Is WK enough for Kanji?

Japanese Language
#40

Make sure you are doing your reviews in time and do at least a set of 5 lessons every day (more when you feel the amount of reviews is too easy).
The reason to do your reviews on time:
When the progression is 4 hours, 8 hours, 24 hours and you do your reviews on time it takes you 4+8+24 = 34 hours to reach Guru.
When you only review once a day it takes you (at worst):
24+24+24 = 72 hours (3 days) to reach Guru (for one item)

If you feel like you want to learn the “meaning” of more Kanji faster you can try Heisig’s Remember the Kanji (RTK). That is what I am doing at the same time. You don’t learn any readings or vocab, so the number of kanji you can learn per day is higher. You need to set up something like Anki for reviews though.
And in WaniKani the kanji you learn are usually somewhat frequently used Kanji. Heisig doesn’t really care about how useful a kanji is, so you also learn kanjis that you might not need for a long time. As a graphical indication (green is Heisig, others WaniKani, ordering by JLPT level (ca.)):

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Learning more kanji with Heisig only “helps” in the short run, as you need to learn the readings later anyways.

EDIT: I am also lvl 3, but I started 20th of March (known Hiragan and Katakana before though)

#41

You can supplement wanikani with Kaniwani. I discovered it today. It’s basically the other half of wanikani, check it out and you will understand what I mean.

#42

I will disagree in this particular recommendation. I did Heisig until chapter 14 or 15 (around 300 kanjis). Doing a lesson a week. All this before starting WK.

As I had already put the effort into it, I kept doing it for my first month in WK. The problem with sticking with two different methods it’s the overload of the basic parts. The “radicals” or “primitives” used to reference when doing the mnemonics started to get confusing… because they are for the most part the same… just not exactly… and using the name for the radical in one method into the other method was a recipe for disaster.

For the other part the keywords of every kanji in both methods are slightly so different; which doesn’t seem a big deal when learning 100 kanjis… but then in the 500 numbers (and probably even more relevant in the thousands) it gets really confusing as more and more all too similar kanjis emerge.

I will suggest ONE method for learning kanji, stick with it if you see it working. It takes time, no matter the method. WK gives you 2000 kanjis… there’re more, but you will figure about how to learn the ones you are missing be then (exposure, immersion, etc) and will be needing.

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#43

I’m not sure what your definition of “day to day” stuff is, but if you’re referring to news articles and such, he will most certainly encounter enough new stuff.

1 Like
#44

I agree with the problem of having different names and such.
I am using Heisig in german actually (my mother tongue) so having a different language than in WK helps and using my mother tongue makes it easier to understand slightly different meanings. So if possible/available: use Heisig in your mother tongue.
Additionally I urge to do the Heisig recommendation to review (in Anki) only from english/german to Kanji for the “Heisig kanjis”. This way you never have to explicitly try to recall the Heisig meaning (possibly different than WK). You only see some english/german word and you try to find the right Kanji. So you basically do “KaniWani with Heisig” and “real” WaniKani.

That being said. I started last month and I will go to Japan in a week. So I am explicitly trying to learn more Kanji than I can when learning them all together with reading and vocab.
I don’t know what I do after I am back in Berlin. If I keep doing both. This works fine so far.
(having 130 Kanji in Heisig and 56 in WK, for a total of 149 (there is small overlap so far))

#45

yep… sounds like what I was doing. L1 (spanish) for Heisig and WK.
Heisig it’s great in the way you can digest so much with the stories, using and understanding the radical into more details perhaps and then going with the kanjis that use such radical.
WK does thing differently, and sometimes radicals have silly names that you will want to put more logic into it… but they’re not intended to be logical, just to provide an aid with the mnemonics and make them memorable.
Anyway if your are doing this for an upcoming trip, it won’t hurt.

I have nothing bad to say about Heisig’s method, I really liked it, and even so I drop it :man_shrugging: … I was using the Kanken books for learning the readings as well, and I also like those books.

Anyway, the one thing I wish I had kept doing when starting with WK would be writing every Kanji from day 1. I was really good with it when doing Heisig’s… Now I’m struggling to keep up to reach my current known kanjis in WK and then write them the moment I do my reviews.

Best of luck in your trip :+1:

2 Likes
#46

Took me over a month to get to level 3…I wouldn’t worry so much about your speed

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Who cares if you are slow. If it gets too stressful then you will quit. Slow and steady is better than being miserable.

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#47

I think no matter what English-based study you use, you’re going to feel a lot of discomfort when you first remove that safety net and have to rely only on what you know in Japanese to understand and communicate.

I personally set myself up for as much native exposure as I can possibly get. I play games entirely in Japanese and am trying to work my way into watching anime without subtitles, or even better, with Japanese subtitles. Unfortunately services like crunchyroll and netflix don’t offer this.

As others have said, what your goals are is what is really important. I took two college courses forever ago and never really progressed beyond the basic knowledge that I had as I just wasn’t dedicated enough to make approaches like RTK stick. Wanikani’s gamification helped me to come back every day and just invest casual effort until one day I realized I was actually able to understand with reasonable comprehension content like NHK easy news.

I am grateful to wanikani. Japanese is a hobby for me that I have no real compelling life reason to pursue, and no daily exposure that I don’t create for myself. Wanikani gave me the daily impetus that I needed to succeed.

So I play lots of games in Japanese only, (far easier now with the Nintendo Switch and region-free consoles) set all my device languages to Japanese, and participate in a few Japanese-language groups that are not about the Japanese language but instead discuss other things using Japanese.

And really, the best approach is going to be the one that keeps you the most consistently immersed in the language itself. That’s how you improve at any skill. I’m probably far from the most qualified responder here, but these are my experiences and I am glad I stuck with wanikani myself.

4 Likes
#48

Any game you recommend for starting to play games in Japanese with the Nintendo Switch?

#49

Sure, but if you read the comments above, OP is actually feeling like they should be doing more. This is not a case about how to avoid burning out.

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#50

I’d say that you should try doing three things:

  • Spend more time on your lessons and make sure you memorize the items well enough before going for the Quiz that comes right after.
  • Increase the amount of new items you learn per day (1 item = 1 lesson) and see how it goes. To make things easier, you can change the number of new items you get per batch (original number is 5, but you can change it). This will allow you for example to do 3x2 new items… and then maybe 3x3… you’ll be slowly adding more stuff. You can change it by going to menu => settings => lesson batch sizing. Find a new number of new items/day to aim for. Maybe 10? :slight_smile: Let’s see.
  • Respect the SRS intervals. Find a schedule that works for you like I described in that post I showed you. Trying to review a new item you were supposed to have reviewed 10h ago doesn’t work in your favour.

In 1 week, lets us know how everything is going :slight_smile:

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#51

I started around the same time as you, and I knew no kanji coming in. I have not needed anything other than wanikani to learn ~35-40 kanji per week (one level per week is the maximum speed in my experience), and I would think that using other methods like RTK might cause you to confuse mnemonics. That is why i’ll stick to WK for now unless something changes.

#52

My favorites are games that have a lot of text that you can advance at your own pace and the ability to turn off furigana, or none to begin with. My reading speed went up dramatically with Zelda. Disgaea 5 was also good, but a much higher reading level. For games like that I’ll play them in English, then re play them in Japanese. It is an easy way to get exposure that is meaningful while doing something that is primarily recreation. Ultimately any game will play in the system language if the game supports it, so just check the box or Nintendo store online page to make sure it has Japanese support before buying. A lot of Nintendo games will Just Work, even if you are playing a US physical copy.

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#53

It’s amazing what WK will do for you. For example, here is a headline today from NHK. A quick read shows that WK covered every single kanji except for 罵.

Caveat: WK will not teach you all the vocab you need to know. There are many kanji-compound words in this article I don’t recognize immediately. However, WK will help you make educated guesses. That is why reading outside of WK is so important.

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#54

Maybe I misunderstood. To me it sounded like they were having a hard time with even the small amount they were doing and everyone kept telling them they weren’t doing enough.

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#55

I have a [quote=“stevenhowe, post:39, topic:30443, full:true”]
Ok, that’s a relief! So, when I say I do 1 lesson a day I mean 1x5 items.
[/quote]

I have a slightly different approach then other folks, but I’d say, that if you feel like doing lessons, just keep doing lessons until either a) there are no lessons left or b) you no longer feel like doing more that day. Hard stopping yourself early won’t make you learn the lesser items more effectively, since it’s the number of exposures (times you see it) and recall events (times you type it in/write it out) that actually hardwire it into your brain as memory. The SRS is designed around this principle; you repeat things you get wrong more often because the repetition IS studying; otherwise you’d always review the same items. If you want to progress faster in your kanji learning game, remember that WK reviews are reviews; don’t treat them like a test, don’t worry about your percent correct.

2 Likes
#56

Thanks for your help.
I have changed the lesson batch to 3 - which is about my success rate at reviews.

Wrt the SRS intervals, if I use the 4 +8 hourly routine you detail in your post (which is fine for me), will this sort of thing even itself out eventually?

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#57

As someone whose WK use was improved immensely after reading jprspereira’s advice, I believe I can answer you, and say yes, things will even out a lot if you stick to the timings he sets out (I found my focus improved a lot too, and hope you find the same).

You will find the largest chunk of reviews coming 12 hours after your lessons as you progress and accumulate more guru+ items, so keep that in mind as you consider the best times in your schedule for lessons / 1st review / 2nd review.

All the best :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#58

Ok, its been a week so a quick status update:

I realised that I didn’t understand the SRS part of WK at all and following @jprspereira 's advice managed to do the following:

  1. Change my lesson batches to 3 instead of 5
  2. Do 3 batches every morning around 7am, followed by reviews.
    This seems fairly arbitrary, but I realised that I wasn’t even getting the lesson quiz right most of the time. I can commit 3 things to memory, but not 5! This means I do 9 lessons a day.
  3. Do first review at 11am
  4. Do second review at 7.30 pm
    So this isn’t exactly 12 hours, but its what my personal schedule can accommodate
  5. I signed up for KaniWani and connected my accounts, but pulled in ALL of my vocabulary, not just the L3 stuff
  6. After my WK lessons, I do 10 KW lessons - I think by the end of next week the number of lessons will align with the number of vocabulary I have been taught and the backlog will be clear
  7. After each WK review I will do as many KW reviews as I can fit in (I did 100 a couple of days ago, but had to bail after 26 last night). Again, once the discrepancy between the two evens out I will aim to finish all my reviews in both WK and KW.

And that’s pretty much it - no extra reading or listening yet. My class has been on Easter break and we start back tonight so I have to revise ~ない verb conjugations now.

I made it to level 4 at the weekend. Thanks to everyone who pitched in, especially @jprspereira for the SRS guidance.

I’ll be back in a month to see how far I have got.

またね!

6 Likes
#59

Generally speaking:
Recognition - yes.
Recall - probably not.