I'm giving up on WK, and here's some feedback after making it to level 20 in three-ish years

[spiced_onions]

@northpilot

When I first started, I naïvely thought it would only take a year. The very first thing you see when you visit WaniKani is

2,000 kanji.
6,000 vocabulary words.
In just over a year.

I think this a valid criticism

I had forgotten this is on their front page. I agree with you.

[Simian60]

@nikuotoko

This is clearly not entirely Wanikani’s fault - Japanese is hopelessly complex, even for native speakers, and notoriously very, very difficult for native English speakers to learn. The rage I feel when doing WK reviews is not rage at the app, but at myself; it’s at my perceived lack of progress. My deep resentment of the kanji might in fact mean Japanese is not for me. But I don’t experience the same bursts of rage when using my other learning apps, which suggests they make me feel like I’m actually learning in a way WK doesn’

I agree with some of your criticisms of WK, especially the levelling but I want to focus on something else.

Firstly, Japanese is difficult, kanji are a pain, but if I can make progress anyone can. The frustration is entirely normal because most things people try and learn are actually pretty easy: driving a car? 30 hours of practice until you can get a licence.

Languages are more like musical instruments; you want to be John Petrucci, and currently you are still trying to master bar chords and coping with blisters. Intuitively we know that if you want to be good at guitar you’re going to need to spend 1000s of hours playing, 10s of 1000s if you want to be great. And secondarily, it might be a good idea to learn to read music, and get in a bit of music theory, and watch some how-to videos.

WK, and any worthwhile app, is like the latter set of things. Helpful, but not absolutely necessary; Hendrix never learned theory or watched how-tos (although he did spend a lot of time listening to and watching people play).

My suspicion is that any app that makes you feel like you are making progress is actually making you feel like you’re making progress in the app and not in Japanese. Duolingo is the major guilty party here, but a lot of the lesser known apps do exactly the same trick.

[evandcs]

I took 3 years to finish WK. Just did the bare minimum, not speedrunning or anything else and I coud hit the finish line

Maybe this tool was not for you, OP. This happens and this happened to me when I tried studying using books, I always felt boring and quit soon after. But this SRS tool in WK was a godsend IMO.

I wish there were at least 10 more levels!

[kittyaphrodite]

i agree- I just had a tutoring session with a new tutor last night, and she was pleased by my kanji ability after one year of study. She asked if I used wanikani and I said yes, and she nodded in approval haha. I think it really does work, but some programs aren’t for everyone.

[ctmf]

@anon6600565

People complain about the diminishing returns when it comes to JLPT/Joyo/online usage of kanji once you get to 30, but honestly, it feels like 25 is the real cutoff point where I stopped feeling like I’m learning a lot through here.

My secret* opinion is you’re not even supposed to get to 60. At some point in the journey you’re going to start picking things up in the wild naturally, become self-sustaining in your learning, and leave WK behind. “Completeness” satisfaction aside, and nothing against people who have done it, but getting to 60 is reaching the end of the runway without having taken off yet.

And that’s not a slam on WK. It’s an excellent runway.

* oops, gave it away

[ChristopherFritz]

@Simian60

or just some sentence that goes on forever in kana and I get lost.

Traumatic times...

[anon6600565]

Thank you. I think that is a very good way to put it into perspective.

[milila]

I agree with all of your points and:

@nikuotoko

If a Kanji or vocab word is still bouncing between Guru and Apprentice after ten levels, let me unlearn it and come back later, or just abandon learning it until I encounter it in the wild.

This!!! I made a thread about this and, although I didn’t initially put it in the “feedback” category I later changed its label AND tagged the mods and no one even bothered to answer, which I found extremely frustrating and, quite honestly, kind of disrespectful too.

@nikuotoko

Flippant attitude to difficulty

I still struggle to understand the point of naming the levels as “death”, “hell” etc. I see no benefit to it and I understand it might be a joke but is it worth it if it’s possibly going to cause anxiety on some users?

[markalanboyd]

Wanikani is teaching me to be kinder to myself by learning to fail without judgement. I’ve accepted that this will take several years to complete, and I don’t flog myself when I get something wrong. 石 and 右 are giving me a lot of trouble but mostly because I’m typing too fast when doing reviews. Old me would say several times how stupid I am and how I’m bad at this and need to slow down. New me catches myself saying that and says, hey, no worries, it will come back in the queue and you’ll learn from your mistakes.

[KJules]

This is how I see it too. To me, flashcards are boring and frustrating, and they have to really give me some tangible benefit. Wanikani for the first 30 levels did that. It eased me into reading and by now I’ve read a ton of interesting stuff, and that wouldn’t have been possible without wanikani. But now, I come across unknown kanji pretty regularly, but not regularly enough that I feel frustrated either looking it up or skipping it and still mostly understanding what I read. And to me that means wanikani is no longer that worth it.

[MiracleGro]

@milila

I still struggle to understand the point of naming the levels as “death”, “hell” etc. I see no benefit to it and I understand it might be a joke but is it worth it if it’s possibly going to cause anxiety on some users?

I assume they assigned them names just to distinguish them. Don’t know the full history of this service, but I know they added the last 10 levels as a group, so I think WK tends to divide them in groups of 10.

I don’t see what’s wrong with the names. I mean no offense, but having “anxiety” over such a thing as silly names for levels is unusual and doesn’t reflect something that needs to be changed for everyone else, in my opinion.

[ctmf]

Right? And for those few you DO really want to learn well, WaniKani taught you a method. (Not the only method, but “a” method. Even a mnemonic framework “world” with recurring characters for the syllables, if you want to use them. Overkill for most things, there if you need it.)

I mean, it’s not like an undergraduate class where you pretty much have to know everything in it or you’ll be at a serious disadvantage. You’re going to learn them all by reading anyway. WK just gives you enough to get started, it doesn’t need to be comprehensive.

This theory is why I’m usually not enthusiastic about the “there should be more levels with ALL the Joyo kanji” threads.

[SpiderWeb]

I think I’ll definitely steal the runway comparison even though I still want to finish wanikani even after having “taken off” with reading. I still use furigana training wheels but it’s a helpful metaphor to see why the diminishing returns crowd has a point about getting through real material rather than just using wanikani and not learning how to read.

[milila]

I don’t mean it as in clinical anxiety, but rather as inducing a negative way of looking at learning. For example, leveling up and having dozens of lessons to do was really discouraging to a lot of people and a simple UI change had a super positive effect. I think these level names bring no benefit whatsoever so I don’t know why keep them.

[ctmf]

In the early days, WaniKani was a lot more jokey and irreverent. The theory was to be memorable and certainly not boring. It kind of bled over to everything, the mnemonics were a lot crazier with more “potentially objectionable, but certainly memorable” content. They’ve kind of cooled it on that over the years, but the jokey stage names are still there.

[MiracleGro]

I wish they had kept that energy. I think things are more memorable that way, and it’s more reflective of an indie project that had passion behind it. You can tell the people making it had more fun. Oh well, no problem.

[MiracleGro]

Like I said, I just think it distinguishes the stages from one another. You’re not supposed to take them seriously.

[Yoti]

I personally glad that they changed a lot of mnemonics. Some mnemonics I was actively trying to forget after visualising that horror. At some point I became good at anticipating the gruesome mnemonics and at avoiding to read them just after a glance. My visualisation is too good!

I like current Wanikani mnemonics much more - less horror, but they are still memorable!

[servette]

@mgrice

Fully expanding the info page (should I want to see everything) is super easy to accomplish and literally takes just a second. Just enter E, the shortcut for “expand all”. On the other hand, having each section such that I can expand just the other ones I want is a useful feature. In the scenario from above, I can look at other sections if I want and still make sure I do not reveal the meaning, which I have not been tested on and should not and do not want to see.

I must be missing a crucial bit of info - I tried that after getting a review item wrong, but it had no effect…

[DaraM18]

I think you need to do ‘F’ and then ‘E’.