I’ve started this journey 8 years ago already. I’ve been doing a weekly 2 hour class, very light, that got me up to the marugoto N3 book. We did minna no nihongo 1 and 2 before.
Since it’s only a weekly class, of course it requires me to do something on my own, that’s why I started with Wanikani and Bunpro. The issue I always have, is that something happens, I have to abandon these tools for a few months, and getting back into it it’s extremely difficult. I’ve reseted my wanikani progress 2 times already, I think I was around lv 20 the first time, and lv 15 the second, and I feel like I should now reset again. I try to do the reviews and I don’t remember anything, and it’s extremely demotivating to keep failing the reviews all the time, while also having to deal with hundreds on queue
The thing is, yeah, I could reset my progress again on wanikani and bunpro and start over, and be back at N5 level, but I’ve been studying for 8 years already, and I feel like I’m just wasting time. My level now is worse than 2 years ago.
Has someone been in this position? Any recommendations on what can I do?
No to the first question, but I do have a recommendation.
It sounds like you have spent all those years studying, I can understand that this kills the fun!
How about doing some fun things in Japanese too on top of the studies, to reinforce your Japanese?
For me fun things are reading and playing games (which is also a lot of reading). I didn’t get into playing games for a while though, I started with reading.
If you haven’t tried it before and it sounds intimidating, then I can recommend and vouch for Satori Reader.
If you need a push to get started and good company, then joining a Book Club here on Wanikani is great. Start with the Absolute Beginner Book Club and whenever it starts feeling easy, try the Beginner Book Club.
You can join a “live” club but you can also use the old threads, that will give you access to premade vocabulary lists, reducing the time needing for lookups and so on, as well as reading people’s questions about the language and their answer, and you can ask your own questions too.
It took me 8 years to reach WaniKani level 60, and I have been trying to learn Japanese even before that (though I’d say I only truly seriously started when I joined WaniKani). I had many falls and resets…
Yes, this is exactly how it was in my case!
In the end, what I decided – is that for me it’s a hobby, so I’m going to take all the time in the world. And perhaps I will never truly learn Japanese. But I can always make myself a bit better. This approach resulted in me finally being able to read my favorite manga in Japanese and I’m currently playing Final Fantasy XIV in Japanese. Which is not the easiest game to play in Japanese, but somehow so far I am managing it…
So, my recommendation would be to just keep doing resets – not necessarily to level 1, but to the level you would feel comfortable with – and keep going again. This is not a waste of time, becasue this is your hobby. You are trying to improve yourself in an area which is giving you problems. Reset is not a waste of time, just like cooking breakfast next day doesn’t mean your yesterday’s breakfast got wasted. I’m quite sure there are some items that you have managed to drill into yourself quite firmly (犬、for example).
Also, if you haven’t done this already, I highly recommend starting reading simple resources like
or
Listening to simple Japanese podcasts like
would also be a good idea.
At least that’s how it works for me…
In any case, best of luck with your studies!
I can totally identify with this, and I agree with @Akashelia above: doing something fun is really helpful when you are feeling demotivated.
I studied Japanese long ago, and then decided to start again in 2020. I also take a weekly class; my other baseline non-negotiable is to do a Duolingo lesson every day. It takes five minutes. It isn’t hard. And it’s a really good reinforcer for stuff I’m doing elsewhere. I use Wanikani and Marumori as well, and I try to read every day when I’m on vacation, but when life gets overwhelming that sometimes adds up to more daily time than I can invest, so I do those only when I have the time to comfortably do so. This means that my progress can sometimes feel pretty slow; doing fun things in Japanese really kickstarts my motivation.
For me the most fun thing is to watch Japanese film and tv. I often do this with the subtitles on - some will say that that’s not real learning, but 1. I don’t care, and 2. I’ve found that, like Duolingo, watching with subtitles can really reinforce vocab and grammar I’ve learned elsewhere. If I’m feeling more confident and invested, I’ll watch old favourites (like the Ghibli catalogue) without subtitles and it’s a whole new experience.
When I’m not feeling motivated, my main goal is just to maintain as much as possible, rather than progress, because someday I’ll be motivated again and I’ll be able to kick up the intensity then.
To be fair, I feel no real urgency: I don’t have grand goals for learning Japanese, and am doing it only because it’s fun for me. But if you are having a hard time doing it but don’t want to give up, I would really recommend just doing fun stuff until the desire to work harder kicks in again.
Yes. And if you don’t believe me, look when I joined. I was in the same position. I took it in college and then stopped. I got up to level 22-ish and then reset all of the way back down to 2. I’ve been on and off for over a decade. Here’s what I’ll tell you - None of it was a waste. It’s not like by resetting you forgot everything you knew. You’re just reinforcing it and every second of learning is you getting better, even if the increment is so small you can’t easily see it. Here’s what I recommend: Start reading something. Seriously, anything. Find a really light manga or something. Or go big. If you were at level 22, maybe find a VN or game to play that is N4-N5 appropriate. You may have to look up a ton of stuff at first, but games are really repetitive with dialog and topics and you would be amazed at how quickly you put away your dictionary.
I love japanese culture, the mythology, the food, anime. I’ve been in a lot of countries, but Japan is the only one, other than my country, where I feel like I would like to live there.
Mostly I wanted to keep learning something after finishing my engineering degree, and Japanese was an easy choice for that reasons.
I just had an interview with a Japanese company few months ago, but my English wasn’t good enough so I failed . Since then I decide to learn Japanese seriously, and one day I wanna interview with them again… but this time in Japanese lol.
Maybe you can try doing something related with Japanese while studying too. I think having a small project make it much easier to keep going.
For me, I’m building Wanascope. Only a few people use it right now, but I really enjoy working on it, and I use it everyday myself to make WaniKani easier. It feels much better than just opening WaniKani only for reviews every day .
Somewhat different position, but WaniKani works wonder for me, making me really remembering vocabularies.
But if SRS itself stands in the way, how about how much you can build around each spotty bits of knowledge. How many vocab around each Kanji, even if it doesn’t align with WaniKani? Grammar is more nuanced, but you have to see it in action, to really appreciate it.
About reading, how having read something right now and perhaps feels too difficult. Then some unplanned day in the future, how about picking up back again, and feels that it’s much more approachable?
I can’t guarantee all these will work, but at least, it might not be as dry as isolated words (even if connected by letters of Kanji or what) nor as holding too many theoretical frameworks in wait…
WK issues, but early word lists may be off from the immediate usefulness. And it might not compensate enough with WK mnemonics or just making it easy to remember…
SRS is a harsh mistress. Juggling two (WK and Bunpro) when neither is your cup of tea is a recipe for self-abuse. Unless you thrive on it, I would stop SRSing with flash cards and use a different system. I don’t think WK is a good tool for learning from scratch because of the grind and relevance of the material.
Reading has been mentioned and it can be done with graded readers or subtitles on videos/games/music for example. I like reading signs and package labels but that’s kinda weird. If you pick a genre that you like, the SRS will come in the form of fun repetition of words that you will actually use. Noting grammar points and taking them to class will make that time more valuable as well.
You can always come back to WK and Bunpro to use as a refresher or fill in the gaps.
USE THE LANGUAGE!!!
isn’t this why you started learning in the first place?
… making this switch will help you so much!
find people to talk with, travel, read, games, hobbies, etc… you’ll still have plenty to learn but after this much time you don’t need to (or shouldn’t need to) “study”
if you find things you want to learn or refresh you can always build your own flash cards as needed and review those but avoid getting into the SRS game, unless it’s stuff you want/need for a particular hobby, book, game etc… avoid adding common words, easy words, or words that are super rare and have fun.
To do WK reviews without dealing with the SRS penalties I use the Kakehashi app (available on iOS and Android). The developer is a WK community member and he is very responsive to user requests. The app has many more features than that, I am only using a fraction of what it offers - but it fills in many blanks that WK does not address, while being aware of your WK level.
Thanks to everyone that stopped by to encourage me. I’m back on track, reading the tadoku stories, which are a lot kinder than attempting to read manga.
I’ve also managed to clear my wanikani review queue, but I will refrain from learning new items until the reviews become more manageable. I can do 200 daily reviews when motivated, but when not, I can barely do 30. I think my mistake is learning too many items when I’m motivated, not considering I won’t be able to keep up.
So hey! if you are reading this now and you feel like I did. Just take a step back, relax, and take this as an opportunity to revisit old topics. You’d be surprised at how many things you didn’t remember that will also help you to understand more texts. There is no need to always be learning something new.
I’m late here but I will say that I have found that around 100 give or take in the apprentice category is usually manageable for me. Your number might be a bit higher or lower but I try to stick to around that. If I have a bit of a bad run and some failures push that number up I ease up on lessons and focus on repeat study of failure items. When it starts to dip too low below this I push on into lessons a bit more.
The other thing I would strongly recommend is Kakehashi. I use both alongside each other. i find Kakehashi’s study failed item options are super useful. I tend to just grind failures repeatedly in this and find these will just stick all of a sudden.
If you’re at level 20, I think that’s about the level you can start with low-level manga and video games, isn’t it? Start immersion.
Oh, and if you ever get demotivated because you’ve got a truckload of reviews piled up, you can toggle vacation mode on and off while doing reviews until you finish them all, and then go back to normal.
I think the key is finding something you enjoy which also benefits your studies. Try Marudex with Steam games, simple stuff like Dragon Quest perhaps. And watch anime with Japanese subs on, again keep it simple.
I think the big one though is go to Japan. Maybe not to live, just to experience it first hand. And try to speak Japanese, you just have to say a few words in Japanese in a restaurant and you’ll get a “日本語大丈夫です” said to colleagues and you’ll be in full immersion mode. It’s a thrill.
. Since then I decide to learn Japanese seriously, and one day I wanna interview with them again… but this time in Japanese lol.
.