For those of you who have completed all 60 levels of WaniKani, how is your kanji recognition? Do you mix up kanji anymore? Do you have an easy time learning new kanji?
1 Like
Iâm still sometimes bad at readings for similar looking complex kanji in material without furigana.
In context Iâm better at reading kanji than I am in isolation. Context is great for limiting choices which helps with distinguishing similar looking kanji.
Learning new kanji is easier, though totally new kanji arenât super common since WK has good coverage of the most frequent kanji. A big thing that helps is internalising phonetic components.
9 Likes
Thanks, this was the answer I was looking for. Iâd probably have to do more kanji study to have perfect recognition outside of WK, but outside of that just by completing WK it seems Iâd have a pretty strong grasp on kanji. Thanks!
1 Like
I donât think you ever stop mixing up kanji at least occasionally. Even natives do. Itâs just important to keep exposing yourself to plenty of native material.
(Iâve finished WK but reset my account a long time ago)
9 Likes
I feel like itâs so hard to accurately convey the answers to the first and third question to someone who has just started learning Kanji.
You will be able to recognize most, but not all Kanji you see. But thatâs not even necessarily the bottleneck for comprehension. Vocab is. Kanji are just pieces of vocab (or sometimes the entirety). You will have a much easier time learning new Kanji and words that use Kanji youâre familiar with for the most part though. You get used to all the possible onyomi there are, general shapes and patterns for components, etc.
10 Likes
Iâm not even half-way through it so just âmeddling inâ but⌠yeah, I sure hope by L60 (or better said, after lots and lots of reading/exposure in parallel to WK) weâd get better at reconizing the kanji and recalling their readings⌠to help with picking up new vocab - at least thatâs where WK is very useful to me currently: much easier to learn WK vocab than from other sources, where new items arenât composed of already-studied kanji.
WK does need to be paired with real-world content as you go on through its levels, as soon as possible and constantly⌠only yesterday I was staring at a word that I was convinced I had never seen before, when in fact it was a WK L17 item which is now in the late Master or Enlightened SRS stage and Iâve not met since the last WK review.
3 Likes
I do that every once in a while, too. Frustrating!
2 Likes
Vocabularies are the real bottleneck. Often, vocab meaning is more reliably recognized by reading inferred from a Kanji, or from a chunk of Kanji, but actual meaning is after that â how the reading functions in the sentence.
Difficult-to-read Kanji exist, but not that many. Still, can be frequent enough to impact reading speed. (Not really for me now, though.)
Kanji choice for the same reading is more like seasoning on the meal. Less important, but can matter.
6 Likes
Just reinforcing the previous commenters by saying itâs definitely a vocabulary bottleneck after WK. But to answer your questions more directly - my kanji recognition is quite good now (it certainly wasnât before finishing WK, or even in the first handful of months to a year after hitting 60). I think that reading and time spent away from reviews has made the leeches I used to have a lot easier to handle. Kanji I used to mix up in reviews I donât have much issue with anymore since most of them I can associate with some context from where I saw them while reading instead of just isolated in the review pile.
As for learning new kanji, itâs both way easier and also more fun than it used to be lol. Now when I see a new kanji I get kind of excited, like âooh this isnât even on WK!â This isnât too common though, as mentioned above WK has quite good coverage. After a bit of reading you encounter the most common non-WK kanji and it gets more and more rare to find something brand new as time goes on.
3 Likes
I wasnât too good at recognizing kanji after finishing level 60. I now forgot and relearned most of what I learned from WK multiple times, and each time kanji got remembered easier and stayed for longer. Itâs been a few years, but I think I could now read light novels. Thatâs on a backburner though, as I am focused on other things, and only going through 20k most used japanese words from Kitsun.io . 20 minutes each day, and the vocabulary keeps growing.
2 Likes
夹 and 复? No. ĺž and ĺž? Yes, earlier today. But in context it becomes easier to figure it out anyway. Many foreign English learners struggle to differentiate âto loanâ and âto borrowâ for instance, but if they read the sentence âI need to go buy some milk, can I borrow your car?â they wonât have any issue understanding the meaning of the word by process of elimination. Same goes for many kanji, especially since they commonly appear in pairs in so called jukugo words.
Yes. In part because of having a lot more familiarity with kanji as a concept, and also because unknown kanji are few and far between. If you read a book and encounter an unknown kanji every other page, itâs a lot easier to pay attention to it and remember it when it comes back compared to the beginning where basically every other kanji needs to be looked up.
But it takes a very long time and a lot of reading practice to get to the point where you can parse even relatively simple Japanese text effortlessly like you would English. You probably wonât be there when you reach the end of WaniKani, but you should know enough to figure out the rest on your own.
I think there are a few milestones around the way, from my point of view:
- The first ~100 kanji
At this point every kanji is kind of unique. Youâll get exposed to new radicals/components continually, and the readings may as well be completely random so itâs just bruteforce memorization. At this point the idea of having to memorize thousands of kanji down the line seems almost implausible.
- The first ~300 kanji (around WK level 10)
Things start to fall into place. Youâre getting familiar with most common components. You start noticing patterns. At this point your kanji knowledge starts also becoming practical: most sentences in the wild will contain at least one kanji that you know (and many that you donât). You encounter many compound words where you recognize at least one kanji, making it easier to approach new vocab.
- The first ~600 kanji (around WK level 20)
You know enough kanji that you get frustrated when you read text aimed at beginners that writes everything in kana. Kanji are now an asset for you, not something that makes everything harder.
- The first ~1000 kanji (around WK level 30)
Thatâs the big one in my opinion. At this point youâll have encountered maybe 90% of common components, so most new kanji you approach are just combinations of shapes that you already know. You can also start relying on phonetic components to learn the readings of new kanji in many cases. Youâre by no mean super comfortable with kanji, but theyâre no longer these bizarre cryptic shapes, you have enough familiarity with them to break them down and parse them with more ease, and therefore memorize them if you so decide.
Youâll also recognize the majority of kanji in most text, which makes it easier to focus on the stuff that you do not recognize. If you have focused your studies on kanji and put vocab and grammar on the back burner, this is also the point where youâll find that kanji are not really the main problem with comprehension. You spend more time looking up grammar and vocab than puzzling over kanji.
- The first ~2000 kanji (around WK level 60)
At this point you start tackling the more niche stuff. You recognize 99% of the kanji in your average shounen manga, videogame or facebook post. Literature can be more tricky, but kanji themselves are not the main issue usually.
But even then, knowing a kanji is not a binary thing. Take a kanji like é˘, what does it mean to know it? Should you know its meaning? All of its readings? How to write it? Can you read é˘äż? é˘ćą? é˘ăă? é˘ăă? How about é˘ć? That one is a bit trickier, can you remember effortlessly upon seeing the word or do you have to think for a bit?
9 Likes
I have to doubt whether I misread for a moment. Like a severe case of English spelling.
1 Like