I do vocab cards. It was something I briefly mentioned and shoulda talked about more though.
I have the word on the front of the card with kanji if applicable.
Then, on the back, I have the reading at the top. Under that, I have the definitions from up to three different dictionaries. The first one is the daijirin iirc, which gives the definitions in japanese. The second one is jmdict which is an english dictionary. The third one is a special yojijukugo only dictionary that has more yojijukugos and their explanations.
Under all those I have the sentence I saw it in japanese with the word highlighted in yellow. The audio also plays on the back of the card automatically.
I have it set up with yomichan to where it automatically generates the card for any word I want, so it never takes longer than a second to make a card.
I think sentence cards are neat, but they take a lot of time and arent great for a lot of situations. Overall, I think having the sentence I saw it on the back gives me plenty of the benefit of sentence cards while leaving it up to me if I read it or not.
I just wanted to say thanks for posting this video. It is really helpful to hear from people who are farther down the road in order to help plan for myself how to approach these problems. (Iāve been starting to play around with koohi.cafe and post-wanikani srs, but I donāt have a good setup yet.) In particular, the parts about the various stages of learning through reading and how it evolves over time was very interesting. A lot of what I hear these days is āGo read!ā, but not a lot of talk about what that actually looks like over time, or what the progression as you read more feels like.
Some random thoughts:
Iād also throw out video games as a good beginner source. For sure, a video game was the first ānovelā I read. Itās kinda manga-esq in the sense that itās mostly dialogue (with some added menus and instructions), and that itās impossible to hook up to any kind of auto-deck builder. But I found it accessible as a beginner, and I was super enthused that I could actually struggle my way through it.
Iām someone who learns Japanese as a hobby, not someone who has a job in Japan, a Japanese significant other, or some other external motivation. And I totally second that all of the reasons I started learning Japanese for are totally not worth the time of learning Japanese for. I grew up on Japanese video games, I like Japanese food, and I wanted to learn a language totally unlike English. None of those reasons are worth the hundreds (thousands?) of hours I have put into learning Japanese. Yea, itās fun to make progress on all of those goals, but if you donāt enjoy learning Japanese the effort to reward ratio is way, way off here.
That said, I think a lot of hobbies that I enjoy can be vaguely pointless, so itās not like Japanese as a hobby is any more pointless than the rest of them. Itās all about how you want to spend your time.
At level 60, I am definitely at the point where I donāt want to learn lists of vocabulary that someone else put together anymore. It just feels inefficient, compared to learning vocab in context from reading or other sources. That said, I started wanikani at the very, very beginning of learning Japanese, and it was invaluable at that point. Without the structure of wanikani, I surely would have gotten into analysis paralysis over how to learn and never started actually learning at all. So making that trade off of learning inefficiently at first just so that you can start the process of learning was very helpful. Did it need to be a full 60 levels? I donāt know. Maybe time will change my perspective here.
(fwiw, I feel the same way about Japanese classes, which I know can be a sore spot in this community. Yea, theyāre not the most efficient, but theyāre structured and all you have to do is show up, and thatās worth something. Plus you have to converse in Japanese, in real time, face-to-face, and you get to meet people who are just as enthusiastic as you about learning Japanese.)
I mean, I wouldnāt mind knowing those words if I magically got them in my brain, but Iām indeed not going to get out of my way to learn them. As you said, why would I spend time SRSing things (an activity I do not enjoy) when I could be doing more reading instead.
Interestingly, the quiz bot on your discourse server does not feel boring (as of now) despite being basically SRS.
I also started wanikani at the very beginning and know how you feel. I think more than structure for me personally, though, I just needed some direction. Wanikani certainly gave me direction, but had I stumbled across a community of experienced readers who learned from input, I think I would have been fine with that and my senpais advice.
Yeah its funny you mention that, because Im the same way. Part of it might be the fact that youre not penalized for wrong answers and can do it when you want, so it just feels like less of a chore. Also, its more like youre waiting for something you know to come up rather than feeling like you should know all of it. Its also been very interesting to see what other people do and dont know. Or what they can guess, I guess lol.
But yeah, in your case I cant blame you for not srsing lol.
I have a question, can I add a sentence on the front of the card with the word being highlighted? I am thinking of doing this with some kana only words that I have trouble remembering. Thank you for the video btw.
My experience with sentence cards is, I donāt learn the word as I can always guess the meaning from the sentence. And there is no guarantee Iāll guess it as well if it is part of a different sentence. If I meet the word in a ā¦ ć§ć kind of a sentences, I wouldnāt know it.
I stopped making sentence cards because of that.
I would say that using the kanji and their individual meanings are invaluable for me when learning a word. I agree with you when you say that learning words from lists are useless but at least for wanikani, I use these vocabulary words merely to drill in the readings / meanings for the kanji, not for the word meanings themselves. If a word sticks, it sticks and thatās nice but I will never beat myself up when I canāt recall it. Iām still a beginner in Japanese, and am learning words from genki 1 on my anki just to give myself some framework when I begin to use migaku + anki (or maybe even some of the tools that you mentioned.) I find that the words in which use kanji I recognize stick way easier than just kana words or words with kanji I donāt know. I came across the word ęč” on my anki yesterday and because I know the readings and the meanings of the kanji I instantly internalized it, even though Iāve never seen it before. Without wanikani I would not have been able to do that. I could even argue that although Iām not able to produce most words that I learn in wanikani, my ability to partially recognize them make them way way easier to learn because I have cross reference learning kicking in; an oh yeahhh moment is a surefire way to remember something imho.
Wanikani is a very very solid foundation I feel like, maybe down the road my opinion will change but for now Iām having fun with it and experiencing the value.
I always did reading and meaning paired together in my wk and flo flo reviews and obviously Anki has both. Between which one came first though, no preference really.
I think scattered reviews are kinda a scam. They take longer for no reason. When youāre actually reading you need to come up with the reading and meaning together. Theres no reason your reviews should be any different and it helps it go faster.
Thanks for this video/thread, itās given me the push to stop using WaniKani. Not that itās bad (WK was useful early on for me in learning how to learn kanji and practice), but in recent months Iāve been using Yomichan to learn Kanji and vocab on my own from whatever Iām reading and (like you mention in the video) itās a much more efficient method, and Iām at the point where I can learn kanji easily using my own or someone elseās mnemonics. (I really wish I had started using this method years ago when I first started playing games, sigh, but better late than neverā¦)
The āknotā metaphor you mention really solidified for me why learning from stuff Iām reading works better, and jpdb.io is such a useful tool I didnāt know about!
On another note, Iāve felt like WK has been eating into my study time a bit too much with the scattered reviews and typing time requiredā¦ Iāve wanted to shift to much more reading and grammar practice but thatās been hindered by having to do WK reviews, and WK reviews end up being inherently less useful than Anki due to it being random words.
Actually, I do have one question for @Vanilla - what are your thoughts on learning kanji meanings? Iām getting the sense that theyāre not so important in and of themselves, as they are for helping memorize readings. But more than that, Iāve been feeling that learning words is ultimately the better way to learn readings/kanji, soā¦ Iām not sure! Iāve just been learning kanji alongside the words I originally saw them in. (Learning Kanji meanings is fun, of course, but I wonder how useful it actually is - like you mention, even if I recognize a kanji while playing a game, if I donāt know the word then I can make a rough guess or look the word up easily, but more or less itās an āunknownā in terms of reading comprehension.)
I will say, some people definitely do need wanikani at the start. The structure is something very important for certain people.
What I will also say however, is that no one needs to use wanikani for more than 40 levels. And I will stand by that till the day I die. The people who need the structure and need that big support system to get their feet on the ground WILL have their feet on the ground by level 40. Its just question of whether or not they are willing to take the leap at that point, and if they arenāt, then its for no other reason than they dont want to.
Stopping part way is a very wise choice for a lot of people in my opinion. With that being said, going full speed thatll make a few months out of your year more efficient which isnt a huge deal in the long run anyways. Itll save a bit of time and money, but itll get you making a very important transition: having native matieral be your primary source of learning.
Meanings? I think its pretty useless on its own for the long run.
Lets take a basic example: If you learn the word ę„½ćć without learning the kanji, you can make your little mnemonic with the radical and whatever. But what youre left with is a word that means fun and a kanji thats used for it. So long as you have an IQ of 1, you will naturally associate that kanji with the meaning fun. Then when you learn ę„½å you might be like oh its that fun kanji again. And really, right there youve basically achieved the same level of hint you might have from learning it fun as a separate definition. Its totally pointless.
To take more difficult example, lets say that you learn č¾ćć as to deafen. Can you guess what č¾č means? Surely you can. Magic that I never actually actually told you what the kanji means and you still knew, right.
At the very beginning of your studies it might be helpful, but I see no reason why someone who is past level 30 especially to need that. Same for readings, you just naturally are able to guess which one is onyomi and which one is kunyomi and learn as you come across them. Ive srsed words with about 3000 unique kanji in them after finishing wanikani and I explicitly learned the reading or meaning for 0 of them. 0 noticeable drop in retention.
Good question though, thats something I shoulda included in the video if I was smaht.
A question just occurred to me. Iām just curious, I believe you briefly mentioned you havenāt directly studied names but may do so eventually?
As a relatively new reader, names have been such a pain for me to handle. I can mostly drill in the significant ones and remember them by context when they re-appear, but that requires me to make a big effort when the work first shows readings (if it does at all), and/or look up the name online and reference that when I come across it in the writing, for a while. Getting a more native-like level of recognition for common name readings seems like it itself will be a large task. I guess all I want to ask is, with the amount of reading youāve done to this point, how much comfort would you say youāve developed in handling names you come across?
Iād say Iāve significantly improved, but still have a long way to go till any sort of native level. In books, you may only get a handful of names and itās not like I srs them. And itās not like English where Yuki is always written the same way, so you might see the same name written 4 different ways. One thing other advanced readers do that I plan on doing in the near future is srsing about 2-3 thousand of the most common names. Thereās a deck for it, and Iād say that will help quite a bit. I work at a school though, so it has practical uses too.
Overall though, even if my guess is wrong itās uncommon that i see how a name is read and am surprised. Usually itās more like āah yeah that makes senseā