Hi, I’m level 4 and have been watching mostly anime and vtubers things in Japanese for over a decade so I know most common words and learn readings best when knowing what words the kanji are in.
For example, I’ve known what a ほうせき is for a while but on my level WaniKani is only showing the kanji readings of 宝 and 石 so it took me a bit to realize that * the ほうせき * is written using these kanji.
Often I have to think back to when I last looked up a word outside of WaniKani or clicked on the still locked words(>:() the kanji is used in to remember a reading, while it would be way more intuitive for me to just have the ほうせき in my Reviews tab.
I’m not saying WaniKani mnemonics are bad because they have clearly put a lot of effort into them and I can see them working for other people - they just don’t really work for me personally, since I learn best when fully thinking in the language I’m learning.
Like, word to word translation is fine, can’t really think of an alternative, but here with kanji readings I kinda have to switch between English to think of Ms. Chou walking on the streets she owns and thinking in Japanese of how I’d say or use the word, you know? And I know from having learned English mostly through immersion(+ basics and grammar at school) this is not the best way for me to learn.
So like, is there a way to unlock future words like this?
And if not, are there any places online to learn in this, not sure how to put it, more-word-than-kanji-approach, I guess?
I’m not gonna abandon WaniKani, just add more sources.
Aside from Anki I’m using Ringotan with stylus tablet and my current goal is to reach N4, fluency in casual settings by the end of 2026 and one day move to Japan so I wanna be as efficient in my learning as possible.
I don’t have a great answer to your specific questions, but I do understand where you’re coming from.
For example, I have long had a reasonable "advanced beginner’ level of Japanese language comprehension due to having studied textbooks first using romaji and then kana, and having watched lots of anime, dramas, news broadcasts, and the like.
So I have long known perhaps several thousand Japanese words, being able to use them in conversation and read them in kana, without knowing more than a small handful of kanji (until I started using WK).
I was delighted to discover that Houseki no Kuni was actually 宝石の国 - and there have been countless other “aha moments” as I’ve been learning kanji through WK. In fact, unsurprisingly, I’m pretty sure that my retention of the kanji that I have been learning for words that I already know well is much better than cases where I’m learning both new vocabulary together with the associated kanji.
Since WK has no way of knowing in advance which vocabulary words I may already know (by ear, or by kana), and since WK must make choices of which vocab words to feature as kanji usage examples, there will always be some mismatch involved in the learning process.
A good way to handle that is probably to supplement WK with other resources, such as online dictionaries, or by reading native material at an appropriate level (or textbooks, including alternative kanji learning materials).
I generally find the WK mnemonics to be less than helpful, and so I will often invent my own - but since there are so many kanji with identical readings, it’s not always practical to do that, and so in many cases I will have to make do with either “Joe” or “Koichi” or “Mrs. Chou”.
Have you set up Yomitan with Anki Connect? You may be able to use it on actual reading materials with some setup (and some grammar needed too). After that, you should be able to determine whether vocabularies are sticking, or whether grammar needs a bigger focus.
When reading early on, expect Furigana to help for time being. Vocab with some Kanji, not all Kanji, may already be memorable on the reading (Kana) part.
Why are vocabularies sticking for you? What don’t you forget it? Typing or handwriting may help? Or logically (though with exceptions) like with Kanji may help?
Wiktionary.org may make better Kanji dictionary than Jisho, otherwise monolinguals like Weblio.
Kanji are better explained like this, though a little more complicated…
or just ignore sense altogether, remembering the vocab as you feel like.
Wiktionary may explain Kanji parts or components better than WaniKani?
WaniKani may help limit the scope of SRS though. Limit the time spent on active memorization, so that you have time to learn other components of the language.
i do think that on one of the later tabs of a kanji lesson they show you words that use the kanji. sometimes those are words you might recognize or be able to sound out partly. for example “Satsuki” wasn’t really helping me remember much about 察, but being able to anticipate 警察 (police), a word i learned from anime and have seen in kanji at least a couple times before, is definitely helpful.
I used to bring my additional words to JPDB (it’s freeeeeee. Who knows if they’ll ever change it). I even used that to start studying WK vocab before the kanji Gurued, since I would export them using WKstats every time I leveled up. Just a little primer for the brain as I don’t personally need the mnemonics, and I learn better having the vocab alongside the kanji rather than later. I mostly liked WK for its structure and the overall gating (which prevented me from taking on too much).
Later on though I moved everything over to MaruMori. It’s not free, though the lifetime is on sale right now. It has both a typing mode like WK or a non-typing mode like JPDB/Anki, and it has wonderful grammar explanations with a grammar SRS (like Bunpro). It has various trainers/minigames like transitive vs intransitive, conjugations trainers, and mode. And the dev is working on a reader so people will be able to copy/paste text and have it auto-parse which words they do or don’t know (kind of like TTSU). So it felt like a good place to stick all my known words while getting lots of other goodies.
Id love to jam my wk full of hiragana vocab that way i get coverage on those words as well with a frequency list. Some of the top 3,000. At 25 cards a day it would be quite fast and would boost literacy rapidly.
It could even be in parallel to my current set of wk cards.
also how come the vocab here doesnt all come with a picture of the subject?
i’m sure i don’t know, but if i had to guess why, i’d say probably because that’s thousands of art pieces you have to either commission or license, including (hopefully) for words like “commission” and “including” and “probably” that would cause flame wars on the forum about how the picture doesn’t make any sense.
* the ほうせき *