand, it gets hard to intuit readings and meanings right away, so thats why I was considered WK.
Although I have yet to start writing in my journey, and I’m unsure if I plan to, I’d like to understand kanji and their radicals and be able to know a kanji, its meanings, and what makes it distinct upon looking at it; not through the help of context in writing, if that makes sense.
You might want to consider the programme Remember the Kanji (RTK). If you are looking to understanding kanji meanings (or distinguish between two similar kanji) but aren’t worried about learning the on’ and kun’ readings (as you already know them from vocab), it might be the better/faster option. I’m told it’s also much better placed to help with writing as it handles stroke order which WK doesn’t. You could look at kanji koohii for a site that helps with SRS memorization for RTK.
I have no experience of these and others might decry the suggestion. I’m suggesting it from the research I did before coming to WaniKani (which I did because I need the readings, have almost no vocabulary, and don’t care about writing yet). I can’t say how the communities stack up.
To be honest, I don’t think that this is a super useful investment of time. WaniKani doesn’t teach a historical understanding of why kanji are the way they are or what the traditional radicals are: it is simply splitting them into components and naming them as a memory aid. It does this as a stepping stone to get people to where you already are, i.e. being able to read words. And the vocab it picks is often aimed at reinforcing kanji readings rather than being common or useful.
You say you’re planning to study abroad: is that studying Japanese? If so, it may be worth asking the institution where you’re studying what they expect in terms of writing ability, to determine whether that’s worth prioritising.
If you do want to learn to write kanji, that does (I think) make it worthwhile doing this kind of systematic breakdown into named components with mnemonics. (I think this because it’s the only thing I know that gives you a way to remember the character when you completely blank on how to write it: you can work through the mnemonic and jog your memory that way.) WK doesn’t really try to do a component breakdown that works for writing, though – there are several places where it merges distinct components into one name that you need to write differently, and it doesn’t drill you on keyword to writing. And because it has no options to skip kanji you’re likely to have a lot of stuff you already know taking up time.
RTK is the other big option in the “breakdown into kanji components” space. It has its own problems, though – notably it doesn’t try to teach you readings at all. Its kanji ordering is purely based on going from simpler to more complex and handling all kanji with a particular component before moving on to the next; so it will happily teach rare kanji in the first dozen you learn and very common ones up at 1800+. I also found with it that although I successfully learned to do “write the kanji when given the English keyword” for the full set of 2000+ kanji, I wasn’t able to integrate it into actually writing Japanese. It’s no good being able to write 勉 when prompted with “exertion” and 強 when prompted “strong” if you’re trying to remember how to write べんきょう and you have no memorised link from the Japanese word to the RTK keywords. (Incidentally those two kanji are 1975 and 1235 in the RTK order, despite being common kanji taught at grade 2 and 3 in the Japanese school system.) So if you plan to learn RTK or any other keyword system for writing it’s probably worth some up front thought about how to integrate it into your vocabulary learning and how you plan to learn to write vocabulary. kanji.koohii is a reasonable RTK specific flashcard web app, and you get to look at community provided suggested mnemonic stories. You could also do it all yourself with Anki and a copy of the book.
jpdb.io also has some kanji keyword stuff in its system, but I’ve never tried it (I only use the vocab flashcards parts, which I am a satisfied user of). Still, it’s free and it does allow you to do things like mark cards as blacklist or “I will never forget this”, so it may be worth checking out. (NB that the developer of the web app has been mostly absent for a year or more now, so the app stays up but it hasn’t had any feature development.)
So I’m actually taking two classes in Japanese, Business Japanese and International Management, and my other 3 classes will be in English. However I plan to use all of my time towards immersing completely in Japan and making the most of my time there, so I guess I’m just wanting to be prepared.
Maybe starting to write will help? Or maybe I should reorganize how my anki deck looks. I’ll also look into jpdb.io and kanji.koohii and see how that looks. Thank you for the recommendations!
I guess where I’m coming from is that 20 years ago when I was studying in Japan, the whole classroom experience heavily involved writing (on printed worksheets, taking notes, etc). So having at least some writing ability was really helpful. But that was 20 years ago studying something else at a different institution, so it might well be that handwriting won’t be much use for those classes, and you can take notes on a laptop or something. It’s just that if you do need it then it’s much easier to have done a bit of advance prep rather than being surprised by it on day one So if you have a way to find out (contacting students from prior years, maybe) if it would be useful, that would help a lot in figuring out whether it would be wasted time or not.
I hear you! I value your advice and definitely want to look in to these things. Maybe I’ll pick up writing just to be safe, and also as a means to better understand kanji. I’m just wanting to be prepared and I want to make the most of the study abroad semester, as I plan to use my experiences in the culture and language in my future career.
