Matt vs. Japan on Wanikani: Do you agree?

Didn’t notice that bit. Thanks.

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fair enough.

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Sorry, I’m just trying to find the best way to learn Japanese for myself. Wanikani is quite expensive, and if it’s a bad product, I wouldn’t want to waste around 90 dollars per year on it. Some people say that Matt vs. Japan is quite credible because of how fluent he is in the language, so I wasn’t sure if I could trust him or not. Not trying to convince anyone else to not use WaniKani.

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Honestly there doesn’t need to be an anything vs Matt thread. Matt opens himself up to enough Matt vs Matt discussions with his shifting views.

In the viral YTuber scene there is no such thing as bad publicity, so he makes his living expressing an even mix of informative and controversial views. Then he stirs the pot and ladles up $$. None of his ideas or platforms are original or innovative, or even really optimized forms of information available. The man cuts and pastes his way to victory.

Watch his YT videos and take away from them the points that seem reasonable and that you agree with, discarding the rest.

Apply a commonsense methodology to your Japanese learning journey of combining textbook study with immersion, kanji and vocab SRS, speech and intonation practice, whatever gamification that works for you, and mining sentences that have pertinent vocab/kanji/grammar.

And finally, remember that almost no language system is utter :poop:, and no system is the magic bullet one-size-fits-all sock that’s going to keep your toes covered during your entire language journey.

I’m neither a huge Matt fan, nor a huge WK fan, but of the two, if you feel the need to shell out money to one:

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Yep, this. I think when I was earlier in learning Japanese I would’ve tried to talk more about my perceived merits of method X vs Y in learning kanji or grammar or whatever aspect of Japanese. But I’ve come across few systems (I’m sure they’re out there but not really mainstream) so bad you won’t learn good info if you just stick with them. Try something out for learning kanji, if you like it, do it.

So much of the Japanese learning community stuff, especially aimed at beginners, just fosters feelings of terror at the enormity of the project (and to be fair, it is enormous) but then channels that into worries that if you don’t pick the exact right methods you’ll sabotage yourself.

Learn some words, some grammar, some kanji (can be anywhere on the spectrum from totally tucked into learning words to studying separately), then read some books and listen to some stuff. Follow what feels right and you’ll be ok. Obsessing over if your chosen method might be wrong, unless you are actively feeling you’re not benefitting from it, is a worse trap than any mainstream learning system is. The only hard rule is anything you do should be in service of moving in the direction of being able to actually use (whichever you care about among reading/listening/speaking/writing) the language. And of course, when able, shifting your studying more and more to doing so.

Just chill and study. That video is 38 minutes long, you can get in some good Japanese time instead :slightly_smiling_face:

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His videos are very engaging. I’ll give him that. And you go on the journey of “I can do it too!” But then you realize you watched a 3 hour video about a guy learning Japanese in English as opposed to just doing it yourself. That part of “learning Japanese” was really hard for me to break out of. I would spend hours watching English speakers talk about how they got good at Japanese but rarely engaged with language. I finally just found stuff I liked in Japanese and did it. But that was a hard addiction to stop.

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I think there is more than one way to go about learning how to read kanji and that Refold makes a lot of sense.

I can’t shit on Matt for having opinions on WK because I also have opinions on WK. It is however, working very well for me… and it’s been very consistent in that regard. I can read A LOT of kanji and vocab and that’s because of WaniKani.

Regardless of which method you choose (RtK or Refold or WK) you’re still gonna have to put in the work.

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I would say there is benefit from studying the perspectives of other language learners in regard to the process of language learning. I spent about 5 months doing study mostly of this nature and I think it gave me a better perspective. You can use the same advice of “don’t read/listen about it, just do it!” But that invalidates any experience that isn’t a personal one. There is benefit to hearing the experiences of others, and of researching the science and theory of language acquisition.

If effective JP communication is literally the only thing you care about, I can see the short-term benefits of skipping the theory explanations and making that time directly devoted to the language, but for anyone planning on taking up more than 1 language, language acquisition theory certainly has a place. Many polyglots put in their dues studying this.

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I haven’t watched the video or read most of the thread, but I’ll just give my personal anecdotal experience.

I used Anki for years but always burned out at a certain point with the Core 2k/6k deck and would end up needing to restart from the beginning again after a break. I finished WaniKani in a year and made more progress with vocabulary and reading than ever, although I don’t recommend going as fast if you can avoid it.

Are the English names and definitions used for some of the radicals and individual kanji a little weird or even bad? Sure, but most of them worked, and at a certain point of your learning you kind of forget or don’t rely on them anymore to recall readings and vocabulary.

I didn’t even engage with the community much, although I know it can be a factor for others, but it was the gamification and things like good browser scripts and the Flaming Durtles app that made a difference in terms of ease, motivation, and discipline to follow through.

WaniKani was the best decision I ever made for learning to read Japanese.

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