There has to be some balance between learning and using what you’ve learned. Being able to read without looking up words is the ultimate sign of progress and the brain needs those kind of experiences, otherwise burnout is inevitable.
At level 11 there’s enough beginners material that can give you this experience, as long as you have some basic grammar knowledge ( like the ones I already mentioned and white rabbit press as well), there has to be some balance between challenge and success. The way to burnout is not relaxing to enjoy the view.
I completely agree.
As others have written, cut back the SRS, drastically cut back the things you don’t like to do and always look out when something just becomes repetition purely for the sake of it, as your brain will not put much importance anymore on that and try to get you to do anything thats more fun.
You should find something that is mostly fun for you and spend a considerable amount of time just doing that to get your motivation back. It is impossible not to learn while doing anything where japanese is involved, you will improve anyway. As improving with languages is a very slow process because there is just sooo much to learn before you are even barely able to function in that language, improvement often isn’t very visible for us, but it is happening!
Everything new will make you learn new things, everything where you already know all the words in it (graded readers, etc) will reinforce actually already learned things to “master” them and make you learn the not so obvious skills in a language (reading speed, internalizing patterns, listening comprehension, etc).
It really sounds like you are trying to put too much of a systematic structure on your learning progress. It doesn’t work well and is not needed for languages. Track your time with a language, try to be consistent and mainly do things you like (or do things you dont like and then give yourself a treat doing things you really like, it helps). Progress will come from that alone and depending on how deeply you interact with the language apart from doing SRS, it will be very fast in the beginning.
OMG this is sooooo Gooooood!
I also saw recommendations for it floating around but since I already had a lot of other stuff to read I only checked it out now.
It’s hilarious! I read these ones -
a level1 book called ぼくのかぞく
And a level 0 book called まだ?
Both times screamed-laughed.
It seems like their approach is to be serious about the work but not to take themselves too seriously, and it shows, in a good way. It had a spongebobsquarepantsy vibe to it.
A word of caution though, and yes, I’m talking to you @inferno60x, since it looks like a potential pitfall for perfectionists who wants to understand everything (speaking as one myself btw), the book summery at the top of the page - not what you’re meant to read*, that Japanese text is not level 0 or 1 and doesn’t reflect the actual content of the books - for the time being, skip it, and don’t let it get to you. Just read the books. They’re super easy. I wholeheartedly recommend this for beginners.
Honestly made my morning
*yes, I can easily read the summery but I still enjoy reading level 0 and level 1 stuff for the same reason I enjoy reading children books or watching cartoons - when it’s good it’s brilliant.
And when it comes to language learning - It keeps me entertained and feeds the positive feedback loop. Somedays you just want to relax and scream-laugh, instead of fighting a death match with the material.
My personal view (i.e. feel free to ignore this, I won’t be offended ) is that trying to learn a language with apps, textbooks, and automated lessons has a poor effort to outcome ratio.
If you want structured learning then a single Japanese course that focuses on reading and listening to natural-ish Japanese would be better, but…
I say this so often I should just save the text and copy/paste it in, but…
Just getting some graded readers with audio, set at your level, and going from there is cheaper and at least as effective as anything else - you’ll learn kanji and grammar as you go in context.
Read the book, listen to the audio, read the book along with the audio, read the book out-loud along with the audio, move on to the next book. After the third book & audio, go back and do first-fourth, second-fifth, third-sixth, etc, etc.
Start slow, and build up to 45-60 mins a day, and spend the rest of the time you have watching & listening to native content, or if you’re too tired youtube videos about Japanese.
Once you’ve been doing this for a while, you can identify any weaknesses you have, and if they are fixable by an app / SRS / course then use that as a supplement.
After a while you’re going to want to switch to proper books / manga, and also you’ll need to speak to a native.
Hear hear. I agree. I developed a rule of thumb for myself. I never do lessons unless I’m under 50 apprentice and have fewer than 300 reviews to do in the forecast. This seems to make my daily load manageable, and over time has reduced my daily review numbers as I finally cleared out a whole bunch of things that weren’t clear in my head.
Under this system, I only end up doing usually 10 lessons a week, although sometimes more if I’m near the end of a level. Because by then the kanji are really familiar and the end-level combination words are sometimes quite easy by then.
Of course under this system, I slowed way down, but I don’t really see the point of going fast if it makes me dread doing WaniKani. I really enjoy it now.
I do something similar. I only do ~100 reviews per day, no matter how big my pile is. I only do lessons (10 a day) if I’ve finished all my reviews. This helps keep the workload managable for me. If I stay on a role like this I end up catching up after about a month (assuming I had a backlog of like 500 reviews) and from there have about 100 reviews per day
But you know what? I almost never stick to that because life happens and I end up going long stretches of time without doing WK. And that’s ok. That’s life.
OP, there’s no pace that you “should” be going at. Believe me, I’ve been at this for 6 years and still am not done. And I’m totally ok with that. If you’re feeling overwhelmed it’s ok to take a break. Vacation mode exists for a reason. And if even if you’re like me and never remember to put it on, you can still chip away at that pile of reviews over a long period of time. You don’t need to tackle everything at once.
I agree with everyone else on needing to slow down I think would be a good idea for you. In addition I recommend checking out Crystal Hunters a manga that teaches Japanese and the video games on steam to wishlist Koe, Wagotabi, Nihongo Quest N5, and Shujinkou. You can become a beta tester for Wagotabi and Nihongo Quest N5. Game Gengo is a youtuber who teaches Japanese through videos.
I think there have already been a million suggestions for you here but I wanted to say hello as a fellow person who started a while ago and is also on level 11. (It says 12 but given I still have all the lv11 vocab to get through it will be at least a couple of weeks before I actually start 12…)
Anyway! I also went for the “10 lessons a day” approach but once it gets to vocab I often skip days. I don’t like to have more than 15 reviews in an hourly slot so if I can see tomorrow is going to be busy, I don’t add any more. This might last a few days and that’s fine.
I get frustrated at the lv2 words I still haven’t burnt but I figure the best way to get my money’s worth from the app is to keep failing so the words come up again. Paying all that money and whizzing straight through? Bah. Boring.
As long as you’re doing a little something every day, maybe just reviews and no other study, it all counts. Treading water is better than going backwards.
You could take a step back and not do 15 lessons a day. Try 3 lessons a day for a while? That’s how I do it. 3 lessons a day, 90 reviews a day, split in 3 sets of 30. If I approach 90 reviews, I stop taking new lessons, and when I’m under 80 again, I start doing lessons again. It’s okay to take it slow.
I started WaniKani yesterday feeling a bit down about it - reviews building up despite my best efforts to keep them under control, and obviously like lots of other people I felt a bit overwhelmed by it all, despite generally enjoying the process. I was going to post something about this but a quick search revealed this thread.
I’m replying for 2 reasons. Firstly, just a thank you to everyone who has contributed to it. There was some really good advice. I spent time after reading the thread, and again today, working carefully through my reviews, looking up all the kanji I couldn’t remember properly and generally taking care to make fewer mistakes and to revise things as I went along. I won’t do any more lessons till I’ve got this back to where I want it. I’m in no rush and I love the idea of the Scenic Route. I also spent a bit of time clarifying to myself exactly what my goals are and how they are changing as I go along. WaniKani is great but my goal is not to complete WK but to get the best use out of it as a tool for learning some Japanese - one tool amongst several. I also tried out the Tadoku readers and they are great! I have done all of the Start series already
The second reason for replying is just to bump the thread. I feel I got a lot of benefit from reading through it, so maybe some other people will see it and do the same.