My main problem with Wanikani

Hi, sorry to read about your troubles. What I do not see in your posting is what it is you’re doing with what you have learned so far. As in: are you reading manga, books, playing games or anything where what you have learned so far could come up? Or have you set your goal to first do WK, then grammar, then start using it in real life? Because, personally, I sincerely doubt it’s possible to retain all that information you’ve learned here so far by simply doing reviews (within WK or elsewhere). Actively using Japanese should greatly help you improve (and expand) your retention. The rest (WK, anki, etc.) are just training wheels.

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Is this your experience? If so, I’m glad it worked for you, and I’m interested to know when you noticed this approach worked better.

However, I always do my best to recall meaning, reading and kanji at the same time, and I’m of the opposite opinion: I think it’s harmful to separate them, because in real life, you’re going to need to see a word, pronounce it, and understand it, or hear it and understand it (possibly while visualising it or feeling some sort of visual trigger activating); or you’re going to feel like saying something and you’re going to ask yourself what you know that is close to what you mean. I think studies of speed-readers have even shown that those who claim to understand without mentally saying words end up doing it to some extent, because understanding is almost impossible otherwise. You need all three elements to be linked to each other, at least at the word level. (It may not be as important at the kanji level.) That brings me to my next point:

With all due respect, ‘piggybacking’ is a natural part of human memory. It’s called ‘associative memory’. We all have an easier time remembering things based on something we already know, and it’s one of the most effective ways of memorising something. Memory athletes, for instance, use familiar things like the names and faces of famous people to help them memorise packs of cards at contests. WaniKani relies on this as well: that’s the reason why recurrent characters are used for reading mnemonics, because so many kanji readings are the same. I’ll grant that it’s preferable to be able to remember something without having to spend a ton of time on some other trigger first, but that’s why memorable mnemonics are important.

Perhaps more importantly, trying to completely separate the things one needs to learn can cause other problems. I’ll quote this post, which explains it much better than me:

(I’d say that the full post is worth a glance, at the very least.)

Granted, this doesn’t mean that it’s bad to test yourself separately on meanings and readings, but this seems to suggest that learning them together is more helpful, so testing yourself on meaning and reading pairs also makes sense.

PS: Just as a final thought: when I was learning Chinese as a child, we definitely were taught meanings and readings together. Our vocabulary lists were always structured the same way: characters for a word, readings, meanings, examples. Forgetting one or the other (or both) is perfectly natural, but I can say for sure that we were tested on meanings and readings both separately (through spelling tests/dictation and comprehension questions) and together (through sentence-making spelling tests where we had to write words down and then make a sentence that showed what the word meant). Neither form of review was significantly more effective in my experience, just more or less difficult. What mattered most was how well we had mastered the words beforehand, and that depended on how we had learnt them.

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I just want to be clear here, the official WK stance is called interleaving: Randomized Review Order | WaniKani Knowledge

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That FAQ entry touches on two things, a) mixing up different types of items during a review (Kanji, radicals, vocab) and b) asking for the meaning first sometimes and for the reading first some other times.
I don’t believe it applies to artificially separating the meaning and reading reviews really.

Additionally, when they write “it has been shown”, I would love for them to cite specific studies so that one can verify what exactly has been shown. (Or alternatively, they should just write “we believe”).

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You’ve basically said what I was going to add, except to point out that:

Character amnesia is real and it affects native Japanese speakers as well as non-native speakers. Actually using your newly gained kanji knowledge is the best way to retain it.

And… my new word of the day (from the above Wikipedia article) is ワープロ馬鹿:

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I guess that makes sense for reviews, especially if those things appear within the same review session. What I’m saying is that it’s probably a good idea to apply a unified logic to learning. WK doesn’t say that’s bad though, so I’m not going to add any criticism here. Nonetheless, just as a personal note, I can more or less guarantee that this is what would happen if someone asked me to use such a review system, unless I was really out of time/trying to see how fast I can finish my reviews:

  1. Answer the question asked
  2. Get myself to recall the element not requested for fun – if I haven’t already – just to make the review harder for myself and to provide an extra challenge

You could call it nothing but a silly, cherished belief, that’s for sure, but to me, that’s how it goes: I learnt these things together, and I will need to use them together, so I’ll recall them together as much as I can.

I think I’d start making changes here. If you’re wondering how, once again, I recommend reading the post I linked to earlier for the basic idea:

While I’m very much in favour of linking readings and meanings together, there’s one huge problem with needing to use the reading to recall the meaning: Japanese contains too many words (and kanji) that are pronounced exactly the same way, even if you account for pitch accents, which most of us don’t study very often to begin with. Case in point: I had a Japanese test less than a week ago. We were given a list of words, almost all of them in written only in hiragana, and we were told in translate them into French. (I’m doing my degree in France.) There was one word I couldn’t translate until an hour after the test started (I did the other questions first): しゅうしょくする. If I had only studied Japanese with this teacher, I would have had no problem. But because I already speak Chinese and I’ve noticed several rules that let me convert pronunciations in Mandarin into Japanese pronunciations, I was stuck. ‘Which しゅうしょく? What is it used for? There are so many words that seem like possibilities.’ I only came up with an answer after remembering that we did a chapter on life stories and milestones, which meant it was probably 就職=‘to gain employment, to get a job’. Point is, readings are far from unique, so how are you going to deal with overlapping, seeing as you can’t prevent it? Similarly, you can’t just link a reading to a kanji if your objective is to recall its meaning, because some kanji sound similar precisely because they look similar. (They’re pictophonetic/phonosemantic kanji (形声文字) i.e. kanji with a meaning component and a sound component.)

What I’d suggest is that you try to link both meaning and reading to the kanji at the same time, by having them cooperate in some way. Ideally, your memory should be something like a 3D matrix or an XYZ-coordinate system: knowing any two of the three elements (kanji, meaning, reading) should help you find the third. I’ll work with your examples:

Fun fact: in Mandarin, these two actually sound almost the same (one just has an extra G that gives it a more nasal sound, and they have different tones), so they’re even easier to mix up. I definitely mixed them up as a child. How can you remember them? A few ideas:

  1. Try learning words you can actually use/you’ve come across before that use them: 幸福(こうふく)= ‘happiness’ does not look like 辛苦(しんく)= ‘hardship’. 幸せ(しあわせ = ‘happiness’)does not look (or sound) like 辛い(つらい = ‘difficult, painful’ or からい = ‘spicy’).
  2. Associate them with real context that makes them memorable: you’ll probably find 辛 or 辛口(からくち)written in violent, rough calligraphy on spicy instant noodle packets, like this:
    p600-05
    See if you can find a Japanese ramen place near you that offers such ramen if you really want to strengthen the experience. It helps with remembering other meanings too: I love spicy food, sure, but I’m not going to deny that it can be ‘painful’ to eat. Hahaha.
    For 幸, I can’t think of an example right now, but I can guarantee you there’s a manga somewhere out there with 幸せ written in bright colours with lots of cheerful 〜〜〜〜 lines, possibly floating above characters’ heads as they relax in an onsen (or as they eat a delicious hotpot).
  3. Play spot the difference: this phrase is favourite on the Japanese Internet when someone asks what the difference between two expressions is: ‘They’re different where they’re different, and the same where they’re the same.’ This may not be etymologically correct at all, but when you’re looking at two similar kanji, pretend that the reason they’re different is the parts where they don’t match, and then make up an explanation. For example, here, we’ve got ‘、’ versus ‘十’. You can pretend the dot (‘、’) is a drop of acid, and that it burns, so it’s ‘painful’; or that it’s a chili seed, so it’s really spicy; or that it’s a pebble that got thrown onto someone’s head. (Pretend that’s the rest of the character.) For ‘十’, it’s easy: it looks like a plus (+), so it’s positive and ‘happy’!

You can apply the same strategies here. I’m not going to go into detail though; I’ll just tell you how I differentiate them:

  • 喉’s got a mouth (口) in it, so it’s obviously linked to the mouth somehow. The ‘throat’ is linked to the mouth alright. What about the reading? Well, it’s のど, and I don’t know about you, but both の and ど require me to round my mouth nicely, and if I freeze right after I say ど, I look like a goldfish. (I’m exaggerating a little, obviously.) What I imagine is that as I say ど – because my mouth is open and everything seems to frame my ‘throat’ nicely – I get one of my fingers and poke the back of my ‘throat’ like an idiot. (Ok, the truth is that I just concentrate my attention on the back of my ‘throat’ as I say ど, but it’s essentially the same thing: the pointing finger of my mental hand brings my ‘throat’ to my attention.)
  • 候 tends to have meanings that are related to time or moments in time – waiting, serving, checking on someone/something, the weather at a particular point in time or in a particular season (a bit of a stretch, but you can see how these things are all somehow related to time)… What’s it got that the other kanji doesn’t have? A line: l. What now? You can pretend that’s a line on a clock (and I vaguely remember a teacher telling me that it was added as a symbol of something like that). You could also imagine it’s someone attentively waiting, as one would when checking on someone at home or in hospital, or when one is in line, like when one is a candidate(候補者 – こうほしゃ)for something.

There you go. I hope some of those ideas help.

It would be nice for them to do so, yes, but for what it’s worth, I remember being given a list of study tips by a neuropsychologist when I was younger and recovering from a head injury, and there was reference inside it to a study on interleaving. Everything was cited for people who were interested. There’s also a course on Coursera called Learning How to Learn that recommends interleaving, again with research cited somewhere in the course, probably at the end of that chapter. Studies on this exist, and while it would have been better if WK cited its sources, in this case, I can assure you it’s well researched, at the least if the medical community is to retain its credibility. WK isn’t pulling this out of a hat. I’m just too tired to bring up a study myself right now. If you want a rough idea of the research methodology though, typically, two groups of students were taught something and asked to review it in a certain way: one group working on one topic at a time, and the other mixing topics. Ultimately, the group that mixed topics did better. I believe the most commonly cited study discusses students doing maths problems. I don’t know if others exist though.

Agreed. Practice is key. There are Chinese characters whose readings I can’t remember for certain (or which I can’t write anymore) because I just haven’t needed them in ages. I’ve been speaking Chinese since I was a baby so… yeah, it can happen to anyone.

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I’ve read what I think are probably the same studies referred to. Just my opinion, but I think it’s a difference of interpretation of the study results. The research talks about studying related topics, such as math subjects that would typically appear as back-to-back topics, and interleaving brings the previous topic(s) back while quizzing for the current topic. The theory is that interleaving helps the brain see relationships between related topics that would otherwise go unnoticed if you didn’t quiz them together.

So, again in my opinion, the interleaving (a) brings together topics that would otherwise be separated by days or weeks, not minutes as within a kanji review session, and (b) is intended to bring together things that would otherwise be separated, not separate things that would otherwise be together such as reading and meaning.

Based on prior testamonials from people who have tried 1x1 mode, I think the main down side is that separating the reading and meaning naturally brings up the item twice in a review, which is extra practice, whereas back-to-back is essentially equivalent to the item being brought up once. But there is an easy remedy for that, too: Rather than doing reading-then-meaning back to back, you can simply recite both in your head (or, better yet, out loud) no matter if it’s a reading question or a meaning question. From the experiences I’ve heard, that method seems to overcome any degradation suffered from 1x1 mode., and typically significantly improves review accuracy. (For me, 1x1 alone was sufficient.)

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辛 and 幸

Here’s another one, from 1:23 to 1:33:

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I do think WK could offer more flexibility on the system to let you review something more (demote items, freeze leeches, etc). Scripts aside, the system is rather rigid which makes sense, but there can be some leeway implemented.

I also agree with interacting with Japanese more. Our brains have a harder time remembering things we don’t use, especially the amount of items you have to juggle in WK. Seeing stuff in context, writing it, hearing it and using it will always help retention more than srs I feel

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If you don’t read native material, you will forget burned items for sure. Start reading.

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That’s what I mean. It’s very easy to take some study result, claim it says “interleaving is better” without any of the qualifications (interleaving what, in which contexts, etc.) and then claim that “your method ™” is “scientifically sound”. But that’s really a bit dishonest.

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I think that’s normal. It’s training your eye to look for the important differences. 辛 was easy to recognize when it was clearly different from anything else you were studying at the time. You could do it at a glance. Same with 幸. But when there’s a chance what you’re looking at could be either, that’s a little harder and you need to know quickly what part is the important part. There’s really no solution to that but practice. I initially had a hard time with mixing up 待つ, 持つ, and all those similar looking ones with a 寺 part. Now my eye automatically recognizes that and then goes immediately to the important “difference” part to disambiguate.

But here’s the thing, in a real sentence, there’s not really an equal chance it could be either. The context of a sentence is going to set your expectation for what’s coming, and you tend to “see” what you expect to see. There aren’t very many sentences where I’m expecting to see 待つ but surprise! I’m wrong, it’s 持つ. That usually just wouldn’t make any sense in context.

So I don’t think your real-life recall is as bad as the context-less wanikani quiz is making it seem.

Also, if you aren’t using your burned items by reading or using your Japanese in some way, you’re going to forget them and there’s nothing you can do about it. Quick, what’s the quadratic equation? Despite that being so familiar when I was younger (through repetitiion, and you better believe I used it a lot more than nine times, apprentice to enlightened), now I’d maybe be able to come up with it if I thought long enough. Just haven’t used it.

None of that is actually disagreeing with your idea that being able to drop an item down a stage or two would ALSO be useful. I’m pretty sure you can resurrect burned items to go through those items again from the beginning (I might be wrong how this works, I haven’t done it), and you can use the Self-Study quiz to review burned items as frequentlly as you want without resurrecting them. That might help a little.

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Writing down by hand (using the correct stroke order) kanji like 辛 and 幸 may help. As for 喉 and 候 you may use the semantic component of the Kanji (侯 is the common phonetic component): 喉 has a mouth 口 (hence throat); the story of the semantic component of 候 is a bit more involved (see image below from Noriko Williams’ Kanji Portraits website).

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What I personally don’t like about WK is that every question in this forum is answered with “there’s a script for that”…

I don’t like scripts. There, I said. Grab your pitchforks, I don’t care. Every time you DL a script, you’re adding another layer of code that may be buggy, clunky or just more bothersome than WK by itself.

They should round up the most popular features and hard code them in. A good example would be the lesson sorting option, I mean… who doesn’t use that eventually? Just code it in…

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Then they’d have to support it through bugs and site changes forever. Why would you do that, when someone else is already?

Because scripts tend to break when WaniKani makes other enhancements, so they’re constantly dealing with complaints about the site not working when a script breaks. I think an official WaniKani feature is less likely to break than a script, so I think implementing a feature themselves would actually reduce risk in the long run.

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Right, but it’s a double-edged sword. Right now, if they want to change wanikani, they only have to test their own code. Scripts are someone else’s problem. If they incorporate the scripts into the app, they gain control over that, but also responsibility for that, which makes changes harder.

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To be clear, they wouldn’t be incorporating the scripts literally. Just the behavior from the scripts. But assuming you meant that, I still think it’s better. It is true of course that the more code they have the more likely something is to break unexpectedly. But because they have control over it, it’s less likely to break than actual scripts since they would know to retest it when making changes in related parts of the app.

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The problem with third party scripts/ plugins is that the compatibility has to work 2-way. If it’s in the main code, it only has to work one way. Imagine trying to fix a bridge with smaller bridges instead of just fixing the original material…
Not sure how much sense that makes though, I’ve had a bit of wine lol

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Another problem with third party scripts is that the author is not obliged to fix any bugs, or maintain the code to follow changes in WK API. And at some point in time, the script author leaves WK and the script becomes abandoned.

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