MIA or WaniKani

Cool, thanks! It’s helpful to have people who have done it say it works.

I think the idea of MIA is so you learn the language how you would learn your native language. It has you do things they think are most efficient from the start so you can eventually master the language, which is what I’m going for. Like I said I’m going to try it out (because I have a ton of time to invest) and I’ll report back whenever and say how things went. I love WK, but this way of learning seems to fit more of my personality and how I learn.

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Best of luck! :grin:

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So coming to this late, but since I have a slightly unique perspective, I’ll share.

I did RTK years ago (like ~10). I liked it at the time, got ~1500 kanji to mature in Anki. That, together with kana and grammar from Tae Kim got me to a state where I could “read” (understand, or at least decode) quite a bit of Japanese text. But I certainly couldn’t speak it, or understand spoken Japanese.

Readings/comprehension never came, though. Some basics were easy, but I never developed that “intuition” for it, despite frequent input.

WK, in the 3-4 months I’ve been here, has built me more of that intuition than several years of trying post-RTK. Why? Because by learning the readings in the context of vocabulary words here, I’ve found a lot of other vocabulary, either not in WK or at a higher level than I’ve achieved so far, that I already know how to read and can often infer meaning of due to knowing the kanji meaning and reading together from WK.

Even better, I’ve found a lot of these encountered words, I read in Japanese first. And more and more often, that’s all I have to do. I have the concept of what it means without translating to English terms. This is very new, very rare, but it’s pretty profound to me. I am understanding words directly in Japanese.

RTK was great, don’t get me wrong. I can progress in WK much faster because of my RTK pre-knowledge. I basically ignore the WK mnemonics for meaning, since most of the kanji I know already or pick up/relearn quickly. But it will never, can never, get you to the point where you will be understanding Japanese in Japanese.

If I was doing it over, I would have done WK without the separate step. It would have taken longer than WK after RTK, for sure, but it probably wouldn’t take as long as RTK followed by WK as I’m doing. And I wouldn’t have delayed getting to this point where Japanese starts to make sense as long as I have.

TL;DR Despite doing RTK, I didn’t develop reading intuition until I learned a lot of readings. I learned those by doing WK. And that jump started my learning to an immense degree.

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Immersion is certainly valuable, half of my Japanese studies have simply been reading or listening to Japanese even if I couldn’t fully understand it and I’d say it’s greatly helped my grammar understanding.

However there’s a limit to what you can learn with immersion. Even Japanese natives have to rope learn Kanji at school, there’s no way I could learn kanji solely through immersion so I think Wanikani is a very valuable tool to help you learn the shear amount of kanji there are.

You can always learn the Kanji with Wanikani and then immerse yourself in reading to solidify your understanding later

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Sort of… these two goals are kind of at odds, though, and MIA definitely attempts to prioritize efficiency over native-like learning. (I think one of Matt’s videos points out that it takes Japanese children six whole years to get to the point where they start learning kanji, and who has that kind of time?, and adult learners should be able to do better, or something.) As others have pointed out, Japanese children don’t memorize 2000 kanji before they learn how to speak a word of Japanese, and they certainly don’t spend hours drilling isolated sentences in Anki.

I do think that most of what’s good about MIA and AJATT comes from the parts that do try to emulate native-like learning, though. Understanding words and ideas monolingually is invaluable, in my opinion, and definitely worth prioritizing as early as you can. Immersion in native material instead of fakey textbook Japanese is also critical as early as possible.

But, I’d argue that if you want to really learn like a native, you should be acquiring ideas in something like the way actual children do. Don’t try to decode words from whatever complicated definitions you get from the old CD-ROM dictionaries for grownups the AJATT people happened to find lying around; learn them from dictionaries meant for children and written for children’s level of understanding. Or, even better, learn them from books literally written for babies, who learn most of their basic vocabulary before they can even lift a dictionary.

I’d also hypothesize that spending hours reading and re-reading every complete level-appropriate book you can get your hands on is probably better than reading the same sentences in Anki over and over for hours. That’s certainly how I learned most of my vocabulary in my native language, at least.

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Love what you’ve written. This also reminds me that I’d still like to work my way through reading all of the ehonnavi corpus :scream:. New Years goal ftw!!

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MIA is what I call myself when I haven’t done WK reviews in weeks: Missing In Action

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If you want to learn like a native you should hire a full-time tutor who tells you to say “いただきます” all day.

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There should totally be an Anki plugin that does this.

Exactly. Why would we want to learn like natives? We don’t have the limitation of being children and not understanding contexts properly. We can do much better.

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I don’t know what you on about mate but I remember me parents giving me my first anki deck (which had words sorted according to several frequency lists) when I was like 2… They then spent hours teaching me the proper verb tense and sentence structure…
:joy::joy:

lol just kidding your comment did reminds me of this vid:

I do remember as is tradition in my country they did hold this small ceremony where I officially wrote my first letters and words… Strange it must have been over 30 years ago but that came to me just now… :smiley:

edit: I wonder what Japanese word I wrote first using kanji… probably inu because inu lmao

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In my opinion MIA takes the least amount of effort. You just watch and read Japanese all the time. The studying is minimal.
I honestly don’t get how some people here manage to put in that much work into Wanikani. That seems really painful. Just like in those reading groups where some people analyze every sentence and every little word. I’d rather just watch videos and TV shows and read novels that I like.

Aren’t you supposed to be sentence mining and Anki-ing? Or is that not part of whatever this MIA thing is.

Lots of people watch anime all day, and I don’t know that they really get any language benefit from just that.

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I spent ~3 years just watching unsubtitled anime and doing a little bit of RTK. and listening to music.

I went from not understanding anything to kind of getting the plot to passing N3 with minimal preparation.

The important thing IMO is the unsubtitled part. And being able to still enjoy that experience even when you have no idea what they’re saying.

I recently took a trial lesson with a local japanese teacher, and she said that you could actually hear that i didn’t learn to speak by studying vocab and grammar in isolation, because i was clearly speaking in phrases rather than building things from blocks. Take that however you want.

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Because they watch with English subtitles. :wink:

Yeah you do sentence mining. But making and reviewing Anki cards only takes me around 20 5 minutes each day.

My perspective: I can have a conversation because of AJATT/immersion. I’m here because it didn’t really work for me from a reading perspective.

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Didn’t you immerse with books too? :smiley:

incomprehensible language can’t possibly do anything for your language skills. that’s impossible, and anyone claiming otherwise is a blatant liar.

comprehensive input however, when structured well, is the easiest way to acquire language, which is why i’d recommend starting with a good grammar dict and graded readers, later manga and light/visual novels.

just “immersion” does zero for you, as my colleagues can attest, who’ve been in japan for upwards of 20 years without learning more than a few phrases.

lastly, i’d be extremely careful exploring whatever faster, easier or better way there is claimed to exist. in my experience, discipline is the number 1 factor, not magic, or sentence mining, or immersion.

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That’s rather harsh.
Here are my personal facts:

  • I started working on Japanese sometime ~2015
  • The only textbook i had was RTK
  • I watched way more anime (unsubtitled) than might be healthy
  • I on-and-off used Anki for kanji practice and cloze deletion
  • The first time I had a teacher or another textbook was in 2018, when I decided to give JLPT a try, starting from N3
  • I went through some JLPT preparation books with said teacher, most of the grammar i was already aware of even if I hadn’t explicitly studied it
  • I passed N3 in Summer 2018 with ok language knowledge and reading and near-perfect listening
  • I studied a little more for N2
  • I did N2 in winter and passed with 60/60 listening
  • I decided to work on my kanji some more because i had barely done anything there in ages and i didn’t feel like i deserved that N2 based on my kanji knowledge.
  • I found out about WK
  • I am now here, at level 16.

I would argue that there is a clear difference between immersion and immersion with the clear intent to learn. You pay attention somewhat differently.

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