I learned about WK a couple days ago. I have been trying to learn kanji for quite a while before that, from different sources, so I already know quite a bit.
How can I get a bit of a headstart? The current lessons I get (radicals) are way too easy. The only reason I made mistakes is because I know the radicals by other names (I don’t get why remembering these names for them is important anyway, but that’s besides the point).
I feel like waiting until they get more difficult is going to take quite a bit, so skipping up until that point would make it more productive.
The early levels are sloe on purpose. You’ll get a whole lot more very soon. If you already know a lot of kanji, you’ll get through the early levels in a few days, 3-5 usually.
There is no method to be able to skip ahead. With WK, you must start from the beginning. One issue is that an obvious way of skipping ahead would be to start at a later level, but that would presume that your prior knowledge matches exactly the order in which things are taught in WK. There are some other reasons for this, which I will not get into nor say whether I agree or disagree with. You can find discussions around that in several past forum posts.
Depending on your current level of kanji knowledge and proficiency in correctly recalling both meaning and reading will impact how useful WK will be to you. If you current “accurate” knowledge level is only a small percentage then I think WK will have a lot of value and you can just plow through the bits you already know. On the other hand, if you already know half or more of everything, I would say it is not worthwhile.
On the other hand I will mention that there are quite a few folks (myself included) here that are on their second time through. Refresher/review of some sort for various reasons.
It’s important, because WK works by giving you mnemonics using the names of the radicals in the kanji. If you don’t remember the names given by WK, it simply won’t work as a tool.
Maybe I’m different, but I remember that the mnemonics from “Kanji Teacher”, which is where I learned kana and lots of kanji, were absolutely useless for me…
For the kana, I just memorized the sound, and for the kanji, I just memorized the meaning, some words that use it, etc.
I understand that some radicals have an “official” name (gate, lid, etc, which I learned of before joining WK) though, so I’ll just press through. (even though “ground” is a little silly, why not just call it “one” like they do on wikipedia. Some other radicals also have a “WK original” name)
As @Gorbit99 mentioned, there is a reason for this, internal to WK design. They use “ground” as a recurring key concept in the mnemonics/stories for the kanji which use this radical. Could they have crafted those mnemonics around “one” as the key word/concept, perhaps. I do not know. I expect that “ground” was easier to use as a common element in the stories.
If you don’t care so much about mnemonics or are open to creating your own, you could also just add whatever you call them as a synonym!
When I started wanikani my kanji knowledge was already around a weak N3 level, and while the first few levels were a bit slow, I soon noticed that some of the vocab introduced was new to me, as were some of the (very common!) readings for the kanji I knew.
If it’s too slow for you right now, do something else with your leftover time, like studying grammar or reading. The pace will pick up very soon.
I found it first weird too, that the radicals had different names than the official ones, but the idea of Wanikani is to use mnemonics, and a more colourful word might make it easier to make stories from it.
I did sometimes learn too, with just memorizing the kanji in itself, but still the mnemonics became useful too to remember things.
Found it slow too at the beginning, since I already knew some kanji, but it will get better at some point. Would say it takes some time to get used to Wanikani. I certainly found it very useful as soon as I got into it.
You can also add your own definitions by the way, if it annoys you that the radicals have different names.
imo, if you find WaniKani’s mnemonics counterproductive, feel free to make up a better one. If you find radical decomposition of a Kanji counterproductive, feel free to devise a better decomposition or find decomp from another resource (e.g. Wiktionary, RTK).
In any case, if you the things are already memorable, you might not need a mnemonic.
Still, I find radicals useful, traditional or image or not, but not because of the name given by the app. I might be a little bias because I was also there before the radical names’ overhaul.
(I would name a radical by the closest Kanji or the related vocabularies.)
