I just started on iTalki as well (Have had two different trail lessons) and I chose one teacher to start lessons with in the new year. I really want to work on my speaking skills. For now I’ll only be doing every other week though.
My other goals are to reach around level 30 on Wanikani, chapter 10 of Tobira, and not take a long hiatus. I used to set myself unrealistic goals and thus fell out of studying when I couldn’t reach them time and time again. Since I work full time and am really social with friends I’ve been working the last few months at a pace of 2 wanikani levels a month and 1 chapter of Tobira every 6 weeks ish. It’s an extremely slow pace compared to what it seems most people work at but honestly I’m just so happy to have stuck with my Japanese studies for over half a year now without falling into another huge hiatus.
That rings so true
Even though you need to be Lvl 50 to have learned all the 1000 JLPT N2 Kanji, by then you’ll have learned 1708 Kanji on WaniKani.
If you’re level 10 right now and are doing 16 lessons every day, you’ll be level 50 by the end of next year. That’s already pretty insane. And some part of me still wants to go faster.
I think I might need someone to slap me every time I want to do more lessons
I really feel the same way xD Sometimes I get hyper motivated and I just really want to be at the end goal already. But thats when I start to put more and more on my plate and eventually become completely overwhelmed.
I’m honestly having so much fun with wanikani tho! And I wish I had started earlier. But then again, I don’t need to hit 50 and have my N2 kanji within a year because I won’t even have finished my N3 grammar at that point anyhow. Tho I admit sometimes I read a long passage in my textbook and it makes me feel so accomplished like ‘Wow that wasn’t too bad, and the kanji was a breeze, I can totally take on the world!’ and then I open some real world material and I just get completely smacked in the face XD Material at or around my level sparks joy, everything way above it does not haha.
Hi, I’d like an add to the list! I’m only level 3 but I’m speedrunning to level 18 (then slowing down to 2-3 weeks per level) as I’ve been studying a long time. So I’d like to be an underdog coming from behind in your group and then by 16 weeks from now hopefully be at even playing field with many of you…
Anyone else studying for N2? I’ll be taking it for the first time in December 2021 (passed N3 December 2019).
Welcome to everyone new! Let’s go!!! Im w/o my computer until january so i cant add anyone on my leadearboard nor check the level ups hope everyone is staying active! Its so hard to keep up in these festive dates! Wecolme @ganbareniichan ! So glad you are here to inspire us all!
You already did N3! Thats huge, how do you study grammar?
Like I said above, speedrun to level 18 (my goal date is April 24, 2021 so that gives me 7.5 days per level from here on out). I’m having a baby in summer 2021 so I’m gonna slow WAY down and focus on reviews for the 3 months after I give birth, but I’m still hoping to be at level 30 by December 31,2021/January 1, 2022.
For the Italki discussion, I use italki heavily. I just tallied up my lessons for 2020 and for Japanese I took exactly 100 lessons (50 hours as I do half hour lessons only). I find it really valuable as speaking fluently is a major goal of mine and has been the focus of my studies for a long time now. I’m shifting to reading and writing now that I feel I can have pretty decent conversations in various contexts. It is AWKWARD when you first start out but then the more you do it the more natural it becomes. I take lessons with a wide variety of teachers (I rotate between like my top 10, I’d say) to get different accents, different speech patterns (varying from like 19-20 year old teachers to like 80-90 year old teachers, male and female)… I have found it immensely helpful, and super reasonably priced… a half hour lesson with some quality conversation buddies can be like $4. I don’t go over $10, even for tutors I love, because it just takes up too much of my budget. But with $25/wk on lessons, I can easily fill up a week with several lessons.
Im on Genki 2 atm so I think my goal would be to finish Wanikani to at least around Level 32/33, be able to have some decent conversations in Japanese (not as basic or broken as they are now), improve listening and reading so it can help me understand things like slightly easier anime, articles/social media posts and/or easier games without needing English aid.
I have Nakama 1+2, Genki 1+2, and Tobira, all of which I used for study for the N3 (I went up to chapter 8 in Tobira). I did the official practice test in October 2019 and spent the last 2 months just studying my faults.
Now I’m planning on studying ALL of Tobira (including completing the kanji and grammar workbooks), skimming An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese (got this from a friend who moved away and not sure how valuable it’ll be but I’m gonna give it a try to see what is different from Tobira), and I have 例文で学ぶ漢字と言葉N2 and the Kanji in Context workbook (I don’t have the accompanying reference texts). I’ll also take the N2 official practice test, probably at the start of November.
Those will be my study materials for the year on top of WK and continuing Italki conversation lessons. Kanji has always been a weak point so that’s a huge part of me starting WK. I did study all of the kyouiku kanji in 2019 but I’ve forgotten many of them. I need the accountability and gamification here to re-up those skills and KEEP going instead of stopping there. My WK level won’t get as high as all N2 in 2021, but It’ll definitely be my first attempt at the test and then 2022 will be about N1 study even if I wind up taking the N2 again…
I have too much SRS right now (WK 3x/day + KW 2x/day + Bunpro 2x/day + Nativshark 2x/day). But i decided to start KameSame this week. But only for enlightened itens. I had a very high accuracy %, so im really happy right now. Still preferer KaniWani though, KS has too much visual aid with the kanjis appearing all the time, it lets you know when you are wrong before you press enter. But i guess it will be fine if i keep using it only for enlightened itens, or maybe one day ill use it only for Burned itens. Also, i love the search tool, i can add words from my grammar/youtube studies into it and let the SRS magic work. Maybe one day (if it piles up too much) ill use KameSame for extra “wild” vocab + burned itens only, or, perhaps, just for the wild vocab.
I don’t have any experience with KW but I’m not sure what you mean. Are you referring to the “predictive text” function on your keyboard? I’ve never felt like KS lets you know the answer before you enter it. I’m curious.
SO MUCH SRS. The good thing is that you are being bombarded with kanji all the time, which is always helpful. 頑張ってね！
I actually hide all the kanji in nativshark, their way of teaching kanji is really bad, i really tried for 30 days and now i just archive all the kanji. And in kamesame i only left the vocab words, i still find the kanjis and its readings really easy to remeber. And im only doing kamesame around 10min/day, as i still have only a few enlightened itens.
So in reality i only really see kanjis in WK and KW, and for me KW is the hardest one, but the one that i feel the best when i get right. It does not have any tips, so it forces you to: 1 remember de japanese word by heart or 2: remember the kanjis that form the japanese word and then remember the readings. Most of the time i remember both, which is really cool, and actually helps a lot with WK.
I think the 2 together are really hard, but for me it feels like the optimal way. When i level up its a pain in the ass, KW is so hard when you just learned the word, but after 2-3x tries i start to thrive.
About my problem with kamesame: for instance, if he asks me for “three people” and I type さんにん it will show３人 or 三人、but if i had mistakenly typed ふたつ i would know I was wrong, before finishing, because the suggestion would be ２つ or 二つ. And i cant just answer with hiragana because he wants it with kanji. Like 富士山 (fuji-san), even if i dont know the first kanji. Maybe im doing something wrong.
Typing on my smartphone, sorry if i made too many mistakes
Oh!! Yes, I see what you mean, and how that could be a little like cheating, but if you know you are wrong when you see the wrong kanji, and you can actually produce the correct answer, I don’t think it’s too bad. That doesn’t happen very often for me, but I think I can remember a few times when I kept getting the wrong kanji from the list, but I don’t think I ended up knowing the correct answer in the first place haha.
Does KW ask you to produce Kanji or just spelling in hiragana? I like KameSame because it asks you to produce the actual Kanji and I think choosing from a list is okay because that’s what Japanese people do all the time. I type in し and I will get a never ending list of kanji I can choose from haha, or if I am impatient I will type in a jukugo vocabulary word I know that uses the し reading of the same kanji and then delete the other kanji. That’s actually a really nice feeling.
I agree with you that recognition and production are super important for getting those words to stick. It is a pain in the ass, but you know in the long run you’re taking your medicine.
It gives you the word in english, like: “Round” and sometimes it has a tip like “i-adjective” so you now he wants まるい and not only まる. It does not need japanese keyboard and does not changes to kanji, just like WK works.
You are right about learning how japanese type, KS its really good for that. But another example of what i did not liked about it: if it was asking for "Fire” i could just type か and search for the kanji 火, instead of the actual vocab reading that is ひ.
Woah lol! I only ordered the first book for these but will probably get more later on. I also want to get into reading One Piece after watching it all last year. Seen that even the first few pages of One Piece showed things that I had not seen in the anime before.
I’ve connected with lots of what you’ve posted on here and I share many of the same goals as you
I’m hoping to be able to progress and speak to some of the people I’ve already made friends with on HelloTalk. I’m curious what do you prefer to have your kamesame study settings set on?
I’ve been trying to find a good balance between wanikani, kamesame and bunrpo haha
Hi neversleep! I am so glad you found some of my ramblings useful.
Yes, we do share similar goals! HelloTalk is certainly on my list. I love the short conversations I have with my teacher on italki, but that feeling of actually having an organic conversation is going to be pretty awesome haha. I definitely need more time studying and shadowing though.
My SRS’s are WaniKani, ToriiSRS, KameSame, in order of importance. I set my KameSame to Master+ and I set my reviews to production only, which means I am given the English word and I need to produce the Kanji or vocabulary word. I don’t do both because WaniKani already does recognition, so it would just be redundant for me to start all over again, and doing that will ensure a good balance anyway. KameSame has really helped me because I’m pretty sure I have not missed an Enlightened review in WaniKani yet…I think. if there are, there aren’t many. I was so glad I stumbled across KS.
Also, I added you to my leaderboard. This is a great thread with a lot of cool people!!
Uh it is boring but I can easily see the longterm value/pay off already. What I’m doing is trying to progress as swiftly as practicable (no I am not getting up at 2am to do reviews, crabigator…) with a super high degree of accuracy (hoping to keep my accuracy above 98% for the “pleasant levels,” then above 95% for the “painful” ones… right now I’m still at 99% with those faults obviously being from having memorized a different name for a radical or for messing up pink vs. purple… clearly stuff I’ll get used to in time and have decided not to install a typo script for this). I’ve gone through and looked at levels… I’ll learn one new kanji in level 5 and then not again until level 9, but from then on it’ll be at least 1 new kanji per level, often more. And I’ll get a slow trickle of new vocab starting from level 5 onward.
I mentioned that I’m studying/reviewing from 例文で学ぶ漢字と言葉N2, so when I’m going through their reviews, organized in syllabary order based on most common on-yomi, I am coming across jukugo I don’t remember. Then I’ll use jisho to locate the WK level and go find the kanji entry… if there are WK radicals I don’t know I’ll quickly look at those pages so I can memorize the kanji mnemonic. Although I’m not SRSing those yet (I relied heavily on Anki in the past but I’m currently disenchanted… may add them on KameSame…) I’ve learned 4 kanji this way so far and I’m hoping to just keep building up knowledge within the WK framework using these mnemonics and then when I eventually encounter those kanji in 19, 32, 45 levels… maybe they’ll already be second nature like these ones are at level 3… that’s the hope anyway.
Hoping to constantly learn even while in these levels with no new content. It works well cuz I’m at a high in my motivation and excitement right now that will carry me through this boring phase… I wouldn’t be able to sit tight for a couple months otherwise but right now I know I can…
hope everyone is staying active! Its so hard to keep up in these festive dates! Wecolme 
