I kept putting off trying the membership for wanikani because I didn’t like the idea of SRS but after trying the free lessons I see how effective it is. If I was free to do the lessons at any time, I know I would keep going for hours on end and I would forget everything as soon as I take a break to do something else.
Since it’s only $9 a month— which is extremely affordable— there is no downside. If it doesn’t work for me in a year I can simply cancel but here’s why I think I won’t cancel my membership until I have finished all levels:
I like the UI. Seeing the little green dots after each review knowing that soon I will do some unlocks is satisfying.
I like having an organized structure and everything is taken care of for me to just learn.
I like the stats
Refreshing the homepage every now and then and see no new lessons and no reviews but then on one of those refresh there’s a review Lol. Something about it that I like.
More importantly, I want to learn Japanese. I know Hiragana and Katanaka and I am currently learning the proper use of particles and grammar in general. As much as I’m progressing in sentence structure, I hate not being able to identify kanjis when I see examples on YouTube as they explain the grammar.
I learned Hiragana and Katakana using mnemonics and it is extremely effective. That’s why I know I probably won’t succeed if I just try to memorize kanji without mnemonics. I could create my own stories but why go the extra effort when wani already exists?
I’m here for the long haul! So hello fellow wanikanies
Yo welcome @Kinozato . That’s great that you started learning kanji soon after you started learning japanese(assuming you just learned hiragana and katakana) people say kanji is the biggest hurdle(or most time consuming one) and i 100% agree. Glad you started. see you on the other side (level 60 ofc)
Yay, a new member in the crabigator cult- I mean Wanikani community! If you haven’t already, try out a few scripts to make your overall experience better and lurk on the forums if you have time.
Thanks for the warm welcome everyone. I just have a quick follow up question:
When people complain about spending more than an hour doing reviews, is it because we have to review everything that we have learned up to whatever point we have reached or because they are going way too fast before mastering the previous Kanji and vocabulary?
I can certainty see that it will be a pain if I have to review hundreds of kanjis and vocabulary every time. Can I simply choose NOT to advance on new lessons until I have ingrained what I have learned into my long term memory hence not needing to review them anymore?
I don’t think you’ll see that problem for a while!! I busted through the pay barrier from level recently, and I started about 2 weeks ago… And is a good pace–Certainly not hundreds so far. I’m so enthusiastic, that the SRS “wait period” is aggravating me! (I did 2 years of DuoLingo and I know 90%+ of the vocab so far) I think reviews start to stack up after you know hundreds of things and old ones come up for regular review and you miss several days… shrugs. That’s when you might want “vacation mode” …I don’t know how to do any of that stuff yet…
What really have helped me is to follow a strict routine, where I do reviews three times a day. Just done my routine for the evening, and 0/0.
Also, in the start I didn´t particulary pay attention to the radicals, but I´m now starting to see their function in recall and memorization and how they are an important part of the whole method, with radicals → meaning → reading and the whole “story” created around the kanji. For example I recently learned 谷, and thought the whole story around it was ridicioulus, but those fish fin-hats got stuck.
Initially, doing maximum of 20 lessons a day will keep your review pile stable but eventually, you will start to get master and above terms back for review so the workload will go up. Around level 10 is where you start burning items but it takes around 5 months to burn something if you get every review right. As long as you have an hour block and a schedule, you can get through review piles. Don’t do them all at once though since they’ll come back the same sized later on.
It will depend on how many lessons you do, and how bad your accuraccy is?
And also: how many time do you do these reviews?
I try to do them when I can, so that’s often, so i don’t have hours of reviews.
I also can use the app Jakeipuu, so I can choose to do 5 reviews a time, if I don’t have the time/will to do all the reviews.
Absolutely. Wanikani doesn’t force you to start new lessons if you’re not ready to (I recently let my lessons sit for three months to try to get my review count under control after a rough stretch over the midwinter. Most of the advice given out is to not binge through all the new lessons as soon as you’re able to keep the review counts manageable. The forecast is your friend in knowing if and when you’ll have a big pile of things coming back, and the Heatmap script can show you further out if you’ve got any bad days coming up.
