Is it okay or recommended to slow things down at times?

WaniKani
1

I try my best to keep doing the reviews multiple times a day, but some days it’s easier than others.

Some days I have all the time in the world and I feel like it goes a bit too slow. And use advanced get some more practice in. And other times I’m to busy with work and personal life that I can only manage to do one or two reviews.

I’m at a point where I get reviews from Apprentice to Enlightened. And sometimes I wake up and there are 50+ reviews waiting for me.

Now my question; Would it be good or bad for my learning process to sometimes skip a day of lessons and only focus on reviews? (in hopes of reducing the amount of reviews that keep piling up).

Small side question.
Anyone got tips on how to keep track of when a word uses a different spelling.

Example:
Sometimes X + ‘Month’ = …げつ
and sometimes X + ‘Month’ = …がつ

Same goes for the Kanji combination X + ‘Writing’ + ‘letter’.
Sometimes it’s …もじ and other times it’s …もんじ

2

That’s fine, as long as you don’t let the reviews pile up.

Repeat the words again and again and again…

3

This is highly recommended - as much as possible: do your reviews every day; if that is too much some days, try to do some reviews anyway, but backing off to zero or very low numbers of lessons is the best way to control the workload and avoid burnout. Over a few weeks, you can check your progress and decide if you want to change your rate, but remember - Kanji take a long time to learn and the most important levels of WK are probably the first 30 to 40. Also, when you can, try to get into reading Japanese - that will reinforce your WK learning.
頑張ってね / Good luck!

One comment/idea on your side question: try to voice the reading when you encounter it (if possible, out loud).

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4

That’s a completely valid learning strategy. Many people do it this way to maintain a more manageable pace and to avoid burnout and review avalanches. Whether it’s good or bad is up to you. I would say only push yourself as far as you’re comfortable with.

Welcome to hell. :upside_down_face:

The only trick I’ve found for げつ vs がつ is that がつ is usually reserved for actual months. 一月, 二月, etc.

Though, it’s not always true. 何月 and 正月 are notable exceptions.

As for the others (もじ vs もんじ, にち vs じつ (日), じん vs にん (人), etc), you’ll either just have to bruteforce SRS them and let the algo punish you until you get it right or you can try to remember the exact reading mnemonics… and then still probably have the SRS punish you a few times.

It does get slightly easier over time as you kind of get a better idea about what “sounds right” (…but maybe that’s just my imagination).

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Thanks! Got any tips on where to start with reading.
I can read Hiragana/Katagana perfectly fine, and all the way up to my current wanikani level of Kanji.

6

Satorireader.com is a paid subscription reader -
it allows first 2 episodes of each series for free.
It is great because it is curated to early-stage (and intermediate) learners. One of our big obstacles as Japanese learners is having to look up unknown Kanji and it makes that much easier.

NHK News Easy has short articles. The Kanji can be tough, but it is possible to cut and paste to look them up.

If you’re looking for beginners’ courses Irodori

is free and targets ‘use cases’. It gives a nice mix, including introducing some Kanji and short reading.

7

You could try to understand the concepts behind each kanji reading.

Reading are often logic.

For example let’s take 音 (sound, noise)

The possible readings are

On’yomi: おん

  1. おん (音): Abstract and formal, commonly used in compound words (jukugo).

Kun’yomi: おと, ね
2. おと (音): General Sound or Noise
3. ね (音): Pleasant or Musical Sound

If you understand those concepts you can see that the readings in the following sentence are very logical.

日本語：「音楽(おんがく)を聞く時、大きい音(おと)は好きじゃないけど、ピアノの音(ね)は好きです。」
英語：「When I listen to music, i dislike loud sounds but… I like the sound of piano.」

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Very cool, thanks for explaining it.
Sadly Wanikani doesn’t give good explanations on when which pronounciation is used.
Guess I have to look them up myself to get a better understanding.

1 Like
9

I do not do it for each kanji, but i’ve had good result prompting chatGPT and asking to give me a general sense of use of each reading in context.

The description i posted above is a copy-paste of its answer.

Also for the additional kanji concepts themselves, just seeing them additionally on https://jisho.org/ is a pretty good start.

I think that’s more or less done in the “pattern of use” section but the info is not centralised which is a pain. The AI way has been the least tedious for me for now.

10

This is great advice IMHO.

Switch on “Autoplay audio in reviews” and speak the word out loud before entering it. Not only does it add listening and speaking to the learning process, you should also be able to learn some of the pitch accent as well.

For example, the pitch accent for 橋 and 箸 is different even though the readings for those words are the same.

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何月 is an “actual month”, as it were. It’s just that which actual month it is is unknown. And 正月 is an older name for January.

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Cool. I guess the trick holds up then. :slightly_smiling_face:

That certainly explains the Chinese calendar I saw. I was wondering why it started with 正月 instead of 一月.

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13

I had to start sometimes doing less lessons to focus on the reviews. I think it’s totally fine to do this on some days, as long as I’m doing my reviews. I’m not at too high of a level and don’t have too much experience but that’s just from my point of view at level 5.

I also get what you mean with the

Example:
Sometimes X + ‘Month’ = …げつ
and sometimes X + ‘Month’ = …がつ
Same goes for the Kanji combination X + ‘Writing’ + ‘letter’.
Sometimes it’s …もじ and other times it’s …もんじ

I think for this it’s just doing it a lot and kind of remembering the pattern.