Hi everyone Just finished making a mind map of some Wanikani vocabulary and wanted to share the results with you. Took me close to 20 hours of hard work, but it was definitely worth it – I was curious to see what parts of speech are taught the most, what topics are explored early on, etc.
The idea behind the map was to help me make sentences with all this target vocabulary – pick a noun, an adjective, a verb, a counter for good measure… Just going around the map making up silly nonsense phrases like 毎日、本社で同じ小さな豚を見ます。あの豚を写しませんか？I know my sentences most likely won’t sound natural at all, but activating the vocabulary early on still feels nice and rewarding
Hope this map turns out to be of use for someone. Here’s a PDF version where every word is a clickable link that takes you to a related WaniKani page with some example sentences and common patterns to copy: ʘᆽʘ
Woah, that’s a lot of work! What a great resource! I’m curious, how does your understanding/memory of the vocab feel having made the mind map vs before? I suspect there’s a lot of value in making something like it even if you don’t refer to it often later.
Thank you, you’re very kind!
I started making the map as I was in the middle of completing Lv5, and I was already feeling how all that vocabulary had begun piling up in my brain and it was really unlikely it was gonna stick unless I activated it somehow – especially all those time-related phrases like 来年、～年来、近日、毎月、去年、and so on… And your suspicion is actually right on the money – I feel a lot more confident now, having spent two dozen hours typing the words and dragging them around, trying to figure out where to put what as I was slowly running out of space…
So yeah, even if I don’t use the map in the future, I think it helped me a lot and I’d definitely do something like this again once I feel the need for some structure and order!
That’s awesome! I think doing stuff like this really illustrates how you can’t shortcut learning, some of the most valuable activities are the most time consuming. I always have to remind myself that it’s better to spend the time once than to try and rush only to have to do it all over again anyway
Thank you for sharing and providing me with a reminder and some motivation!
The first thing I tried was copying all WaniKani level 1-5 vocabulary and feeding it to ChatGPT, asking it to generate example sentences, exercises, or to even just categorise this list by parts of speech and relevant topics. It spectacularly failed at all of these fairly straightforward tasks; DeepSeek showed more promise initially, but they were both ultimately useless for learning Japanese.
This was a huge disappointment for me, as I had somehow initially thought that AI would be an awesome tool for facilitating language learning. What both tools ended up doing was wasting a whole lot of my time that I could have spent learning kanji
So, having seen that there would be no help from any existing AI language model, I decided to make this mind map by myself using a service called coggle.it! It’s the best mind map site I could find – not without its shortcomings, but pretty affordable and versatile
Just finished making a mind map of some Wanikani vocabulary and wanted to share the results with you. Took me close to 20 hours of hard work, but it was definitely worth it – I was curious to see what parts of speech are taught the most, what topics are explored early on, etc.
