Level 30 - reflections on learning

WaniKani
1

A few months ago, I finally completed level 30 - the halfway point. I decided this was a good time to pause lessons and work on other skills: grammar, reading, listening comprehension.

Initially, I felt optimistic that I could churn through WaniKani at a steady pace, completing it within roughly two years, and that would mean that I would have “learned” 2,000 kanji and 6,000 vocab words. I’ve since refined my view and have been forced to scale back my expectations. Perhaps other people have a different experience, but I’ve found that even burning something indicates only that I’m vaguely familiar with the item.

Since stopping new lessons, my review scores have plummeted. This makes sense, as I no longer have ~45 new apprentice items fresh in my mind to pad my score. My post lesson scores used to be 85-95%. Now, they are more like 70-80%. Occasionally, I even drop into the 60s. I constantly miss burn reviews, and more and more items seem to be cycling back and forth between apprentice and enlightened. I’m forced to admit that I’ve leaned a lot less than I had hoped. I’ll be honest: this is extremely infuriating and discouraging. With scores this low, it will take years to actually “complete” WaniKani. Anything less than 66% means I’m actually making negative progress in the SRS system.

My default reaction is to become incredibly angry with myself for this perceived failure. If I were in school and consistently getting Cs and Ds, I would be freaking out, and utterly, unforgivably disappointed in myself. However, I realize that WK is different: low scores just mean I haven’t learned the words yet. So I try to remind myself of that and move on.

But I do think such low scores still indicate a fairly serious and chronic problem that is going unaddressed. Why am I bothering to spend all this time learning these kanji and words if after a few months I can’t even remember them? That seems utterly inefficient, and a good path to burnout.

The challenge, of course, is that there is no foolproof solution. I’ve found that I remember and learn things best when they are given special importance in some way. So for example, if I come up with a clever mnemonic for one kanji, that will probably feel special and is likely to stick. But ten clever mnemonics for ten kanji? Now that’s just a list of ten things, none of them particularly important.

The situation when something feels most important is when you come across it in an unexpected context. “Whoa, that vocab word? I totally know that!” When that happens, the information gets solidified 10x stronger than when seeing it in a WK review. But that’s the problem - it’s so random and unreliable. There’s no way I’ll “randomly” come across all ~3,000 vocab words enough times so that they get reinforced before they slip away and are forgotten.

The answer of course is “read a bunch”. Which I try to do, but reading is just soooo slow for me. Between constantly looking up vocab and deciphering sentences to understand the grammar, it often takes me 30-60 minutes to get through even a single page. And if I only get through one to three pages a day, that’s simply not very much volume to get exposure to solidify vocabulary. It doesn’t help that I still come across a bunch of new kanji - often ones taught in the later WK levels. (My reading has mostly so far been the Nihongo con Teppei stories/essays, as well as the beginner podcast transcripts while listening along.)

Being an engineer, I can’t help but think there must be some solution, some system that can be built. Language learning should be a solved problem. And yet, the best I can find are disjoint and incomplete pieces, like WK and BunPro intermixed with random reading sources which don’t necessarily line up that well. And the more time I spend trying to come up with systemized solutions, the less time I spend actually reading, listening, and engaging with the language. So in reality, the only practical answer might just be to continue plodding forward, be okay with low review scores, trust the SRS system, and accept that failure is just another step on the path to eventual success. But man, sometimes that is a hard pill to swallow.

2

Welcome to the community!

Sadly, the answer, no matter how you shake it, is still ‘read a bunch.’ It will always be very slow at first, but if you don’t do it, it won’t get any faster. I recommend trying resources like Satori Reader- on there you can input your Wanikani API so it will only show furigana on unknown kanji, or only show known kanji, that kind of thing.

If you’re getting frustrated by your reviews, then you might as well just put your WK on vacation mode and focus on reading and grammar for a while. Frustration in the learning process doesn’t help anything.

3

What end goal do you have for Japanese? Are you living in Japan or wanting to read novels or play video games in Japanese? Or do you want to take the JLPT?

Use the backwards design/reverse engineering method: where do I want to be? What do I need to get there? You may find that you don’t really need kanji yet, or that the first 30 levels have the kanji that you need for the moment. If that is the case, you may want to put Wanikani on vacation mode and come back to it later.Or if you feel like you need kanji now, because of JLPT for example, you may want to learn 3 new items a day and give yourself motivation by remembering those. I write down kanji and meanings, and I will sometimes look up an unfamiliar kanji if I know it’s a leech to avoid frustration.

Good luck!

4

Formal education systems do exist. Unfortunately if you are trying to be self-taught, you have to figure it out as you go or mimic what others have done hoping that it works for you. If you are truly frustrated, I would recommend getting an IRL professional teacher. In the USA, there are community colleges that offer language courses (Japanese may be hard to find in some areas) for free or low cost. The structure is pre-baked and all you have to do is show up to do the learning.
Best of luck.

5

SRS is after all SRS. in my experience it gives me a nice base to acquire words through actual exposure to the language. but mistaking review percentages for learning or lack thereof is the mistake here! it’s actually totally natural that you only vaguely know a word via WK: WK is only giving you vague experience with the word.

6

There’s nothing sad about that answer! Why bother learning kanji at all if reading wasn’t a goal in the first place? My frustration is more: there is a mismatch between what I’m reading (various beginner-oriented stories) versus what I’m learning (WK content) and that mismatch degrades the experience and efficiency of both.

Had I known this from the start, the answer may have been to just skip WK entirely and use Anki via mining for both kanji and vocab so that what I’m studying in SRS would always be aligned with reading reinforcement. Of course, then you lose out on all the benefits that WK does provide.

I’ve heard Satori Reader recommended a number of times, but honestly, I’m subscribed to enough “systems” already that it’s hard to balance and get use out of all of them - WaniKani, BunPro, Comprehensible Japanese, Nihongo con Teppei’s Patreon. I was trying to use Anki for sentence mining on top of all of this, but I couldn’t keep it up. I already use rikaikun and have my own custom suite of tools with keyboard shortcuts built up for vocab/kanji lookup/tracking, sentence and grammar analysis, etc. So reading isn’t slow due to technology shortcomings, it’s simply because my reading and comprehension speed itself is abysmally slow.

I visited Japan for the first time a few years ago, not having any particular preconceived attachment to or impression of the country, and unexpectedly found myself fascinated with the culture - how in some ways Japan felt similar to the western culture I grew up in, and yet in others it was utterly alien, like some strange parallel universe. The closest thing to a metropolis like Tokyo that I’d ever experienced was New York, yet beyond a surface level comparison they are totally unique. In particular, the language was… mesmerizing. Every day I would ride the Tokyo subway system and listen to the announcements. Unlike with Romance languages, where you could maybe guess the rough sentence structure or pick up a few cognate words, I could understand absolutely nothing… yet, these mysterious announcements were strangely calming, somehow. I picked up only one thing: they always seemed to end in “… mas.” What did this mean?! I had to know. And so, I started learning about this bizarre language, and it sort of became a personal challenge, something I couldn’t get out of my head: what would it be like to be able to think about, categorize, and comprehend the world using this system that was completely and utterly different to how I’d been thinking my whole life?

So to be totally honest, I don’t have any “good” reasons to be learning Japanese beyond “everything about it just seems fascinating”. Well, I suppose that’s a good enough reason in and of itself. But here are a few more concrete reasons:

  • My partner works at a Japan-based company and has several business trips planned, on which I intend to join. The ability to speak at at least a basic level sounds both enjoyable and fulfilling.
  • I am an avid snowboarder and would love to experience what Japan’s mountains have to offer.
  • I haven’t worked out the practicality or details of this yet, but I have a dream of doing a thru-hike from the southwest to the northeast of Honshu. I view speaking as absolutely mandatory for a fulfilling experience.
  • I was heavily influenced by Nintendo’s NES era and early titles like Castlevania and Megaman. I think it would be really cool to read about the period of tech innovation in Japan during this time, and even cooler if I could read about it in Japanese.
  • Okay, this is a dumb one, but I think it would be totally hilarious to watch the Japanese dub of Lord of the Rings.
7

I see what you mean. To be honest, why not do that now? Just stop using WK, start reading, and use Anki for kanji/vocab you come across. Stopping WK around L35 is actually a pretty common recommendation.

8

you can and should start doing this now, with the understanding that you won’t get it much. and as much as you can, you should keep doing it, and notice that you’ll start to get a little more over time. I wish I could promise you a linear progression but I cannot.

repeated listening is wacko and works crazy well.

9

If it’s in your budget, given your goals for visiting Japan, maybe try speaking practice with someone? I take weekly lessons with a teacher on on Languatalk and have recently started meeting up with a Japanese woman from my mahjong group who speaks Japanese with me (we are both expats whose husbands work for Japanese multinationals). Some people really like I talki but I haven’t used it. Other people talk to the cat. Or maybe your partner wants to learn too and you can practice together? Good luck!

10

Well, I sort of did. I’ve stopped doing any new lessons and, while I’m still doing reviews, the workload has dropped significantly so it’s not that much of a daily commitment. I haven’t yet decided if I want to eventually resume and keep going to 60, but I don’t have to decide that today.

I’m reading and mining words and grammar points using my custom tooling which tracks encounter counts (I’m logging encounters for words that I come across and don’t immediately know, it’s just two keystrokes), and my policy has been to add SRS entries when an item is hit for the third time, so this way, I don’t get too bogged down with one-off vocab words that don’t come up much. Currently, I’ve been adding words to BunPro’s vocab SRS, since it has a fairly large built-in dictionary with example sentences for a lot of the words, and since I’m already using BunPro for grammar, this avoids adding yet another separate SRS… plus, the tooling can also analyze a sentence and determine if a matching BunPro grammar point exists, so for instance if I keep coming across an N1 or N2 grammar point despite only studying N3, I can track that and add it to the reviews.

The alternative would be to either switch fully to Anki so everything is just one SRS and I’m not bound by whatever restrictions BunPro and WaniKani impose, or to roll my own custom SRS tuned to exactly what approach works best for me. I’ve gone back and forth, and have stuck with WK and BunPro in the spirit of “trust the system built by the people who have already spent a lot of time solving this problem because you probably don’t know better than them”, but the more understanding I gain of my own learning process, the more one of these alternative options makes sense.

This has been my approach recently, but I’ve been aiming for more comprehensible content. I’ve been listening to Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners episodes in two different modes: audio-only, or with a transcript. With audio-only, I can generally understand the main idea of each episode, but often only manage to catch snippets of individual sentences, which often sound like a blur of familiar syllables and words that I think I should know but don’t come to me instantly, like the meaning has a delay and by the time it arrives, 20 more words have already passed. When listening along with a transcript, I can often understand a lot more, but not in real-time - I have to constantly pause to parse the sentences and wait for my comprehension to catch up, and a single 3-4 minute episode can stretch to 20-30 minutes.

I’m generally on-board with the ideas presented in the video you linked, but the details are what always trip me up regarding this topic. For example, in the video, he emphasizes the importance of comprehension - I agree, and presumably this implies that input must be comprehensible. Then, he suggests picking three short audiobook chapters, totaling about 50 minutes, and listening to them once a day for 30 days. But here’s my disconnect: Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners is, basically, an extremely beginner-oriented podcast, discussing very simple topics, using simple grammar, and repeating the same vocab words a ton. And yet, I cannot really comprehend even a single episode in real-time, let alone 50 continuous minutes, and I definitely can’t read along with the transcript in real-time. And so this would just bring me into incomprehensible territory (this is already often how the audio-only listening feels), and I’m skeptical that repeating something incomprehensible 29 more times would suddenly become comprehensible. And if that’s the case with Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners, moving to any sort of real audiobook would be 1000 times worse. So while I want to be able to do what this guy suggests (and others who suggest similar things), it feels, quite literally, impossible for me at this point.

Hence, my current approach of going through each episode slowly and in excruciating detail, line-by-line with the transcript, taking 20-30 minutes, and also listening to episodes repeatedly in real-time with only audio, with the hope that the two approaches will enhance each other. I have no idea if this will be even remotely effective, as comprehension only seems to improve at a snail’s pace and thus is very hard for me to gauge.

I should probably do this. The best I do right now is write to ChatGPT and have it give me hints about grammar I’m screwing up. My idea is that hints (“X isn’t right, what should it be instead?”), rather than simply revealing the answers (“you should have said Y instead of X”), force active attention onto the mistake, and that hopefully makes more of an impression and is better retained. But yes, I should eventually find someone who I can speak with. My excuses is that I’m shy when it comes to speaking, my comprehension is really slow, and I freeze up and can’t think of the right words or how to express things. You don’t have to tell me that these are terrible excuses, I already know.

11

I think on the journey of reading / listening / watching we all start optimistic and then the disillusion hits really hard when we try real native material.

I’d advise to take right now the time to get a work you want to read / listen / watch which is not learner oriented and to see how hard it is. And then every few month to take back a swing at it. You should see subtle but tangible progress.

For reading especially, learner material just doesn’t make liberal use enough of long sentences with multiple clause and a metric tons of conjunctions and adverb everywhere. This is what practicing on real text will help you bridge after a few thousand sentences but it is very painful and no amount of SRS or anything else will prepare you to it.

Take note of the biggest pain points and make one of them it part of your learning journey for the next months.

Best of grit.

12

I feel you on all this! I think the core problem comes down to finding the right balance of fun and practice/training, especially when it’s a hobby rather than a life necessity. A few ideas here… YMMV

I hit pause on WK a few months ago. I’m doing the same thing as you: continuing to review but not doing any new lessons. This makes it easier to pick back up in future if I want to, but the reality of WK’s fairly poor SRS means you gradually get stuck with more and more leeches - words that your brain just isn’t ready to learn yet. Not a good use of time. Definitely not a good way to stay motivated haha. If it’s really dragging then as Soggy suggest you could just kill WK entirely for now, and free up more time to do fun things.

Speaking of fun things… would you have more fun if you mainlined reading? Podcasts are pure listening (without visual cues, making them harder than video for example) and it sounds like most of your learning so far has been kanji and reading which doesn’t map that well. If you want to drive reading forwards, Satori reader is really excellent. Varied levels of difficulty, WK sync for furigana, voiced audio, and grammar explanations and cultural notes giving lots of context. Try the trial chapters for a couple of stories and see if it matches your level?

Reviews and stuff here Satori Reader appreciation thread

Alternatively, if you want to continue with audio, could you try something easier? Sounds like you’ve already tried lots, but I found Japanese with shun much easier to begin with, or the CI Japanese stuff on YouTube etc. better than teppei. No idea why! Or something more fun - I have a soft spot for shirokuma cafe.

I don’t think there is the perfect system - find what you enjoy and follow it. Regardless, you’re not alone!

13

I hear your skepticism about incomprehensibility. But why not just try? Give it two weeks and then give up and tell me I’m an idiot if you see no improvement.

With the Lord of the Rings, presumably you have a vague sense of what happens in each scene already, and you have a lot of interest in the content. In my experience, that combo makes comprehensibility pop.

14

Yes, there is!

In this order: graded readers, Satori, books with clubs in WK, anything written with decent quality

Because -

Reading something enjoyable does this rather well!

Speaking practice and tutoring also do this.

The mountains of srs, on the other hand, should be in a supportive role, not the main show. You need a rebalance imo so that srs is max 10-20% of your time with the language

Reading is slow and painful at first, yes, but it gets faster very quickly if you’re consistent. Get recs here or look up learnnatively.com

15

hey I also watch Comprehensible Japanese and listen to Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners! (It’s so interesting how everyone’s different, I found Shun’s podcast so much harder as a beginner and I couldn’t understand much. I think for me personally, the more scripted something is, the harder it is to understand.) I also recently “unlocked” ことのは and the Bite Size Japanese podcast which took me about 300 watching/listening hours, both of which were tougher for me before. Echoing what TakeFlite said about going back to easier videos if you’re having a hard time comprehending Teppei! The method I landed on was just starting with the complete beginner videos on CI Japanese, and I kept trying Teppei until I could finally understand beyond the first 20 eps or so - this was around 60 hours of listening for me. Podcasts are just always going to be much harder than videos, because you don’t have the visual cues/gestures/facial expressions to help you understand. As I listen or watch, like you, I also keep track of words that seem useful and keep coming up, then I add those to my SRS (Renshuu, for me). Then, I only study the kanji from those words so I already have a decently strong association with them, and I try to say the words I know that use each kanji in my head when I do reviews. I’m personally prioritizing listening, but it’s worked so well for me to remember the context I first heard the word in, remember the speaker’s voice, tone, etc. I can just feel it forming more connections in my brain. Studying words and kanji I’d never come across before from a list just never ended up working well for me, I’d always forget them.

16

Thanks for all the replies! Lots of great advice here.

Yeah, definitely worth giving it a shot. I generally try to establish a routine and stick with it for a little while to see how it works out before moving onto the next thing. Right now, it’s slowly making my way through one of the Nihongo con Teppei short stories, and interleaving that with podcast work. Once I’m done with this story, I’ll try this technique out. Do you have any more pointers that might be particularly relevant to Japanese?

Yeah… I always hear this! And yet somehow it’s so hard not to get sucked into massive amounts of SRS. When I was doing 15 items a day on WK (which is not even that much compared to many people), the SRS sucked up so much time. 150-200 reviews per day was just so draining.

I haven’t tried Shun’s podcast, maybe I’ll check it out just to see. The complete beginner CI videos, and some of the beginner ones, are quite doable for me. Teppei definitely feels a few levels up from that - even though it’s beginner content, he still often talks pretty quickly and his sentence structure can be fairly casual.

17

Just a philosophical note -

I think it’s possible to get sucked into more srs than is ideal because srs, although draining at that level, provides continuous easy wins, and for Japanese, it’s easy to stack on multiple well developed systems and keep up a feeling of progress. Aside from a cold turkey stop, most people tail it down gradually by not adding new items for a while, and gradually filling the time with something else. After the thrill of constantly adding to your stack wanes, and spending time on something else like reading or listening that is arguably harder but closer to your end goal with the language, you achieve a bit of distance and fewer reviews. At that point - a nice long reflective look at what you’re doing and why, and what it’s actually achieving will help you see whether it’s time to just drop some activities, grow them again, or leave them at a minimal level

18

If you want to practice speaking at zero emotional cost, I thought this Japanese tutor had some pragmatic suggestions https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rGEkBvl47Ho&pp=ygUkdGVhY2ggeW91cnNlbGYgamFwYW5lc2Ugd2l0aCBjaGF0Z3B0&ra=m

I’m more into reading right now, but am thinking of giving his method a shot if I can figure out how to use DeepL as the language generator (maybe plug a DeepL agent into the chatbot?). Anybody tried it?

19

No, not really, I don’t think learning Japanese is particularly special vs, like, French. I guess when I started rinsing Death Note and Harry Potter in January, I picked up a couple phrases that I had an idea of the meaning of, but felt nervous about because I hadn’t really read them, or maybe the written words used kanji I didn’t know.

I think at the time I thought that meant something, but I’m coming to see that all it means is that I sometimes feel uncomfortable when my listening vocab is stronger than my reading vocab. Which is fair enough, I guess, but is a discomfort that doesn’t need a response per se.

20

Are you using it for anything?

If you’re just learning words without actually using the language for anything of course you’ll forget it.