Yes, somehow, with the power of procrastination and self-loathing, I managed to stall participating in this forum for almost exactly 3 years. So here it is, a single step.
Self-introduction and WK Journy
Hey WK Community, I’m a 22-year-old electrical engineering student from Switzerland. All my school career, I struggled with languages. Be it my native language German, French which we started learning from 3rd grade on, even Englisch which I’m now fairly fluent in, I always had just barely passing grades. At around 19 I got hit like a truck by the classical teeny identity crisis. I was about to finish my last semester of the Technical High School I was attending, about to break free from the shackles of public education after 15 years, and had just quit football/soccer, my hobby of also 15 years.
In said High School I had some non-self-identifying weeb friends through which I came into contact with Japanese pop culture. I read comics like Lucky Luke, Die Schlümpfe, Dagobert Duck and many more all my childhood. So naturally my beginnings were reading manga. Specifically Berserk and Flowers of Evil as I remember. Followed by listening to a ton of Japanese music by artists like Lamp, Sundae May Club and MIREI. This concludes the incubation period of my Japanese journey. Then as soon as summer break hit, I signed up to WaniKani without any prior knowledge other than hiragana, which I started to learn during class in the last semester of high school.
At first, progress was slow and unsteady, reflecting my life as a temporary worker at that time. That was followed by 18 weeks of mandatory military service. Which made doing WK reviews not totally impossible at the beginning, but as time went on, I didn’t have the fortitude to keep up. After the military, it was back to temporary work for me, again struggling with the same issues of instability and a serious case of working-shit-jobs-slump. But when University came around, I was off to the races. Slowing down only during the turbulent exam periods. I started to diversify my Japanese learning portfolio. I started using Bunpro, from which I just now finished the N2 deck, and even joined an online JLPT course for N5 through N3 to practice reading and listening comprehension as well as writing sentences with the newly acquired grammar structures.
But around WK level 35 things turned sour for me. I increasingly got upset with the inexact “Radical Combination” descriptions and vague mnemonics. I started to look for alternatives in these regards and found Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji. Because its drawback of not being beginner-friendly didn’t apply to me anymore, I could now fully profit from its approach of teaching and encouraging you to write your own mnemonics. Which, after around 600 Kanji, you have to do. I really enjoyed this part. This was the last railroad switch I needed to be on track for my journey to Level 60. Being able to come up with mnemonics in seconds sped up my lessons and early acquisition so much. Furthermore, knowing stroke order gives a much deeper understanding of the radicals and how they come together. Making deciphering them require way less redundancy, unlocking reading speed and enabling me to read other fonts. With this in the bag, I steadily and unspectacularly cruised through the higher levels straight through Level 60.
The unsung hero of resources
There is an ocean of great and handy Japanese learning resources out there. But for me there is one specifically that I think is nowhere near popular enough: kakimashou.com. And that not even for its advertised features of writing kana and kanji’s. For me the highlight is its “Character Breakdown’s”. Such detail and accuracy, putting popular online dictionaries like Jisho to shame. It features, besides its flawlessly working writing tool, a very comprehensive “Common Words” list, which is sorted by reading. Which is insanely handy when kanjis have many on- and/or kun-readings, because it gives an Englisch translation per reading, not just per kanji.
So yeah, if you’re sick of the pesty omg-生-has-one-bajillion-readings-japanes-is-so-random-and-complicated clickbait content, here is something actually helpful: Kakimashou - Common Words Containing 生
Settling My Score with WK
I love WaniKani. It’s super beginner-friendly. Its SRS works unobtrusively smooth. It gives the structure enabling the consistency every kanji learner needs. For me, its issues lie with its actually most advertised part: the radicals and mnemonics. I could whine for hours about how some of the radicals are learned after the equivalent kanji were already mastered, or how some of the kanjis used as basis for others don’t have an equivalent radical at all, or I could bitch over the nightmare-inducing fact that WK treats 夂 and 攵 as the same radical (Ahh! aAhaH!!! The agony). But I know this is the undiagnosed ASD/OCD cocktail in me talking, so I’m going to try and sway focus on something less detail-oriented:
Why does WaniKani not encourage the creation of your own mnemonics !?!?
I know there are these two boxes where u can take notes in, but it’s not like they are named, “Pls write your mnemonic here.” Is that a talking point here on the forum? Because in my experience, learning how to make your own radicals takes you from:
→ “oh no, so many strokes”
→ to “nice, so much context”
→ to “漢字と我は一体なり“ real quick.
(Maybe got a bit ahead of myself on step three but u get the gist.)
Ps:
So yeah, thanks for your attention dear reader. That was it, the first step. If you have any questions whatsoever — about me, about Switzerland, its languages, its education, about any other part of the text, and of course if u have an opinion of any kind about how WaniKani is/is not encouraging the creation of your own mnemonics — please ask/post about it. Initiating any form of social interactions is a big obstacle for me, so it really would help me take some more steps.
!
). Please rest assured you don’t have to reply to everyone here. It might be different what people think and of course depends on the comment, but at least in my opinion I think it’s okay in most cases to just like someone’s post as a token of appreciation without necessarily having to reply back. Tho it might be a bit different when you’re requesting questions, hehe :P
Also wanted to say you’re good at writing 
