Hello everyone,
I’ll be wrapping up level 10 tomorrow, thought it’d be a good time to come and say hi to the community!
I took a semester of Japanese night class about a decade ago, but had to stop due to circumstances. Last year I started listening to Japanese music and my interest was re-piqued, so I decided to take it up again. It’s been great so far, despite switching from onsite to Zoom after just 4 weeks. I felt like we weren’t making a great deal of progress however, since classes are just 4 hours per week. We’re scheduled to learn about a dozen Kanji by the end of the semester. I have quite a lot of spare time on my hands, so I decided to pick up Wanikani to speed things up a bit.
What a ride it’s been so far! I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten to learn 350 Kanji through conventional means, much less in the span of 3.5 months! It’s great to slowly start picking up words in what used to be a sea of gibberish in music and Anime, and I find myself pausing and switching to Japanese subtitles a lot to check if I got it right or lookup some of the Kanji I don’t know yet. The vast array of extension scripts available really help with the experience as well.
Till there, the positive note. The biggest problem I have with Wanikani (and I suspect a lot of other people as well) is its very one-sided approach. The mnemonics are indispensable when it comes to remembering the pronunciation of Kanji and words if you can read them, but I find it gets a lot harder when just hearing them. While Kunyomi pronunciations are fine for the most part, I struggle a lot with Onyomi jukugo words. What I tend to do for the majority of them in my review queue at the moment is look at the word => remember the pronunciation of the individual Kanji => remember the meaning and reconstruct the reading. I’ll probably be able to get a good chunk of them to burned status this way, but I’ll never be able to recollect them myself or recognize them in a conversation. It really doesn’t help that when you first learn the word, you usually get the “you’ve learned the Kanji so you know how to read this” explanation.
In my original schedule I sought to get to level 60 by mid 2022. Just recently I’ve added three days per level to try and tackle this issue using Kaniwani and audio only self study quizzes. My new schedule reaches level 60 January 2023. It stings a little, but I hope it’ll greatly enhance my long term retention rates.
The other thing I plan on doing is hard-learning all the Kanji I’ve seen so far associated with a specific pronunciation. I extracted most of the data using the item inspector extension and poured it into Excel (I’m a spreadsheet nerd like that). I found out that the 5 most common Onyomi pronunciations occur in 40 to 60 different Kanji 
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, thank you very much for listening to my ramblings! Any comments or suggestions are very much appreciated. Barring life getting in the way, I’m adamant to make it to level 60. See you all around!
EDIT: Since the community seems to like GIFs :]
better to watch the scenery and enjoy the ride.
