I’ve been using memrise to learn japanese, almost done with japanese 2. It’s good for vocabulary and a bit of grammar since you learn complete sentences as well. But the format really doesn’t work well when it comes to kanji, since you only get to learn a kanji and it’s meaning, no pronunciation or vocabulary. I’m trying out duolingo as well, and it definitely has it’s merits. Though I like both of these, I prefer WK not only for learning kanji but vocabulary in general.
I definitely have the motivation and I’ll continue to study japanese. However I’m not sure if I’ll continue to use WK. But I have to say I’ve been using WK not only to learn but because it’s fun. I hear people complain about long review sessions, but I’m disappointed when I have to wait for the next review. Though I suspect it’s partly because I’m at the low levels.
Well, I’m a student (will be be starting at university this fall,) so a bit low on the income. However since I live in Sweden we get study grant and I get money from relatives on special occasions such as my birthday. Basically, I can afford WK, but it’s still a big commitment.
Great idea! I’ll certainly try out some free alternatives and continue to use memrise before I decide. And if I do decide to continue, it seems monthly or yearly is the better choice.
WORTH IT. Been studying Japanese for years and explored different methods for learning kanji. I learned about 400+ with books and rote memorization before finding Wanikani.
In my opinion, Wanikani is the best method to quickly learn and retain meanings and readings. It’s also structured in a fun and engaging way, kind of like a game/contest where everyday you’re drawn to study and advance your knowledge simply because it feels good. Especially the excitement of getting 100% on a review! haha
In the end though, it depends on how it works for YOU. How did your first three levels go?
If you dig it, you should definitely continue!
Yup, it’s because of the low level. The material accumulates as you level up, so lately I’ve been getting an average of 150-400 reviews a day, given that I’ve been doing them regularly and not just letting them pile up. The worst pile I’ve had was 1600 from when I was traveling, naïvely thinking I would be able to do reviews and didn’t turn on vacation mode…
Not trying to bash you, but can you really say all that at lvl 3? If you say you already knew 400 by the time you started, then your ability to “quickly learn and retain meanings and readings” is probably skewed by your previous experience. I, too, had studied quite a bit prior to WK so the first few levels were easy. It took me several weeks to get into some newer kanji before I decided that it was good for learning brand new stuff as well.
WaniKani is definitely worth the price, well kinda. The lifetime option was too expensive for me at $300 so I chose to subscribe to the Yearly plan ($100 a year). It has helped me to keep studying Japanese because they space out the reviews. I need to have a goal in mind to stick with something, so knowing that my next review would be in, let’s say 2 hours, I can look forward to studying then. Without that, I probably would have stopped studying a long while ago. Another thing I like about WaniKani is the fact that they use radicals and mnemonics to help you recall Kanji better. Rather than trying to learn 12+ more strokes per kanji, I just need to remember 3-4 radicals.
If reading Japanese is your main goal, go ahead and get it. It’s definitely worth it.
As for speaking or understanding spoken Japanese, I’m not sure about any free resources. Sorry about that.
I can only echo what most already wrote. WaniKani is just one of the many in the box of Japanese Learning tools, but I personally feel that when it comes to reading Japanese this one is the best.
I learned Japanese on and off for a couple of years before joining WK and tried various ways of learning Kanjis prior to WK. When I joined WK I had roughly 200 Kanjis under the belt already, but it was only after I started out my WK journey that I “suddenly” and noticeable was able to read and understand more and more Japanese texts (was greatly struggling with that before WK).
That said, WK naturally shouldn’t be your only tool. While the vocab you learn help in memorizing the Kanji, the used Vocab quite often are JLPT N2, N1, or beyond leaving huge gaps in more “basic” N5 vocab (due to some N5 vocab being written in Hiragana in the N5 test, but actually having Kanji that come up in later JLPT levels).
Further, WK is not testing you on production on any of the vocab you learn here - I painfully learned this when I started with Renshuu.org and set-up WK vocab schedules there, which quickly proved to me that I can easily recognize kanji but am not able to type in the hiragana for whatever English definition it threw at me
So in summary: As far as I can tell, WK is the best resource/tool currently out there to quickly acquire the ability to read Japanese text, but you naturally will need to combine WK with other resources/tools on the side for anything else (non-Kanji vocab, grammar, production, etc.)
It’s true to say that WK doesn’t cover all the kanji that “could” appear on N1, because even though there’s no official list, it’s basically assumed that any of the Joyo kanji list is fair game on N1 and WK does not cover all of the Joyo list.
But WK covers many of the most common ones, and therefore any you miss are just less likely to appear on the exam.
But you are correct in assuming vocab is a bigger problem. N1 is littered with vocab using kanji that WK teaches for words WK didn’t teach you.
Since you are asking for (free) alternates, I recommend checking out NihongoShark. It is maintained by Niko, a similarly enthusiastic guy like Koichi (the founder of WaniKani). Most of his stuff is paid, but the Kanji learning Anki deck and its how-to-use guide is free. It uses the same mnemonic based memorizing method as Wanikani, and sometimes it has better mnemonics and ordering than Wanikani. I used to learn by the NihongoShark kanji deck + WaniKani combined for a few months, and it was super effective, but it also did an extreme burden on my brain, so I had to choose either. Wanikani is better overall, so I stayed with that, but if money was an issue, I would have definitely chosen the other.
It depends on what value you think you will get out of the product, your budget, your motivation to study, and your study goals (plus many others).
Im a medical student so my free study time is limited. I opted not to go for a lifetime subscription because at the time i couldnt afford that chunk of money. The monthly subscription, for me, was viable because it was within my budget and allowed me to skip out some months down the track if I want to (or i have to put off Japanese study for exams). I realise that if I dont get to level 60 within a one and a half years or thereabouts, the lifetime subscription would have been a better choice. Regardless, I am happy with the monthly subscription because its an investment that im willing to make, even if I could have potentially gotten it at a cheaper price.
In the end its your circumstances that will govern with subscription you want to buy. If you dont think its worth it, dont buy it.
I remember reading some blog that suggested to try other ways to learn kanji first, since they can be learned faster and free. If everything fails, try wanikani since it’s maybe closest to idiot proof method out. I think they may forget that Wanikani teaches huge amount of vocabulary too.
Heisigs kanji book and anki decks are old school way to learn kanji. Still you need to learn vocabulary maybe memrise. Lessons - JapaneseClass.jp Has kanji and vocabulary and it’s free. No help for remembering kanji there tho and you are supposed to take in multiple readings at once.
Oh contraire mon frere: Since I already knew 400 kanji, and had learned them in a completely different fashion, it gave me the unique ability to forecast how the wanikani system would work in the long run, compared to other methods. In addition, I didn’t know some of the level 1-3 kanji and radicals. In fact, I didn’t give much thought to memorizing radicals until I began using WK.
Based on how it helped me quickly learn and retain the radicals and kanji that I did NOT know up until this point, I was able to compare that to how quickly I was able to learn and internalize kanji I had learned BEFORE the WK system.
It’s all pictographs and memorization. Just because I knew kanji going in, doesn’t mean it would give me an edge in learning the meaning to a character I had never seen before. For instance, would the fact that you know kanji make it easier for you to learn the arabic scripts? Or what if I held up a picture of George Washington and told you that whenever you see this picture it means the word “banana farm”. Grammar and usage aside, each Kanji character is an isolated entity, unto itself. And after we “learn it” we then use it in the context of language (in our case Japanese or Chinese).
Now, all of that being said, this is just my personal opinion, and I can see how one could surmise your assessment based on your own experience. But, everyone is different and it’s often wrong to assume. I do find it odd that you singled out my answer (and a few others) on this thread, when everyone here is simply trying to help someone make a purchase decision by sharing their PERSONAL experience with WK.
Responding civilly to others’ suggestions to provide my own thoughts is “singling out”? You make it sound as if I’m attacking people. So you make me out to be the bad guy and say it’s “all good” to get the last word in? You say I assumed, yet that’s precisely what you’re doing. And further, wrapping yourself up in a pedestal of righteousness afterwards.
I asked a legitimate, non-confrontational question and you go on the defensive, trying to make me out to have seemingly committed an atrocity. There was no need to get on your high horse and belittle me.
The short answer: Yes, it is worth it. There is simply nothing out there that is as intuitive and all-inclusive for kanji learning like WaniKani. It is the only thing that has worked for me, and I have gained massive progress with it. If you want steady and guaranteed improvement in kanji, you can’t really go wrong with it. Also, the help and support on the community forums is truly high tier
