I wouldn’t count on a special WaniKani coupon. They post some new deal on their English twitter account every month or so. Sometimes it’s a free month (if you’ve never used a coupon or paid before). Sometimes it’s a discounted one year membership.
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In order to not have the boxes, the links can’t be the only thing on the line. Making a space and a character before/after the link will do the job for you!
I should try some of the JLPT vocab courses, thanks for the links. I started a Core 6000 course back at the same time I started WK, but it didn’t have readings and I had trouble memorising the kanji I hadn’t learned on WK (which was… all the kanji back at that point, haha).
My plan for when I guru 60, is to dive into my favourite area(manga/light novels), and start mining; Find words I don’t know and add them to an Anki SRS. Or grab a recommended anki deck 
Since the language used in various studies differ, e.g. Fishing vs economics vocabulary, I think reading what you want to be able to read and developing off that might be the efficient route. But what do I know 
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These are great resources! Thanks everyone!
I joined Wanikani late in the game, so though I haven’t gotten very far, I’m already N2-ready and I’m using Wani-Kani to fill in gaps in vocab.
I’m really interested in reading texts and native material, because for me this makes language-learning visible and worthwhile.
I actually like the link boxes in this case.
Also this gives me more motivation to getting back to my Memrise courses.
The thing is, for me Memrise courses don’t seem to teach grammar well… or have I chosen poor courses? Can anyone recommend grammar courses you like and find effective?
I used the code “rlearnjapanese” when I tried it out in January, gives 3 free months of access.
Are you cool with spending like $60.00 up front? Buy a Kindle – I just have the old paperwhite 2, and it’s magical. I’m going to explain why I like it here, then digress and suggest what I would suggest for acquiring vocabulary in general.
More concrete suggestion: look into Read Real Japanese, both the “fiction” and “essays” variant. I made a really long post about it on some other thread… but basically, the books walk you through popular modern stories/essays, explain practically everything along the way – so you get training wheels to learn how to read in Japanese (which, like anything, is a skill to learn in its own right). If you don’t feel confident reading, read these.
Thing one - buy the kindle
- That dictionary issue you mentioned? Gone. All you have to do is click on a word and it instantly brings up a dictionary article – plus you can import your own dictionaries. I installede both a Japanese dictionary and a J-E dictionary, and you can switch between them with two clicks.
- You mentioned SRS – kindle has a “vocabulary building” function you can enable which will add any word you highlight to a list. You click on the word and it brings you to the sentence in the book where it was at.
- If you’ve got a friend in Japan, you can use their address to download directly from Amazon Japan. Otherwise you can import PDF/ePub/etc to the kindle via email.
SO BASICALLY
Find something you’re interested in Japanese that you’d like to read. Read it on Kindle. Click on any word you don’t know – get definition in Japanese. If you don’t understand, click again, click “swap dictionary → english” and you get it in English. After you’re done reading go to your vocabulary building page, pick out the words you’d like to remember, and add them into anki/whatever with context sentences.
Edit: As others have said, there are also online resources like bliubliu.com or LinQ. I don’t mean to say that buy a kindle or you might not as well try … just that for me personally, it’s much more pleasant to read on kindle, so I recommend looking into one if you enjoy reading.
The issue with remembering
- The issue with remembering things is that your brain is programmed to forget things. It would be terrible if you remembered everyhthing – so really, the art of remembering is merely convincing your brain that what you’re trying to remember is important enough to remember.
- Bad news: words in a foreign language often have no context for you, and at least in the beginning, are seen as “worthless information to be purged from memory”. When you’ve spent your entire life hearing sounds like the above, then suddenly get arakajime … the brain is like nope. An SRS helps to convince your brain that it’s important by ensuring that you see (information) frequently.
- The good news is that there are more efficient ways to remember things than brute force (flashcards) or well-placed brute force (srs). This is insofar that any information you wish to remember can be “tagged”, and depending on how many of these tags it has, your brain judges how important it is to remember. These tags are things like your senses, physical location, time… Benny Lewis (fluentin3months) was talking recently about how his posture helps him to some extent, because the way one holds themselves in Eastern vs Western culture is different.
- This is why WK features quirky little stories and rhymes for everything it tries to teach you. 裾 This means “cuff of trousers” or “hem of skirt”… I only glanced at it once on a clothing tag by accident, 3 months ago or so… and have never forgotten it once. (to my great annoyance – I wish I could replace that useless kanji with a different one). The point being that “A pelican (mine is fat, scruffy, and drunk) stumbling about the top of a grave with the Polish flag waving in the background” is much more memorable than that particular combination of strokes. It’s weird enough that half a second burned it, unfortunately, into my memory.
I mean to say that such things create memory – and the introduction to the Heisig series offers like a 30 page introduction into sheerly this idea. I bring this up because after WK you’re going to have to make your own stories, and it’s definitely something of an art, though quite enjoyable.
Why you should learn by reading
- You’re presumably interested in whatever you read which already gives you a heads up in terms of “this content shouldn’t be forgotten”.
- Seeing the same words in a wide variety of different contexts begins to “create” a web of meaning that encourages your brain to remember things. Sometimes you’ll just literally see a random new Kanji and remember it just because.
- Reading will expose you to many new words you’d otherwise not get. People you talk to simplify their language so you understand (even if you speak very well). Manga will get you through conversational vocabulary and some niche words relevant to what you’re reading. Reading books/short stories/light novels expands much further beyond that… and also is something of an SRS in itself in that you’re going to see a word you don’t know… then again later (and have to look it up again)… then you’ll see it next week… and eventually just remember the damned word.
- Literature tends to be in a “higher register” than newspapers, conversation, manga aimed at youth, etc – meaning you’ll also get (perhaps more importantly than vocabulary) a much wider taste of speech patterns and idioms. Yesterday while reading a short story called かける by 多和田葉子, I came across this: 尻に帆かけて逃げる (take to one’s heels (and run)… but literally, “put a sail on/in my but and flee”). I already knew that Kanji, but I’m definitely never forgetting it’s read as ほ from now on, lol.
- Basically what I want to say is that just because there is SO MUCH vocabulary/idioms/grammar, expressed in such a wide variety of fashions… you’re bound to stumble into some variant that you find particularly tasteful and will remember easily/without trying.
So if you find a good book, you basically learn kanji/vocabulary/idioms/grammar for free, while entertaining yourself. You begin to create a meaningful web for which Japanese can exist within to help you learn by context. Read mindfully and you’ll also sort out some of your more frequently occurring grammar issues just due to being exposed to “correct” grammar so frequently. And best of all, thanks to the Kindle… you can begin reading as soon as you’ve got a grasp on some basic grammar and go from there.
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I have an Android and can download the Kindle app. Do you think it’ll do the same or is a Kindle device absolutely necessary?
Also I have like 4 of those reading real Japanese books on my Amazon wishlist and my birthday on the 27th, maybe I should see if someone will get me one as a present? That’d be awesome.
It might be able to… I had dinked with it on my phone for a little bit for some reason. I recall that you could highlight sentences and view them later – so i presume the dictionary would work, but at that point I was reading in English for a class and didn’t need to look anything up. It’s worth a shot, though!
Just to specify, this series is the one I’m referring to. This one & the penguin one are also nice… but they only provide a general word-dictionary. Don’t get me wrong, that’s really useful – it saves you from having to look anything up…
but the real beauty of that “read real japanese” in the first link is that he devotes the second half of the book to being a running-grammatical dictionary of everything that was in the stories/essays. So you can literally just sit down and read the stories confident that everything you need to understand them is there. If you’ve read a few books/ahve a solid grasp on grammar then the latter two are also nice… but if not, definitely begin from these two.
The series is also nice because he devotes a good amount of time to (a) comparing similar grammar points and (b) discussing the nuances of certain grammar points – really nice to clear a lot of stuff up.
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Memrise allows you to constantly learn new words without having met some quota of correct answers for the previous words. Also you never ‘burn’ a word there, each time you answer correctly the word gets pushed back into a queue that caps at 180 days. There is absolutely no point to keep a review queue of 0 on any SRS (except likes of WK that require correct answers in order for you to level up). There will always be words that you instantly remember or words that you will have hard time remembering no matter how many times you get prompted.
They key is to treat SRS/word lists as a quick first introduction to various kind of words rather than a list of words that you must absolutely master outside of any real world examples. There was this one word that I just couldn’t remember with higher than maybe 30% accuracy at best, but instantly recognised it when I saw it when I was playing Final Fantasy 7. When you read a lot, play games in Japanese, or whatever else the activity in Japanese you might enjoy happens to be, these words will get cemented into your brain.
Memrise to me is the easiest and the least troublesome way to increase my passive vocabulary. After reviewing the words maybe 3-5 times, I just leave them to be rediscovered in real context. The more you then discover these words in “real world” context they start to gradually change from passive vocabulary to active vocabulary and you’re able to use them in speaking and writing.
Regarding the JLPT, yes I passed the N1 last December. Didn’t do any of the other levels, just the vocabulary (used Memrise) and grammar (新完全マスター文法 -books for N4, N3, N2 and N1 are a godsent, they get my full recommendation, couldn’t have done it without.).
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Those are some great recommendations. However since you talk so high about memrise, what was your motivation to none the less continue on with WK until lvl 60? At least it comes across that this wasn’t as helpful as some other resources for you, or am I reading this wrong? Thanks for your thoughts on this
Do you have a link to those books perchance?
LinQ for example can do all that for free too, if someone doesn’t want to buy a kindle.
I agree that reading is the most important and effective way to advance in a language. Sadly reading has been in decline lately and many people struggle to even pick a book that they would like to read. I think the number one thing you need is to focus on doing things that you find enjoyable, things that you’re able to stick with and hopefully finish. Telling someone to go and pick up 心 by 夏目漱石 is going to be an impossible and extremely daunting task for anyone who isn’t inclined to read similar books in their own language. Only way to achieve success is to do things that you find interesting and fun. It may or not be reading the classics of Japanese literature. In my case, I prefer to build up my word count and stick to reading newspapers, essays and such before stepping into the big leagues and reading a book. Constantly looking up words while reading a book just kills the fun for me.
I don’t agree with everything that you said about memory. I’ve found out that mnemonics do not work for me at all, it’s harder for me to remember a story than the meaning of a word. The way I see SRS is not quite as extreme as brute-forcing rather just an effective way to encounter lots of new words in a short period of time. I don’t stress about getting 100% correct answers when doing reviews, and I rarely bother reviewing the same word more than 3-4 times. Some stick instantly, some will never stick until you come across them in a text and you just know them like it was some sort of magic.
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Well there were couple of reasons for sticking to WK, first of all I had already paid for it and I’m the type of person who likes to finish things that I started and level 60 was achievable so I figured I’ll go for it. Also since I was doing things with the goal of N1 in mind, I found having separate platform with more strict structure for kanji learning a refreshing thing. Eventually the stuff that I did on Memrise overtook Wanikani and I ended up learning things on Memrise before WK. I never did any kanji courses on Memrise so I ended up learning the kanji via vocabulary. Wanikani was more of an ‘official’ way to learn the kanji. Oh and by the way if you’re interested, I hit level 49 here on the morning of the exam.
@Shiawase I talked about these books on the Longest Thread -thread few months ago. https://community.wanikani.com/t/Longest-WaniKani-Thread-Ever/6392/14209
I bought mine from White Rabbit Japan at https://shop.whiterabbitjapan.com/ You can probably find them on Amazon too, I’m sure.
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Ooh thank you. I was surprised with how cheap it is on White Rabbit Press, but it’s a little cheaper (even new) on Amazon, so I added N4 and N3 to my wishlist. Grammar is definitely my worst area, but even difficult, for some reason this seems like something I could and would want to do / work through/with. Thanks!
I agree that LingQ is probably better for someone like you who is just interested in reading short news articles. It’s a hassle to import them into Kindle, and they often don’t look wonderful. Plus, LingQ suggests you new content based on what you read/ your vocabulary, no? But even if you’re just wanting to read a light novel or collection of short stories…
I also wasn’t suggesting OP to read anything like that – he mentioned several medias of reading, so I took them as being someone who liked reading. Literally all I said was “go find something you like reading… and read”. So I was telling someone who I assumed found reading interesting and fun… to go read. I don’t see what the complaint is from you here ;;^^ We’re basically saying the same thing.
All I was really going for with that, is that a text that is too-difficult to read in paper can well become manageable on Kindle. I was simply sharing my experience. There are all different sorts of tools for all different sorts of people.
The problem isn’t with mnemonics but your stories, then 
On a more serious note, I also don’t really feel like we disagreed here – at least, with the following: My mysterious point #5 that disappeared was basically “it’s not necessary to use a mnemonic for every word. A lot of words will just stick after a go or two. If you’re consistently forgetting a word or confusing it with other words… I’d look into giving a minute or two to making a solid mnemonic and see where it gets you”.
Essentially, you said that you give a word 3-5 reviews and if it doesn’t stick… you say to hell with it and wait until you see it in a natural context (newspaper, video game) and then it “magically sticks” because you have context. All I said was that using a mnemonic is a means to create that context to help words magically stick – one that is artificial, not natural, and not perfect – but is nevertheless useful in a jiffy when you (a) can’t wait to stumble into the word(s) you want to remember in a natural setting by happenstance or (b) reading/using the language in a natural setting isn’t yet a brain-dead practical thing for you.
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Yeah, in essence we aren’t really disagreeing with anything. We both think that reading is the best way to improve but our approach just differs. I don’t like jumping into a book without knowing anything, to me looking up every word (even with easy to use dictionaries like the one in kindle) takes away from the joy of reading. I also think you kinda misunderstood me, I don’t “just” read short articles. I read essays, long editorials and featured articles, and I do read books almost every night before bed, I just tend to prefer the paper kind and my choice of books tend to be non-fiction, aside a couple of Murakamis. At the moment I’m reading Richard Dawkins in Japanese.
Regarding the mnemonics. I have found that mnemonics simply do not work for me, I’ve also tried these “memory palace” methods that some people use, my brain just doesn’t work that way. I don’t visualize pictures of pelicans wearing tuxedos in my head nor do I picture tossing things into a different rooms of my ‘memory palace’ when learning new things. Take kanji for example, I associate the kanji with meaning, and after couple of words that use the kanji - I know it, I don’t need to imagine horses on a jet ski to remember them. I don’t doubt that it works for many people, it just doesn’t work for me.
My point about the “magic” that happens when you actually encounter words in the ‘wild’, so to speak. Those words that you might’ve struggled with are like water to you all the sudden. You just read through a sentence and start the next one and go “wait a minute… I used to have difficulties with that!”. At least that has been my experience with those ‘hard to nail’ vocabulary.
Anyway, just wanted to mention LinQ for anyone who happens to be a poor or otherwise cheap, I don’t personally use it but I’ve heard good things and I do like the concept of it.
I bought the lifetime pass because I know once I hit 60, I’ll forget a lot of stuff. I plan to keep doing it until know the reviews so well that I can do the reviews in 5-10 minutes instead of the 2 hours it takes because I don’t know or are familiar enough with the word. Then it’ll be something that doesn’t take up a chunk of my life and still keeps the information enforced. So yea, I’ll probably have no more lessons in 2020 at this rate and years after that just review quicker and quicker
Thanks. I myself was planning to buy kindle if it has dictionary function. It doesnt matter if i buy it in english store, it still can use japanese dictionary? When you reading manga not novel how can it identifies characters, in manga there is no lines, they are handwritten and drawed there anywhere inside the picture. Can you lookup those as well? And what dictionary it uses? Can you make to lookup in jisho.org automatically???