Hi! I’ve been studying Japanese for a while now, but I had to stop some time ago because of personal affairs. I want to seriously continue my study, but I am unsure about how to do it.
At the moment I am doing WaniKani, BunPro for grammar, Anki for vocab, and I am using comprehensible inputs such as the Comprehensible Input website and Tadoku graded readers.
So my question is: is this a good combination? Should I stick with/use fewer resources to avoid burnout?
Any advice is good!
If you want advice maybe providing a bit more information would be a good start. How often do you use what resources. What proportions do you do them in. In one week, how many items do you do on wanikani? How many items on bunpro? How many items on anki? How are you getting the vocab words that you use for anki? What do your cards look like? How much are you reading and how intensively?
What are your actual goals? What are you practicing for and when do you want to be able to do it by?
I use Comprehensible Japanese (listening) and all SRS resources (Anki, WaniKani, and Bunpro) daily.
I usually focus on vocabulary and grammar first, and then reinforce them with WaniKani and listening.
In a typical week, I do around 70 items (about 8–10 per day), including 3–5 on Bunpro and 10 on Anki per day.
At the moment, I’m using a premade deck, Kaishi 1.5k, to build a solid vocabulary base for immersion and mining.
My goal is to learn all the main aspects of the languag(speaking*, writing, reading…) I’m not in a hurry; I study Japanese because I love learning languages and have developed a strong interest in Japanese language and culture.
*I’m gonna start it a little bit later
My initial impression is that you are doing 20 wk/items a day in addition to your bunpro which is a pretty decent speed. I personally did essentially the same speed so I won’t discourage you, but keep in mind it will have a significant ramp up in workload as higher interval reviews start coming in. Unless it’s not updating, it still shows you at level 1 which would mean it’s really too early to gauge anything.
I don’t think doing three different things is inherently wrong since I sorta did the same thing, but just make sure you are zeroing out your reviews every day.
As far as the anki deck is concerned, 1.5k words is a pretty good number for bootstrapping reading provided that that’s a frequency based list. A quick Google search seems to suggest that it is?
The combination is fine, but if things ramp up and you find it hard to maintain, I would probably prioritize keeping a stable routine on wanikani until around level 10 or 15. At that point, if you’re still finding that you can’t manage grammar with all the new reviews coming in, slow down on wanikani and add in a little bunpro. Then around level 20 I would really make sure that you have your anki/supplemental vocab in there.
If you can do that all from the get go and maintain stable speed obviously that would be ideal, but you can never really tell until your burn reviews start coming in and the world load stabilizes. For reference if you keep your apprentice in check, 20 new items a day will probably come out to like 200-250 reviews a day long term iirc.
I would say if you do have some extra time at this stage and you don’t want to load up on more items for fear of having high review counts a month from now, the tadoku is a good way to spend your extra time. Just the act of trying to understand and apply grammar you’ve learned will be valuable. I wouldn’t worry about absorbing vocab.
Does it cover what you want to learn from the language and how you’d like to learn it? Can you work at a pace that works for you? If it is, that’s a good combination.
Definitely think the readers and listening input is good. I didn’t really prioritize that for a while and definitely feel like that was a mistake learning experience.
But the important thing is to know why you want to learn the language and what you want from it, and keep evaluating your progress and tools as you go. You’ll get great advice here, but in the end no matter what kind of Japanese experts there may be here (as well as a lot of non-experts like myself), in the end you’re the you expert. Just be reflective on your process and if you find it not working or burnout creeping in, make adjustments as necessary. But it sounds like you’re off to a great start there so I think know you’ll do awesomely.