My experience so far

I actually have KaniWani set just to delay the lessons until they’ve reached guru, but I’ve seen others on this forum only have it set to give you new items after they’ve been burned, and I think there’s solid logic behind that method, and it’s probably the “best” way to do it. Mostly I’m just impatient, haha, and also I’m used to doing it how I’ve been doing it and don’t want to make any large changes now that I’ve passed the halfway point :sweat_smile:.

KW definitely helps me a lot, though, and I think the time investment has been worth it. However, you really need to aggressively budget your time and lessons if you want to do both KW and WaniKani, I think. Any large increases of workload in WK (like binging 90 lessons) results in an equally large increase of workload in KW (or KameSame). So doing a smaller, consistent number of daily lessons is absolutely the way to go if you don’t want things to balloon out of control in the higher levels.

If you ever do feel like the reviews are getting out of hand, it’s a good idea to either decrease your daily lessons, or temporarily stop doing lessons and just do your reviews until things get back under control. It’s better to slow your pace than burn out entirely, and you’ll want to make sure that your daily workload is at a level where you can complete it even on a bad day when studying is the last thing you feel like doing, because you will have days like that. If you’re feeling some strain already, scaling back a little is probably a good idea.

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I have KameSame set to Guru (I’m not even sure if you can change that, like you can in KaniWani). For me that’s the best moment to learn them in reverse - I got the Kanji or word reviewed in Aprentice level 4 times in WaniKani and then it appears in KameSame.

You’d think I would know the kanji and vocab after I got it 4 times right in WaniKani, but then KameSame hits me in the face when I have to do it in reverse :slight_smile: Sometimes it’s a bit frustrating when I get so many stuff wrong, but it forces me to memorize the vocab even better, often letting make better mnemonics in my own language so I can remember it better.

So far the Master and upper stages in KaniWani are a breeze now because KameSame forced me to memorize eventhing much better.

The disadvantage as you rightfully say: it costs almost double the time to do them both.

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210, I am going to review all of them in oneshot, but as always after a couple hours there will be more 200 to review so yeah, I will try to do a little bit less like 50 reviews every hour so I don’t, yknow, overheat from doing so many reviews, plus I need to learn 49 news lesson so yeah, pretty tough tbh, but not even close to draining my motivation, since I started doing this it was craved in stone that I would finish it all, not only wanikani but Japanese in it’s entirety. Thanks for the advice tho.

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I highly recommend reconsidering your approach. You’re only level 6; things are just going to get way, way worse from here. If you’re having hundreds of reviews a day at this level, you’re going to be in for an unimaginable world of hurt once you’re six months in, and your full workload has kicked in. I know you feel very motivated now, but your enthusiasm is unlikely to last an entire year, which is how long it takes to reach level 60, assuming you go as fast as possible. Even if you want to go maximum speed, there are other ways to do it that cause far less strain.

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Thank you for this post, it’s encouraging to see other pleasants making good progress and having fun !!! Thank you for the Kamesame recommendation also, that looks like a really good resource ( ´ ▽ ` ) Good luck and happy learning going forward !!!

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Not enthusiasm no, but motivation yes, and thanks for your advice, I think I will do 50 per hour but there’s no way I would be able to do 200 every few hours like is happening rn, also I plan to only start doing grammar when I hit level 30 since it’s what jprspereira recommended (My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 ))

This was the actual context. It seems to be more of a recommendation to not wind up reaching 60 and having basically not studied grammar at all. Whether it be level 5 or 55, I think the recommendation is to not procrastinate. :wink:

If you’re at all interested in starting sooner once you cool off your Review chaos, feel free!

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Nah, at your level, I’d definitely recommend starting with grammar. What I meant by that is that people can slowly start not being so obsessed with WK because kanji is no longer the scary challenge that it was at the beginning, and they can start opening up to more challenges (like reading).

Sorry if it was misleading.

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I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about, but if you’re talking about reviews, the way to slow those down is to stop doing so many lessons. jprspereira’s guide talks about how to spread out your lessons over the course of a level instead of doing them in huge binges. You should always try to clear all of your standing reviews each day (though you don’t have to do them the exact moment WK wants you to), and if you ever find yourself struggling to do that, it’s a good idea to stop doing lessons for a bit and only do reviews until you’re able to push those items along to a further SRS stage.

Just make sure to keep in mind that decisions you make earlier on in your studies will affect you weeks from now, a month from now, six months from now. All of your reviews are going to add up, and if you have hundreds coming in from different stages on the same day, future you might struggle to get through them.

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Oh, I realized that but I kind of thought it on my own, see at level 30 you already know biggest part of the common used kanjis so you can read basically almost everything from shounen, simple news and just other stuff (like youtube comments for example) knowing this I thought it would make more sense to start learning grammar at that point since you already know big part of the common kanji 'thus making it way easier to learn grammar, because if you try at my current level you would probably need a website which uses furigana or manually search every single kanji, making the learning process 10 times more tedious.

Unfortunately, you’ll still run into plenty of unknown kanji at level 30, so you’ll have to look up loads of kanji regardless. You’ll also know zero kana-only words, which make up a surprisingly large portion of Japanese text. Grammar is also complicated and difficult to learn because Japanese sentence structure is so different from English, and there will be many times where you know all of the words in a sentence, but cannot for the life of you figure out how to piece them together.

Basically, WK will help you out a lot, but learning a bunch of kanji and words in isolation does not equal learning Japanese. Knowing a lot of kanji will give you a leg up on learning new vocab, but personally I’ve found that it does very little to help you learn grammar :sweat_smile:. For almost all resources that teach grammar, knowing kanji is not necessary. And in fact, learning grammar makes reading possible, which makes it easier to learn vocab/kanji.

Also, as far as reading material goes, if you read digital text with the help of Yomichan, kanji look-ups aren’t really an issue (it’s trickier with manga, print books, and video games where you can’t directly use Yomichan on the text). But you will have to be doing loads of look-ups regardless of your grammar/kanji/vocab knowledge, and regardless of the medium. Even the simplest children’s manga will be difficult for you, at least at the beginning.

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Oh… so do you like have a recommendation for where you can learning grammar, I’ve searched on google and I found websites like bunpo but I am not sure if it’s really good.

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You can try Bunpro for free for a month (if you want to do their lessons). I also started doing it alongside of Wanikani.

I use Bunpro and Genki (book), but you might want to check out Cure Dolly on Youtube. The voice is a bit weird, the whole video is a bit… creepy because of the doll and voice to be honest, but I find her explanation of grammar fantastic.

I have not tried Bunpo (or Bunpro), but from what I’ve heard from other people, websites like that can be good as practice/reinforcement, but aren’t as good for teaching the grammar concepts initially (unless paired with a textbook or another source of grammar). Of course, this depends a lot on the individual. You might have better or worse luck with them.

Personally, I’ve chosen to go the textbook route myself. I’m using Minna no Nihongo currently, and I really like it. Textbooks aren’t for everyone, either, but if you are interested in trying one, Tofugu has a list of beginner textbook recommendations.

There is also this thread on the forum with loads of resources, including for grammar, if you want even more options. However, it’s very easy to become paralyzed by the sheer number of choices available, so try not to worry too much about choosing the “best” option! As long as you find something that you’re able to stick with until you at least get through the beginning grammar, you’ll have a solid foundation to work from.

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I checked out Minna no Nihongo, but since that book is completely in Japanese, isn’t that making understanding grammar even more harder?

Minna no Nihongo has a translation/grammar explanation companion book that is available in a dozen or so languages (including English), which provides definitions for the vocab and in-depth explanations for all of the grammar points introduced, and some translations for the lessons. Generally, you use the two books in tandem, though it might be possible to do without the translation book if you work through the textbook with a teacher.

Generally what I do is pre-learn the vocab in Anki before starting each chapter, then right before I read the lesson, I read through the grammar information for that chapter. Then I try to work entirely with the main textbook without referencing the translation text at all. Sometimes I’ll double-check the translations just to make sure I’m on the right track, but I usually am able to understand the text just fine and don’t really need to look at any of the translations (none of the exercises have translations, anyway, so for the majority of the text, I’m on my own).

It basically gives you loads of reading practice with comprehensible sentences, slowly building on the grammar/vocab you already know. It’s more in-depth than Genki and other textbooks, with both the benefits and downsides of that (you’ll learn more, but it’ll take you longer to get through it).

I really like it, personally, but it’s not the textbook for everyone.

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That sounds great actually. Just ordered it, thank you :slight_smile:

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Sounds like you’re describing confusing the transitive and intransitive verb pairs. Remembering which was which was really difficult for me, but what helped was two things. A lot of the verbs follow a pattern as to which is the transitive and which is the intransitive, like in this table:

http://nihongo.monash.edu/ti_list.html

So I made a table of my own, slowly adding each verb pair as I learned them. The other thing I did was try to use each word in a sentence. When I did that it was a lot easier to remember, because I could think back to the meaning of the whole sentence instead of trying to remember if the word was the transitive one or not. There’s also a plugin/script you can use that adds example sentences from anime to each lesson item. That might help too.

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Thanks! Somehow I wasn’t really aware that that was my problem, but that’s exactly it. Making a table is a great idea, I will do that from now on. I should also spend more time on reading and making sentences instead of just blindy learning all the vocab.

About my progression - I’m doing both WK and KameSame but after some days of thinking about it… decided to drop KameSame. My main goal is to be able to read Japanese and KameSame is taking me more time than WK, since doing it in reverse is way harder.

Decided to spend the time I spend on KameSame on daily reading and grammar instead… think that will be more usefull to me. I’m still searching a bit which study method will work the best for me :slight_smile: