I would not expect the average person to casually “take off their blindfold”, because it is not a simple process by any means. I have spent 3x more time studying the actual mechanisms involved with learning and teaching than actually learning a language. Because that’s where my passion is. Most of the research that would assist one in “taking off the blindfold” is pretty recent and not well disseminated. If I sounded like I was BLAMING anyone for being a little blind, that was unintended. The majority of the information circulating about learning fosters this blindness.
But I’m getting a bit off-topic on someone else’s thread.
I am kind of liking the SRS way of learning, though I am still on level 3 – I believe that I should start learning some grammar. And finding your post, I would like to ask --if Bunpro really helps on learning grammar using SRS system ? I am not really sure about WK --on Grammar side, as mostly I see it guides me on Kanji & Vocabulary …
From your experience, when should I “combined” with Bunpro (to start my grammar journey ??)
Thanks
For what it’s worth, I didn’t buy lifetime at the start with WK (I had a yearly subscription, which I did thankfully get on a discount), and I ended up regretting that I hadn’t bought lifetime that entire first year, because it would’ve saved me money if I’d gone all in with it from the beginning. Unfortunately, I started WK at the end of 2020, so when it was time for the lifetime sale, I was still unsure if I’d be able to commit or not, so I went with the “safe” option and gave myself a trial run before making any big decisions…
I knew by March 2021 that I should’ve just gone for it .
There definitely are other tools that work besides WK, and WK might not be the best option for everyone, but if you’ve tried other tools and they haven’t worked for you, and you’ve experienced enough of WK to know that it does work, and that you like studying with it, then I think buying a lifetime subscription is honestly a great purchase.
Like you, I don’t “need” to study Japanese for any major reason, but I’ve gotten so much personal fulfillment out of the hobby, and I’ve made so many amazing friends through this community, and WK worked so well for me, I’ve easily gotten $200+ of value out of it. Could I have gotten where I am without it? Probably. Would I have? I dunno. That’s a way harder question to answer.
I’d say there are far worse hobbies you can have than learning a language, and there are far more frivolous purchases you could be spending your money on than study tools.
Hmm, re: lifetime vs. yearly (or even monthly), I guess you need to ask yourself, do you think there’s a very high chance of you still using WK much longer than two years from now?
There are definitely people who use WK for years and it works for them - many people in the thread seem to fall into that bucket. I think especially if you don’t have much time to learn every day, or if you really value the simplicity of WK, lifetime is a good idea.
But, for me, I’m definitely realizing that I want to use other tools in the long run, and there’s no way I’ll be using WK even one year from now, just because I found tools that work much better for me. So I’m not planning to pick up lifetime, although I really appreciate WK’s content for being a great introduction to kanji.
Why I want to use other tools
I have heard that WaniKani is primarily useful up until level 30, and drops off in usefulness in the next 30 levels.
I heard this same advice, I think in Vanilla’s thread where they said to stop using WK somewhere between level 15-40, and start reading and mining instead.
I started looking into it and set up a mining deck (I’m using jpdb + jpd-breader for now, might switch to anki + yomichan). It’s definitely more complex than getting started with WK, but now that I have it I’m realizing that I want to ditch WK’s SRS for just this setup. I actually have control: I can add the words that I want to learn, I can get more reviews on a word I forgot, I can get less reviews on a word I know well, etc.
I’m also finding that it’s way easier to learn kanji in any order I want, now that WK has given me a lot of good practice breaking down complex kanji. (I didn’t feel this way at at all back at lvl 8, it changes fast!)
So yeah it might be worth waiting and see how your thinking changes, it could be a good idea to hold off on lifetime, you might ‘graduate’ from WK sooner than you expect! Especially if you are spending a lot of time studying and trying out different tools.
Do you mind sharing here the optional tools ?
I am a very beginner in learning Japanese, so far – I have quite a good fun with WK --and (especially) with its system of SRS. Although it becomes a bit addictive and affecting the review timeline. So far, I have no complain about this (timeline).
However, I believe that learning language is not only about “word-by-word” (either Kanji or Vocabulary) of which I am looking any additional alternative which will (hopefully) allow me to understand better (and -hopefully not overwhelming me in the process).
That’s a very good point, but as Leebo and others like to remind me, my delivery… falls flat at times. In a post where it’s my intent to actually be helpful, my message is going to fall flat on its face if I come off as abrasive or condescending. I’ll make my own thread in the near future, when I’ve had a chance to rehearse and work through the mechanics of it all so that it’s more… palatable.
In case you missed it, I did write a bit about what tools I’m using under the ‘Why I want to use other tools’ fold, you can click to expand it!
But more importantly, I would recommend getting advice from people further along than me! You could look for other threads in this forum e.g. about ‘how to learn vocabulary outside WK’, ‘how to start reading’, etc.! In particular the keywords “mining” or “sentence mining” might be good to search.
I really enjoy Bunpro’s SRS for grammar, it’s become my main source for studying.
But in the end none of this matters if you don’t take the time to actually engage with “real” Japanese content. Rote memorizing kanji, words and grammar is a useful crutch, but it’s just a crutch.
I get you completely I’m in a similar boat really. I bought lifetime for both WK and bunpro and I don’t regret either of those, although given my current pace in WaniKani I would probably have saved some money by paying yearly, but I like the peace of mind of not having to worry about that.
Could I learn all that stuff using only free resources? Absolutely. But here’s the way I see it: I actually find wanikani and especially bunpro more pleasant to use than the free alternatives. I’m going to spend probably well over a thousand hours on these two websites, so if you calculate the price per hour it’s not a very large amount of money if you actually think like me that these websites provide added value over the free alternatives.
How much do you value your time? I don’t know how much you earn but for me as a DINK software dev, $400 is maybe a week’s worth of savings, it’s a complete no brainer. Unfortunately not everybody is that lucky…
Are they 4chan-style language-learning purists who scoff at your weakness or do they think that learning languages is not important/useful and therefore you shouldn’t spend that much money into it? Because frankly both of these possibilities sound equally silly to me.
Again, if you calculate in terms of $-per-hour, a wanikani or bunpro subscription is a vastly better “investment” than a movie ticket or most videogames. And you actually learn a valuable skill too.
So I’m in a situation where I do have the money and I have used many, many resources. Also note that this is my 5th new foreign language. But I wanted to say that I really like Bunpro for grammar reinforcement. I used Renshuu for quite a while but it didn’t help me with construction of sentences and that’s the recall you need to speak. You will need to LEARN it through some text/youtube/other teaching resource, but for review and reinforcement it’s great, especially when you make it so you have to TYPE the answers in using a Japanese IME. I learned from an Italki teacher and Genki I and II to start. Recently I reset Bunpro, since the Genki grammar order is different and went back and am working through N5 to N4 to N3, etc. It’s great with the SRS to keep hammering me on the things I forget. Just my 2 cents worth… Good luck on your learning!
from my bunpro experience, it helped A LOT from n5 to n3, which is basically what you need for anime/manga
the quizzes were fine in those three levels, but from n2 it becomes really hard to differentiate the answers in so many different ways to say the same thing, if you ask the people in the forum there, they all will say “it’s the nuance” I always rolled my eyes reading that. “sigh”
*then came n1 and it went very bad as well, then I quit. But since manga/anime is my main goal, I got what I needed, now I only focus in expanding my vocab, tha’s what I really need. Still a long way to go and that’s the challenge for me.
if marumori extends grammar to n2 and n1 in my lifetime, maybe I will give it a chance.
This is pretty much my sentiment. Not marumori specifically, but language learning content that consistently stays engaging, intuitive, efficient and informative throughout all levels. It pretty much doesn’t exist after N3, where you’re basically just told to go kick rocks and go venture off into native land, and I would even argue that most of the beginner material available to us right now hasn’t come close to peak optimization.
Advancements in the psychology of learning and artificial intelligence are being made daily, and the intersection of those is probably where the future of language learning will live.
What I’m picturing it looking like will be dynamically generated fictional content that functions exactly the same as graded readers, with tightly controlled vocabulary, kanji and grammar, but with inbuilt spaced repetition recall, dictation, and comprehension exercises, based on updated methodologies utilizing cognitive load, comprehensible input and a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy.
The content is either going to keep moving away from JLPT, or JLPT itself is going to undergo drastic changes to become relevant (I say become instead of stay, because after N5 it inarguably begins losing relevance quickly).
Thanks @evandcs for the insight.
For me, allowing me to pass those basic JLPT (N5-N4 -or perhaps N3) will be an achievement by itself.
Although I believe that to be ready for those basic JLPT --will still be a long way to go as I am currently at the very basic level on WK but it will be nice to start preparing the next step ensuring that the I will gain benefits from all successful journey from many learners.
personally, WK is a constant resource for me. i go through times of being great at studying and many times of being bad and to be fair, i bought lifetime when it was like $150.
i think the feeling stupid part and your parents offsetting your passion for learning and applying yourself isn’t great though. don’t feel embarrassed! because they don’t want to understand your personal interest doesn’t make it bad. spending money on something that you like and that betters you, as long as you’re not sacrificing money for bills, food, shelter, etc. i’d say it’s worth it. $400 in the long run… it’s really not that bad of an expense. money will always come and go, so utilizing it in a way that can bring additional benefits is fine.
don’t second guess yourself. I’ve personally been swayed away from things due to my parents a lot and it sucks. i regretted not standing up to what i actually believed in or liked in lieu of what someone else wanted me to do or like. if they’re disappointed in you wanting to expand your horizons and LEARN, well… prove them wrong. double down. buy it AND learn it. get to N1. you can do it.
also, sometimes spending a lot of money on something is the actual catalyst for you to apply yourself to doing the said thing.
Honestly, I think your family is not being super negative on this. If you take any course in real life, the price is WAY higher than what you are paying for online. Not only that, but add the cost of time for you to get to the place and all that.
I used to hate paying for stuff online and felt like it was a scam. But the reality is that there is great material online that is worth paying for. Wanikani + Bunpro has been an excellent combination for me.
I think you can’t have the illusion that by JUST doing Wanikani and Bunpro will get you to proficiency. It’s also worth investing in a good book that suits your level and some private lessons once in a while.
Stick to what you think it’s right and use the community as your support group.
One thing I’m not sure was mentioned - one doesn’t need to complete WaniKani to benefit from it. The diminishing returns are actually quite brutal, especially if you pair WaniKani with any other resource which teaches vocab and/or kanji. If one picks a yearly sub and then gets to level 30-40, that’s already a massive gain :).
If WK allowed you to control the order of cards and the timings, it would be unparalleled in every regard and the diminishing returns issue would go away. Not sure that introducing kanji based on progressive radical knowledge has any benefit.
If you like studying Japanese AND you like structured learning - WK & Bunpro are practically priceless resources. I love Japanese so much, but I also completely flounder when left to self regulate my studies. After buying both lifetime subscriptions, I have made so much more progress than I ever would have otherwise. If you’re planning to study Japanese for a long time, I think it’s worth it.
To add additional perspective, I had to take about a 3 month break from studying Japanese to focus on my masters program last year. I was able to do so without really feeling bad about having ‘wasted’ money because I knew I would always have access to these services and without both of them, I probably never would have come back to Japanese.
There are certainly limitations and flaws to both, but hobbies come with costs and these are two costs that I think provide a lot of value (much more value than the pitch accent dictionary I bought, for example )
We’ll hopefully start tackling N3 content for grammar soon \o/ Marumori was only released recently, so the lack of content N3 and above is not because we don’t want to do them, but because we were simply restricted by time Meanwhile, vocabulary lists of thousands of books will be released soon, so hopefully that will be something that will satisfy more advanced users.
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