My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 )

[mariodesu]

My app Tsurukame shows something similar bht I can’t manage to make it display greater periods of time.

Honestly I’d prefer pc with browser scripts a hundred times but I don’t have a decent computer and I’m moving all the time so…
I just found out there is an interesting option of showing reading and meaning of elements back to back in my preferred order when doing reviews. Would recommend?

Also another very useful option that could save me tons of times but I keep turned off is “anki mode” which allows me to simply touch a button to go to the next item, very useful and dangerous as well because I could think I remember something good and proceed to pevel it up while in truth I remembered it wrong

[Ptscan]

@Rrwrex

You run into many visually similar characters, forcing you to pay more attention to radicals, tiny differences in stroke lengths, and other little differences. (I’m looking at you 鳥 vs. 烏 and 末 vs. 夫.)

But that’s what I meant, sorry if it wasn’t as detailed as your explanation. My experience (I was once level 60 way back in 2016) was that I had to take more time and pay attention to the various nuances and details of radicals that built the “more advanced kanjis” and relying only on the SRS wasn’t helping as much. But again, that was my experience. Now I’ve been doing some Self_study on the side to reinforce what I just learned in a way to repeat more times the newly learned item. It’s been working.

[Rrwrex]

@Ptscan

that’s what I meant, sorry

No apology necessary, I misunderstood.

@Ptscan

relying only on the SRS wasn’t helping as much

Oh, yeah. I get that.

It’s weird, but I actually found the increased difficulty from similar characters helped my reading skills tremendously. I better understood the essence of the characters: “Oh, of course! The one with さんずいへん means something to do with water, にんべん means something to do with people/personality/status” (or whatever).

I was also shocked at how long it took until I could read much “in the wild”. It really wasn’t until late in my third year here (level 50+) that I felt I could really read much at all without help. But it seems like it’s somewhat exponential: can’t read much at all, then able to read a bit here and there, then whoosh – skipping over less and less on the first pass. Still a long, LONG way to go, of course, but my reading is worlds away from where it was just a year ago.

[Kazzeon]

@mariodesu

140 reviews

@mariodesu

quickly in one and a half hour

90 minutes for 140 reviews.

Less than 2 reviews per minute.

I’d suggest going faster, by getting things wrong if you don’t know them in a few seconds instead of trying to remember no matter how long it takes, as that’s not usually how one interacts with words in the wild. This will make it so you get a lot more things wrong, and as such see them a lot more often, but this is how the SRS works better, imo.

I think I went for 5 seconds at most for an item.
Even at 10, you’d double your speed.

“But I’m not learning if I get it wrong all the time.”

The frustration of skipping an item on purpose because you don’t remember it quickly can work wonders for motivation.

If you don’t mind taking long on your reviews, then ignore this.

[mariodesu]

I think it’s an excellent approach and saving some time is priceless… the fact is I’ve been testing an approach where I spend more time on every single element because this way the mnemonics that I didn’t remember quickly get in someway strengthened. I’m still applying your approach later when the majority of elements is at least guru 2+, because this will make me sure that I won’t go far if I don’t know it well enough… til now this approach showed to produce results by allowing me to maintain a very high accuracy but things could quickly become unmanageable as the quantities pile up. If it happens I will definitely start to use your method!

(And tomorrow morning I’ll be on the new 100 lessons of lv 10 )

[simias]

I have the same mindset as you have (although not the same biceps judging by your profile picture) and nearing level 20 right now I can confirm that it does open up a lot of content. I still encounter unknown kanji all the time but it certainly makes it easier to read Japanese.

In order to go faster I cheat a bit: I use Flaming Durtles on my phone and I’ve set the meanings to “anki mode”, meaning that I don’t have to type them. Then I don’t hesitate to mark an entry as correct even if I’m a bit off (like answering product instead of merchandise or something like that). This keeps my % accurate high and lets me go faster. I still type the readings though, because there’s no fudging that IMO.

The thing that scares me a bit at the moment is when I reach level 26 and I start burning items. That will increase the review load and probably lower my accuracy score and it may force me to slow down.

[mariodesu]

@simias

although not the same biceps judging by your profile picture

Thank you mate, but biceps are my weakest group

I totally agree with the strategy you described, actually since when I wrote that message I changed and am doing exactly like you except that I don’t feel like I have to write readings and jump them as well with anki mode, but maybe it’s because japanese is way easier to read and speak for italians rather than english people (assuming you are one)

[simias]

I’m French actually, but I’m not exactly sure if that’s better or worse for Japanese phonology. Probably better than English I suspect, if only for the vowel sounds.

I don’t find Japanese pronunciation very hard at any rate (pitch accent notwithstanding) but it’s mostly about not missing rendaku and making sure I pick the right reading when there are multiples. I definitely considered switching the reading to anki mode but I fear that I may become too sloppy if I do that.

Maybe I’ll do it eventually if the review load becomes too intense and I really don’t want to slow down.

[mariodesu]

@simias

I’m French actually, but I’m not exactly sure if that’s better or worse for Japanese phonology. Probably better than English I suspect, if only for the vowel sounds.

Yeah, I suppose better but not by a lot

@simias

I definitely considered switching the reading to anki mode but I fear that I may become too sloppy if I do that.

Maybe I’ll do it eventually if the review load becomes too intense and I really don’t want to slow down.

Sounds reasonable to me, even tho i think it shouldn’t become a problem since you’re supposed to put a lot more practice at looking up stuff and reading and else, so this may become neglectable.
At least - to me it is since WK is the tip of the iceberg

[kyouxren]

I was kanji starved too
I tried to level up once a week. You can see the graph in My Way of Japanese continues after a Corona break
After a while I did less and less vocabs. As you can see in the thread I’m still working on them.

[Viktor97]

“Damn, such a simple step forward took me so much further in the journey. I can’t wait for what’s coming next.”

After 1 month has passed since I have officially started my WK journey, reading this passage again now makes me say “Hey, that’s totally true!! I reckon myself in it!”
Thank you so much for this guide, I had stopped WK at the end of level 3 and after reading all of these feedbacks and so on, it made me really commit and continue my journey on WK. I have now done 3 full levels in this month, now a couple of days on the 4th (level 7); making progress with a time schedule and a pace I am comfortable with, all thanks to those helpful tips! Gotta say, a big resource are also the scripts in my opinion, I didn’t know you could have such things in this platform to begin with!!
All in all, thank you for sharing your journey, I really though it was very well done and extremely useful and inspiring! !
A great day to you all!! o/

[smaulcat]

hi ! just wanna say i started wanikani 2 days ago and got hooked, and of course the lack of content at the start made me dig deeper, and found this guide and the whole community thing, and this guide really helped me, mainly with the userscripts part with the recommendations.

im going to japan in june for 2 weeks to attend a language school, alongside being in university doing a ba in japanese, so im hoping to use wanikani to get a sort of deeper understanding of the kanji, as my course is very fast paced, it introduces around 10-15 new kanji per week that we just have to learn the meanings, stroke order, readings etc. for in our own time, mega difficult.

anyway, just thanking you for creating this guide, and to say that even 6 years after posting it, newcomers are still reading it and gaining valuable knowledge from it, like me

[AlexLancaster]

It’s been one month and a few days since I started my WaniKani journey so you know what that means…

#MessageMe response!

Failure is okay.

I’m not sure if I would exactly call it failure since I still learned something, but it definitely feels like it sometimes. Maybe it was just an oversight.

Before landing where I am today, the path was dark, confusing, frustrating. Seemingly everything I could ever ask or know was right at my fingertips. After getting a good grasp of Hiragana and Katakana on Duolingo, I knew that it alone was simply not enough for my goals, and I needed outside supplementary sources.

So after a good bit of research, I decided to use Ankidroid to learn Japanese.

Failure #1
I first started out with a deck that had seemingly good reviews, photos with the vocabulary, audio, and example sentences. Surely I could just study this? No. I started to notice my brain was too smart at recognizing patterns and taking the easy way out. It would associate the image with the word, not the kanji itself which made recognition without the image incredibly difficult. And the ordering and the words were just weird. There goes 2+ something months.

Failure #2
Okay, no more pictures, got it. So I searched some more decks and came across one called “Core 2k/6k Optimized Japanese Vocabulary.” Cool. So I start doing that, but… it just doesn’t seem to stick. And I am just learning the vocabulary and they are all different and ahhhh (and now I understand there are different reading which I didn’t really understand at the time). I mean it definitely was an upgrade from the last but it still just wasn’t what I needed. It might work for some but I needed something else. There goes even more months.

Failure #3
Okay, okay, let’s see what most people are recommending…
WaniKani keeps showing up, and it has mnemonics, so that’s nice! So let’s try it! I starting using “WaniKani Ultimate”. It was one deck split up into 3 decks, one for radicals, kanji, and vocabulary. And radicals I STUDIED. And then some kanji, and vocab too. But I started to notice mishmashes and things that didn’t overlap and such. I studied many of the radicals but the newer ones never showed up… and some of these vocab words are still using kanji I learned so long ago. I had proportions all wrong. I had no sense of structure. Okay… that kinda sucks, but still I would say better than the previous and I am still learning kanjis and learning from my past mistakes.

Failure #4
Starting to see the pattern here? Getting annoyed? I am too. Finally, I found a new deck that I was more comfortable with: “Wanikani Ultimate 2: Electric Boogaloo.” And honestly it was pretty good and I felt like I was actually learning and understanding kanji better. And I actually used it for quite a few months (I think I got to the equivalence of around level 10 here?) … but even with a good deck, I struggled due to I believe a few reasons.

First, I didn’t really have a good structure or understanding of the “system”. What I mean by that is usually once a day or so, I would learn some new things and that was it. I didn’t really question how the system worked. I just did it. I didn’t know of any timings and such.

Secondly, I am not sure if the AnkiDroid SRS timings are different or how all that works but I would be pretty harsh on myself and have items show up again, creating a bigger and bigger pile.

So I think not knowing how the system worked and the combination of the AnkiDroid grading system itself hit me like a truck. There weren’t any levels, it was hard to keep track of my progress, so on and so forth. And I stopped doing it, for a good while. (Maybe a year or more?)

What was it all for?

Here I am, once again, back not to let my failures bring me down, but to learn from them and improve upon them. The path isn’t always easy, and so that is why I am very appreciative of guides made by people such as jprspereira.

To answer the question as to what help me the most (in this long and very roundabout post), it is understanding what I am getting myself into. Being able to read everything I will need to prepare for. Especially knowing the SRS times for items (it all makes sense now and I can strategically formulate when I should study).

I would have never thought to do reviews 3 times a day compared to me doing my one a day (which started to overwhelm me)! And to stick to a study structure based off of the SRS timings. Saying “oh yeah doing it 3 times a day works well, once at 8am, then 12pm, and 8pm” might work in the short term, but I feel like I might give that up if I don’t know why I am doing something. So thank you for explaining how the whole system works, it has helped a ton.

Also understanding the importance of EN->JP and JP->EN has helped too, so I am actively looking out for that as well. (And I can see an improvement in my Japanese skills just by doing both)!

Oh yeah, and Flaming Durtles (a phone app) ROCKS!

The reason I am writing allll of this out is to try and help others that might be on the same path I was starting out. It is okay to fail, I just want to make people possibly loose less months off of their life by understanding what went wrong for me . So if you are considering WaniKani, I recommend it :)). Their review system, in my opinion, is super intuitive and easy to use. It makes the whole learning way easier and better. If you would like to use AnkiDroid, I recommend (as far as my knowledge of WaniKani decks, do your own research ;)) “Wanikani Ultimate 2: Electric Boogaloo.” And you are already on the right track as you have hopefully read and are following the ultimate guide’s advice (which I wish I did).

So don’t give up! Failure is part of the process! It is okay if you have to start over again. Your mind is powerful and capable to execute on goals, so go for it :))

And again much thanks to @jprspereira, script and Flaming Durtles creators, and WaniKani programmers, admins, all of you!

Going all the way!
Alex

[pmflanders]

@Warrie

I find it already extremely satisfying when I read a text and I already see Kanji and vocab being used which I learned

This! 100%

[Warrie]

That post from me is 2 years old I see, how time flies by Turns out learning Kanji wasn’t the biggest hurdle for me - grammar is. I kept confusing and forgetting things. Recently I started doing grammar drills with jpdrills.com and finally the finer grammar nuances fall in place. There’s just no ending to learning this language

[peterA]

You might find this helpful or unhelpful:

Why I stopped studying grammar (and what I do instead)

[pmflanders]

I flip flop. I minored in Japanese so initially vocab was weakest, now I’ve gotten high enough in WK that grammar nuance is weaker… I’m trying to focus on immersion and capturing sentences/chunks in Anki at this point.

[Roxcell]

Grammar is also my weakest point and the reason my speaking still sucks, despite understanding quite a lot of everyday Japanese. I will definitely give this site a try.

[Warrie]

I get what he’s saying. I grew up near the German border and learned the language and it’s grammar naturally that way, mostly by watching German children tv programs.

With Japanese it’s different for me - the grammar is so completely different that I would have to immerse for many years if I would ‘get’ the grammar naturally without studying.

I started with BunPro and while it’s great - I noticed after a while I kept confusing and forgetting things despite doing my reviews daily. Doing those jpdrills daily does wonders for me though. It feels like immersion combined with practicing and while not all grammar points have explanations - the ones that do are awesome, very extensive and also explaining why the false answers don’t work in this case.

But meanwhile I noticed that different methods work better for different people - some people despise learning Kanji with WK which I just don’t understand. I finished WK in a year and there is no way I could have done that with any book for example. For some immersion only might be enough to learn the grammar, for me it isn’t unfortunately.

[Thubanshee]

That’s a lovely video, thank you for sharing! I totally agree with when he said “what’s limiting me when reading isn’t the grammar, it’s the vocabulary”. I know there are people whose experience is the opposite (like the above poster), but I totally feel seen by this guy.

Tagging @NeoArcturus because you might like it : )