I just made it to level 7! For someone like me, WaniKani is perfect … it guides me … all I have to do is the lessons and the reviews, plus read about the adventures of others in the community forum.
I am also using the wanistats app to help me stay motivated … only 14 days until level 8.
I would welcome any tips or advice. If you are an advanced member of this not cult, and you wish you had done something differently back when you were only at level 7, please share!!! Should I use other apps too?
I guess this sounds pretty lame but … always do all of your lessons. There are scripts out there that let you pick the lessons you want, and thus you can skip the vocab and just level up by learning the kanji. But in the long run it will probably hurt you because you don’t get enough exposure from only the kanji, and you don’t learn all the important readings.
I’m not saying don’t use the scripts, though! E.g. WaniKani Ultimate Reorder script. It’s great and gives you lots of freedom. Just make sure to use that freedom wisely.
Wanikani only covers one corner of Japanese. Make sure you’re spending sufficient time on all of the important skills. Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking. Ultimately, what tools help you the most in each of these areas is going to be unique to you, but try to make sure you’re working on all of them. Wanikani is great for reading, but doesn’t help much with the other 3.
Obviously, the best way to shore up everything is to enroll in a class, but that’s not possible for most people. My personal recommendations for self-study would be to use the Genki textbooks and Pimsleur Ultimate Japanese audio lessons. Genki will help with Reading, Writing, and Listening if you do all of the exercises, and Pimsleur Ultimate Japanese will help with both Listening and Speaking.
Pimsleur is pretty expensive, though, so make sure to check your local library to see if they have it available to borrow.
EDIT: Of course, some people might only be interested in a few of these skills. You might never plan to speak Japanese aloud or write any down if you’re only interested in consuming Japanese media. You might only be interested in reading and writing if you want to communicate but never plan on visiting Japan. I still recommend trying to attain mastery of all four, but tailor your study to you.
I heartily disagree.
Do as many as you feel comfortable with.
There’s no point over-whelming yourself.
Different people have different approaches to Wanikani, some have more time to dedicate to it, some have less. Some people thrive with lots of information to take it, others easily get burned out and suffer to retain information.
Giving advice to always go at full speed is not the best thing to do.
Oh sorry, I did not mean to say that! What I wanted to say is, don’t skip vocab. (I currently have a pile of 600+ lessons from previous levels so I’m talking with some experience here )
I did not mean to say “hurry” or “overwhelm yourself”. If you do 5 new items a week, that’s perfectly fine if that’s the pace you want to go at. If you do 30 new items a day, that’s also fine if you feel okay with it. But no matter your actual speed, I just ask you to help yourself by doing all the lessons of any given level before moving on.
This makes more sense and is sensible.
The way your original post reads makes it look (to me at least) like you’re giving advice to always remain at 0 lessons available.
I don’t even know how to choose particular lessons over other ones. I just do them as I feel like I’m feeling like I’m getting a bit light on review content.
Pretty sure if you just click lessons and click start it just gives them in order
I’m not really an ‘advanced user’ of this site though, I just cruise along doing things as default and hoping for the best
This is why I stick to the vanilla experience. I don’t doubt that user scripts can be very useful, but I trust that the website has been designed in a way that I will learn well from it if I take it as it is.
I’m not sure how far along you are in your general studies, but there are some pretty good resources here for practicing speaking and listening. The Japanese Culture Center has some regular meetups that the language tutor I see (native Japanese) attends occasionally. He has had good things to say about it, though I’ve yet to attend myself. Plenty of schools and other opportunities too!
Thanks! I somehow missed the Japanese Cultural Center, but I’ll definitely check that out. I did go to a Japanese Meetup at Mitsuwa, but most people there were chatting away in Japanese, so … that’s a little too advanced for me. Maybe I’ll go to a Chicago Japanese Meetup.
Yeah, my speaking/listening comprehension is much lower than it should be (hence the tutor), so most of the meetups tend to be above my level right now. I’ve had good luck finding people on HelloTalk that live in the city, so I have a couple of Japanese friends that I meet with from time to time so we can practice speaking one-on-one and ask each other questions that might not be appropriate to ask in more professional settings.
You can change lesson ordering in settings. I have mine set to shuffled this level, and did all lessons over a couple of days. Not frontloading radicals and kanji will slow down level up, but also make sure new lessons don’t come in all at once.
I’m using KaniWani with the minimum SRS level set to Guru (not Master) and I’m finding that’s helping a lot with reinforcing vocab between WK Guru and WK Master.
Other than that, keeping a physical diary of new kanji during lessons and stuff-ups during reviews, learning to surf the SRS intervals without losing sleep (Ultimate Timeline yay), and accepting that the radicals and vocab here are mostly just to help learn the kanji.