I’ve tryed this, definitely not my thing to be honest.
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Well this is some interesting context.
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Agreed. It happens when I failed to burn the enlightened items and suddenly I remembered how I constructed the mnemonics. Seems like the encoding was not strong enough so I need to redo them.
However, I tried the memory palace once but it took too much time to be useful for me. Maybe I’ll have it a look again when mnemonics alone don’t serve me well anymore.
Someone mentioned me AJATT/refold before and I took a look at it. I think it is quite good. I now incorporate some into my daily routine.
Well, that’s good for you then. At least you’re aware that mnemonic and learning methods are not necessarily universally efficient or helpful. Personally, I have grievances with those who push panaceas down others’ throats and act haughty when questioned about the universality of their effectiveness. I also don’t understand why taking somewhat famous quotes and using them to support what is supposed to be a rigorous argument is considered helpful or useful. People say things all the time, and a lot of the time the things they say are wrong. Fame doesn’t make you right, testing does.
As an aside, I’ve heard of Anki users basing their mnemonics on OP’s memory palace method before. I have nothing against them — but if the method is that efficient for OP, what’s the point of using Wanikani, a service whose only real advantage over Anki is its built-in mnemonics? If you’re going to make your own mnemonics for every word and kanji anyway I don’t really see the point in shelling out the cash for the service that WK provides.
Oh! And I’d like to ask you guys: how quickly do you do your reviews, in reviews per hour? If you have the heatmap script you can calculate your average by getting (total number of reviews)/(total hours spent in reviews). I think it’d be interesting to compare the recall times of people with different mnemonic methods. I believe I saw another user saying he got about 400 reviews per hour on average; usually I can only get about 300 per hour (then again, my keyboard’s broken.)
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Before using WK, I used Anki, but I was not too fond of it. It was not mnemonics I decided to stick with. WK sticks with me well because it goes randomly ordered, separating meaning/reading, lesson order, and good SRS intervals. I don’t use provided mnemonics often because English is not my first language. Mainly I use my own mnemonics. I hate leveling, toast up/down, and SRS stages WK provides, but there’s no way to get around it, so I disabled the toast up/down and SRS stages instead on FlamingDurtle.
On average, I do around 100 reviews in 30 minutes. I don’t do more than 100 per session. I only use FlamingDurtle as I wouldn’t say I like doing it on a PC. Too many distractions.
Could you elaborate on this a bit? There’s nothing stopping you from customizing your anki setup and flashcards to suit your needs, in that case.
If I understand correctly, everything you need can be found in Anki; random ordering of lessons or reviews can be set up in Anki by simply getting or making a flashcard deck that has these properties. (Besides, WK doesn’t actually use random ordering, it uses some weird in-between semi-random ordering that I don’t really understand the purpose of fully).
Separating meaning/reading. Although many core3/10k or kanji decks do combine the English glosses with the readings, there are some that don’t (and you can do a bit of csv customization to the ones that don’t separate them; just export the deck as csv, copy out two sections for the reading and meaning, and regex the meanings and readings into their places).
Lesson order. This is a more difficult thing to answer, but wkstats.com does have a kanji ordering list for wanikani, which you could adapt for your own purposes. I’m pretty sure the WK team doesn’t really care all that much about the specific ordering past the first 20 or so levels. I could be wrong, though.
Good SRS intervals. This is always available in Anki; I believe options groups can be fitted with custom timings — some kind souls have even made a WK template for Anki, complete with timings and text entry, although I’m not really sure how good it is, as I’ve never tried it.
The customizing part is tough work. It’s not easy to customize Anki. And I didn’t have time for that. I tried Memrise for vocab building for a year, but it didn’t work for me, then I found iKnow.
I use iKnow in companion with WK daily because they both have convenient mobile apps. For me, the main deciding factor buying a lifetime is convenience and the kanji sticks. It just works. Anki or Memrise didn’t, and I didn’t bother to find out why. I can only guess the factors, but in the end, maybe it’s not about the features. Open source is powerful stuff, but many times they are hard to customize and not user-friendly.
I think it’s more like a personal preference, just like how people chose Mac or Windows. I have both, and I hate my Mac. However, I think Windows are more convenient, cheaper, powerful, and easier to use, which is debatable for hardcore Mac users.
Yeah, I completely agree it’s a matter of preference. I adjusted my Anki SRS time checkpoints a bit and they work really well for me (3 repeats when learning and the regular spacing similar to WaniKani), but for instance adding extra fields to flashcards, images, etc. requires some time investment.
I wouldn’t replace Anki with WaniKani, though. WaniKani is my main kanji learning tool and Anki supplements vocab for kanji I have problems with or ones I want to practice more.
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I see. Well, I must apologize if it seemed like I was trying to push Anki — in fact I don’t even use it much myself, mostly because I absolutely hate its UI. 
While its functionality is top notch, the graphics are… lacking, to say the least.
btw, if you want a prettier version of anki with similar features and SRS timings to WK, with none of the leveling, I suggest Torii. It’s free, has a mobile app, and there are multiple vocab lists you can choose from; kind of similar to KameSame, but KameSame doesn’t have a mobile app unfortunately. Many of the vocab lists can work in tandem with WK.
To Japanese fluency!
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It’s alright.
I have tried the earlier version of Torii back there when it is a PC version, it occasionally crashed, and I frequently lost my work. I also tried KameSame too, but it didn’t work. I like iKnow better with context sentences and good audio. That was around I reset WK because I was getting too anxious doing the reviews.
I found that I got zero stress when using iKnow, and finding my reading and listening comprehension were getting a lot better. I realized maybe because it doesn’t have levels (it uses percentage instead), testing multiple methods simultaneously (basic, cloze, and multiple choice), no toast up/down, and no pressure for burning items. It also has a sentence trainer. So that is why I tried to replicate it to WK. I know many people here don’t like iKnow, but I couldn’t find a better alternative (I still couldn’t find one now), so I decided to get the lifetime account when it was sold back there before it was closed forever.
FIFY so it doesn’t hurt the eyes (like the Anki UI) 
I’m sorry @Zeiosis, but I don’t think you have become fully educated on the science behind UI based on your comment.
I am a UI God first, cyclist second. My field is sarcasm and as a student of beetrootology, numerology and astrology by default, I can tell you… there are intentional misconceptions within society about how Anki works in terms of UI and its crucial function with everyone to the greatest wizards, to the greatest pimps, just about any professional in every field of study. Many of the greatest hairstylists swear by this technique, but I thought I made that plain already with magician Plato (aka The Oracle of Punk). Maybe Gilgamesh, Chuck Norris and Banksy are better examples. I digress.
Edit: This comment was hidden due to having been flagged. My post is neither abusive nor offensive and was clearly received by the community as a humorous contribution, as evidenced by the 12 14 likes. I am happy for it to be reviewed by a mod if it is flagged again. After all, mods deserve to get a laugh in too, once in a while.
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This made me laugh. Thank you sir.
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Reading through this thread, I appreciate the insights provided by a couple of the posts here, and reading some of the other posts I would also appreciate it if people to read and consider Goal 2 of the Community Guidelines again.
Congratulations, now it has 69 likes
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(Sorry to derail your topic. But unfortunately your topic about a translation for your novel got closed so I didn’t know how else to respond to it.)
First of all I find your novel “So Blu” very interesting because it is an urgent topic indeed. I tried to find ways to improve my lifestyle to become more sustainable many times (Veganism, Plastic free, minimalism, compost worms, Masanobu Fukuoka, Urban Gardening, Eco architecture…) but it always ended up somewhat disappointing and difficult to apply into real life. I am also a big fan of young adult novels (still!) in which worlds have to be saved and I love “dystopicunderground” (thank you for this word btw).
Secondly, I find the idea of translation from English to Japanese also very interesting. But it looks like such a big goal to achieve! Almost impossible, there are so many nuances in languages (I am sure you can easily find that I am not a native English speaker ). But in the forum there are many people who do have something to say on nuances in Japanese and it would be interesting to hear some of their knowledge.
And finally “This cannot work without an infusion into the collective consciousness of many very different people.” made me think of maybe this divine challenge could be solved with collective intelligence. Something like a challenge to translate a novel sentence by sentence and having the proposals being discussed by others. And I don’t know how you think about it, but using your novel “So Blu” (or a part of it) for this translation challenge purpose could give you back some ideas on what is important for you to convey to an Japanese audience that could be lost in translation otherwise even if you hire a professional translator.
Just an idea, if you are not interested I might open a topic like this with another source because I would like to have a space to exchange ideas about nuances on translations to Japanese. But I cannot find an English source that could be interesting enough to make people participate so far…
They are starting point. It’s supposed to “teach you” how to create your own and then you make them custom to the max. I’ve found Koichi to be really helpful when I’m being less creative and I am forever grateful for his input. Sometimes the connections are so obvious!
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I’m sorry. I guess I wasn’t clear. The way wanikani works you have to master (“guru level”) a kanji BEFORE associated vocab is unlocked so since it’s easy to memorize kanji AFTER its associated vocab is unlocked. That’s a Catch-22 isn’t it? So the more accurately you memorize the kanji initially, the faster vocab is unlocked and the faster you can cement the information with associated vocab.
Hence why I said… struggling with kanji means… “twenty or so vocab waiting in the wings until you have finally mastered it.”
And the answer is…your memory palace and the mnemonics that go with it. This is just builidng on the learning algorithm that’s already really good for interactive recall. You put in a little extra work at the baseline and you will have faster recall on the kanji which means faster recall with the vocab which means reading japanese becomes second nature. Hope that helps.
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404 likes? awesome! LOL. who’s trolling who? Finished Rosetta Stone. Finished 85% of WaniKani. (the last 10 Levels aren’t actually big on JLPN1 so I’ve had to move on past wanikani since the end of July 2021) I passed the JLPN3 a few months back so…right on schedule. Thanks
Given that you seem to be actively prescribing this method of memorization, I’d like to see some evidence supporting the general efficacy and universality of this method that’s not just anecdotal.
I’ll be honest, I don’t really think I have any need to use this method, because I don’t seem to have any issues with the mnemonics or just the memorization in general — everything I can’t get in naturally I brute-force, and most annoyances (such as verbs) are resolved in 2-4 SRS cycles. Obviously that’s not for everyone, though, so again: any evidence?
I made another post about this, which was in between the two you replied to… now, I wonder what happened to that one 
(Again, I’m not doubting that this method can work for some people. I’m asking for evidence supporting the notion that it’s a universally applicable one.)
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