So I’m almost level 10 on WaniKani, and recently started using jpdb.io. I’ve gotten used to the flow of things over there, and having subscribed on Patreon I can filter out WK items I’ve already studied, or may eventually study - but filtering out every word feels too extreme. If I want to read something, I don’t want to wait until level 60 on WK, nor do I want to learn the kanji on both platforms.
What do you guys do? Do you just have kanji disabled? Wait until WK level 60? Or do you suck it up and do both? FWIW I find it harder to learn kanji over there, and the mnemonics far inferior to WK’s. (I’m constantly copy-pasting them over.) Maybe I’d learn their kanji better if I enabled reverse cards?
Also, any other quality-of-life tips would be appreciated. I’ve basically been scouring pre-built decks I’ve added for words I already know, right-clicking them and marking as “never forget” so I can avoid relearning them, get accurate coverage and such. Setting WK to level 10 on settings also helps with this.
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My experience is that the biggest thing that made it harder to learn on JPDB (and Anki) than on Wanikani and Bunpro is that WK/Bunpro will keep drilling you about items in a single review session until you get it right, which means you’ll have a lot of reinforcement if you’ve forgotten something, or will plummit it back to stage 1 if that’s still not enough, giving you a learning period again. JPDB’s minimum interval on the other hand is 10 minutes, so if you get something wrong, even if it’s at stage 0 on the SRS, you won’t see again for at least 10 minutes (which e.g. if you’re doing once a day review sessions there, and you finish your session, means you mightn’t get reminded of it again until the next day). I think it’s probably best to schedule another JPDB session shortly after to catch these items if you are trying to learn items in it as a result (e.g. do lessons at time X, time X + 30 min, time X + 1 hour).
I think JPDB/Anki’s model works better when it’s being used for revising the material, not learning it for the first time through the SRS, but since that has been the case for most of the content, I found WK/BP worked better for me.
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I was doing the same thing for a time of mixing kanji study on JPDB and WK. I was using only kanji->keyword cards, not sure if that’s what you mean by ‘reverse’ cards.
Anyway, I eventually ended up disabling kanji cards on JPDB and just learning words directly. I think it’s the best way to learn once you can do it, and, yeah, the JPDB kanji learning support is janky anyway. I recommend giving that a shot and seeing if it works for you. If not, maybe try again every few levels! Personally, I ended up preferring it and stopped doing new lessons in WK.
You’ll also get a lot of opinions about this if you ask on the JPDB discord server! There are a fair number of people in the same boat.
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I recommend giving that a shot and seeing if it works for you.
I actually tried it at first, but I could tell my retention was worse, and I didn’t like the idea of missing the opportunity to learn them alongside the actual vocab. Maybe a bit of FOMO there.
I experienced something else as I studied more, actually. I felt that as I learned more kanji the “correct” way, the more it reprogrammed my perception of old Anki words I hadn’t specifically learned the kanji for. So I’d suddenly get ones I’d burned forever ago wrong, because I was noticing and thinking about the kanji more this time, rather than the vague impression I memorized before.
So perhaps I’ve talked myself into just doing the kanji 
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Hey! We had a discussion that might answer your question here
https://community.wanikani.com/t/tips-on-using-jpdb-and-wk-together/62867
Funny because on that thread I had just started using jpdb one month prior. I still use it, but not the same way anymore. I don’t find it fun to learn words before I meet them (I know some people like that, so they can flow through the material without unknown words, for me it’s too spoilery).
I add a lot of new words to JPDB so my reviewing strategy is to pass every word as Hard as the lowest option, I don’t fail cards, my goal is not to remember all the words through the review but just to get reexposed to them
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