Hello all, I have enjoyed wanikani for the past few months, but now that I am comfortable with a few hundred kanji or so, I am starting to reconsider my use of wanikani. Id love your thoughts.
Rant below:
I am using japanese.io to import short stories and read them. I am realizing that reading with words in context and seeing the associated kanji might be a more effective way to learn words and Japanese as a whole. I am also finding wanikani to be a bit restrictive. For example during reviews, you have to recall the exact reading of the kanji in isolation from many weeks ago. I dont know how beneficial that truly is because as we know kanji are not words themselves, they are building blocks of words. Basically, I feel like once you get a kanji to guru status, you shouldnât have to review the kanji readings anymore, only the meaning and vocabulary associated.
Also, the radicals are completely useless to me. Not having an option to exclude them is just straight up annoying to me.
One last point is that some commonly used kanji I will not even see for many weeks, but I will see them often when reading native material.
Has anyone else experienced this feeling and transitioned to exclusively reading / grammar study? Did you eventually come back to wanikani? Thanks!
Itâs definitely possible to just read if wanikani is frustrating you. You could always add kanji to an Anki deck or something as you encounter them in the wild, that way you would guarantee learning them in context. Nothing wrong with that approach.
Thanks! I think I agree. Im comfortable enough with Kanji now to just start diving in. I do think Wanikani has been incredibly useful and im not sure how i would have gotten to this point without it, but I think it might be time to move on!
I think it strongly depends on the person. Ultimately, reading and grammar are the main tools of learning language; itâs just that studying kanji and vocab can make it much easier.
If you donât have to look up every single word you encounter, it becomes much easier to understand texts and grammar. This â and the minimal daily routine â is why I love WaniKani
However, different people are different, so, whichever works best for you
Personally reading was also my main objective and you definitely donât need to get all the way to level 60 to start reading seriously, although Iâm surprised that you already find WaniKani frustrating at level 12, for me it started feeling really redundant by level 30 or so.
As you get towards more niche kanji later in the course I do think that it doesnât make a lot of sense to learn some kanji in isolation (my go-to example is æšæ¶ which contains two kanji that are basically only ever used in this one word, so it makes more sense to just learn æšæ¶ directly IMO) but early on I actually disagree:
Many âbasicâ kanji are used in so many words that knowing their reading in isolation will let you guess the reading of new words or words you donât know well which is very convenient.
Unfortunately Wanikani doesnât really emphasize these phonetic components which is a huge wasted opportunity IMO. Fortunately (and as always) there are userscripts fixing this issue.
All that being said, if you find that just reading works for you then by all means, just read. Personally when I did this around your level I remember being overwhelmed by the amount of unknown kanji but if you can make it work itâs certainly better to learn the language in context.
I donât know, but at least I think it is necessary to read. Because I got nowhere significant I took Kanji more seriously. Grammar is more like, start with it, but on hold, and review later on.
Kanji can sometimes be viewed as an abbreviation of a full word (but not an English word), that got stacked together to form a new word. Because that Japanese has Kanji, so Japanese vocabularies became more numerous and Kanji help with sounds of some words.
Sometimes itâs not necessary to view so. Like, I donât think much of ććŒ· or ć ç. Kanji meanings are afterthoughts.
There are of course cases that some (rare) Kanji donât give much meaning without other Kanji in a vocabulary. There are also cases that all Kanji donât make give much meaning in isolation, but easily recognizable when together in a vocabulary. Iâd say, those Kanji do have meanings, but it doesnât matter for casual foreign language readers.
This is super helpful and a good perspective. I think I could also easily be just not noticing how much wanikani is still helping me. Kind of like how people stop taking medicine because they âdont need it anymoreâ when in fact its just working as intended. I think I will stick with it a bit longer - maybe around level 20 or so - before I finally call it quits. I agree with you that jumping in and completely eliminating my kanji study will be difficult.
Yeah I do remember that by the time I got close to level 30 I felt like I didnât really need wanikani anymore and that my time would be better spent studying grammar and vocab or simply just reading more.
I still went all the way to 60 for completionâs sake but frankly in hindsight the value of WaniKani as a study tool drops sharply as you go through the 2nd half of the levels, and I would even argue goes negative by the time youâre in the 50s.
Looking up unknown words without Furigana gets so much easier/faster, when you can guess the readings of the kanji in the word. Even when you canât guess the specific reading of the word in question, you can type multiple other words with those kanji and remove the characters you do not need.
WaniKani helped me a lot with that. Reading without this knowledge can be very tiring. But of course, reading as soon as possible is also a good idea. I would do both.
I read and use Wanikani. I think it did help me to read faster, since I knew the words. Sometimes also learnt new words and saw them then in the wild, and was happy to encounter them.
If you just want to read, Iâm sure you can do that too. My impression is books aimed at children have different difficulties levels, like âGuardians of Gaâhooleâ seemed like 3. grade level, but âWolves of Beyondâ, which plays in the same universe, was suddenly more difficult and felt more like maybe 5. grade level. (So difference was, less words had furiganas over them. And I just guess which level it could have been, since I have some books for children to learn kanji.)
Also reading gets easier when reading a book or series, since authors might use similar words again. (Like when you start, you might to look up some words, but you will encounter them later again. Because the words used might be a style thing of that author, or you learnt words which are relevant for that setting.) (Just as tip, in case it might feel overwhelming at first. It gets better while reading.)
What I also did in the past to add words to Anki, which I encountered while reading. But Wanikani sure gives you a more streamlined experiences, with having words with kanjis you learnt, where as when you just add words, some sure felt more difficult, because of kanjis, which I didnât know too well then. I think itâs helpful to learn a kanji, then some words with it.
I sure think reading is helpful to really put the things you learnt in use. So certainly do it.
If you feel like Wanikani isnât helpful anymore, then donât use it, if you donât want to. Itâs just a tool to reach your learning goals.
Finishing wanikani gives kind of a closure or a sense of acheivement.
The reason I decided to go through wanikani level 60 was because I still didnt know many words and kanji when I read my hero academia manga, and it was so frustrating to look up many vocab and kanji even though I was level 40 at the time.
This could be due to my hero academia being my first hard manga.
After immersing for a while I realized there are two ways to understand japanese: Method 1: Just use wanikani to build up vocab and kanji and see them in reading. Less frustrating and provides more enjoyable experience from the beginning. (I used this) Method 2: Get used to vocab and kanji through repition by immersing through books, podcasts and videos. Extremely frustrating in the beginning but if you get used to it more rewarding. Alternative: Doing both as LuisTM said. Have the best of both worlds. You just have to find the content and be able to handle both.
There might be methods Iâm not aware of due to my experiences. This only applies to kanji and vocab. Grammar is a different beast.
Analogy: Wanikani levels are comparable to car engines. the higher the level the higher the speed and comfortablness of reading. And it is able to maintain the speed and comfort in many different tracks ie, different genres of book.
This sounds cheesy, the more I write this analogy.
Whenever you learn something from wanikani it is nice to know it is there (brain) and whenever Iâm encountoring a word I learn from wanikani it gives me the feeling of little wins.
Just follow what your gut says and have an amazing language journey
