Just finished my free trial, and wow!

I looked down at my phone today while listening to Spotify and I saw:

大きな玉ねぎの下で by Masayoshi Yamazaki

Holy crap! I can read all of that, and I only just started level 4 after finishing my free trial! Bless this website! This is great motivation for me to continue.

Also, I never thought I would care much for the word “onion” in Japanese, but there it is, alas… I’ve read criticism about how WaniKani isn’t great for learning vocab but I find some excitement in the spontaneity!

Thank you WaniKani!

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Wanikani doesn’t give you an exhaustive vocabulary, but it certainly helps! Plus it makes learning new words easier 'cause the kanji aren’t so scary. I remember when I started it, I definitely noticed a huge difference in my vocabulary size, particularly after the first 30 levels. Since then I’ve learned tons and tons of words outside of wanikani, but having that base really gave me a head start. Good luck on your kanji journey!

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Yeah, I’m sitting here staring at it going “well, I understand all the words, and I understand all the grammar bits, but… what?”

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頑張って! Keep up the good effort! Combine WaniKani with Duoling, Satori Reader and Bunpro,
and you can really improve! and watch Samurai Champloo everynight!

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That’s great! I remember getting the same kicks out of suddenly understanding something, no matter how small, in Japanese, it’s a great motivator for sure!

Also, I find that by and large the vocabulary taught in WK has been very helpful. It does contain a lot of the most common words you’ll run into.

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Wait a hot minute… you’re new and yet this isn’t a thread complaining about the time spacing mechanism.

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or the lack of paticles

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Raise your hand if you forgot the word for onion already XD

…because I knew there was something odd when it started to sound like “big/great ball” and didn’t end with something like fire!

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Hahaha yeah I did a lot of reading about WaniKani beforehand so I got an idea of what I was getting myself into. I actually have ~HSK3 level Chinese so there was some redundancy with the radicals/kanji meanings. But in the end, I know soon I won’t recognize many at all and besides it’s a nice review! Also really cool to just observe the crossover between languages! It’s fascinating to me.

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I was more worried about how it took me a minute to figure out that 下で was で applied to “under” and not a complete word. “What’s the reading for that…?”

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It’s したで or もとで。I’m guessing したで。It’s definitely not しもで。

My Windows JP keyboard will autofill it while typing both した or もと which is a little odd. That’s what I usually use to verify a reading and I’ve never had two readings bring up the same result before.

That was a vocab I had already since my early days, long before WK. But living in Japan and doing grocery shopping and cooking and reading instructions and recipes all the time, your vocab for foods and other daily shopping neccesities grows quite early.

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I was just wondering why they chopped off the sai in kudesai.

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Is that really a thing? If so, how is it different than ください?

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Yeah, hopefully one day I’ll get good enough to understand the whole song and figure out what the heck is going on there…!

No, just me not remembering how to spell kudasai either. And also forgetting that the kanji part is kuda, not just ku anyway. I can’t believe how many different ways I messed that up at once. :frowning:

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Haha, you know I burned this item in July but when I saw the word just now my first reaction was to say “onegi”, like the word “onion” and “タマネギ” smashed themselves together in my brain for a second…

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burned it yesterday… lalalaaaa…

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I can feel you.
Knowing more kanjis give us more “aha” moments, some of them are very memorable.
Good luck on your journey.

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