My reason for quitting WK (no, not because of the reviews or the common reason)

WaniKani
41

I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of immersion vs other study tools, because it’s one that so many people have such strong opinions on. The thing that continues to baffle me is the assumption people seem to make that if you’re using a textbook, or using a program like WaniKani, that you must have chosen that as your sole form of exposure to the language.

I spent a year and a half immersing myself (as my primary form of entertainment) in a type of Japanese media that only occasionally has subtitles or translations, with essentially no background in the language before then, and I learned only a small handful of words and phrases from it. I did learn a fair amount about Japanese culture (largely from the small amount of translation that was available), and a few things like the fact that Japanese companies often use a 24 hour clock, but I could not parse actual sentences (they just sounded like a blur of sound to me), and I made essentially no progress toward actually learning the language in a meaningful manner. I’m not going to attempt to add up the total amount of hours I have spent watching Japanese pro wrestling (and seeing tweets in Japanese about it on my twitter feed) lol but it is hundreds and hundreds of hours.

Then last fall, I made the decision to actually try learning the language. I memorized hiragana and katakana, and right away, that study time paid off, and I could read the katakana names of foreign wrestlers, and could also read words like タッグマッチ and ベルト. Suddenly, my ability to actually productively learn from my immersion went up by a lot.

I found WaniKani at the end of December, and literally from level one, I started noticing WK kanji (and vocab!) in wrestling shows. Not long after that, I started learning grammar from Japanese Ammo with Misa, and my ability to actually learn Japanese from watching wrestling went up again. Then I started reading Minna no Nihongo, and my ability to actually learn words and grammar from wrestling increased even more.

Thanks to a combination of all three sources, especially WK, with its constant practice with hiragana and kanji and audio reinforcement of all of the words, I started to gain the ability to hear spoken Japanese as actual sentences, with word and particle pairs and verbs at the end (even without knowing the meaning of the actual vocab). I could actually transcribe spoken Japanese and make out the specific sounds of the language and guess how words were spelled.

I suppose if I stopped with WK and MNN now and put every minute of my spare time into only reading and watching native materials, I’d maybe actually have a chance to be able to figure them out. It would be an awful lot of work and be very frustrating, but I probably have enough of a base where I could actually learn through immersion. I’m already able to jump ahead in my studies a bit and learn things just from immersion that I have yet to get to in WK or my textbook.

But, that said, using WK and a textbook got me to a level of baseline familiarity with the language at a much quicker and more efficient rate than all the time I spent immersing without using any sort of structured tools. WK and MNN (and Japanese Ammo with Misa, and Tofugu articles, and the many various other sources I’ve read) have also made me feel much more confident about learning, and have made it feel like it’s actually possible for me to learn Japanese, instead of forever being dependent on the work of translators. The importance of this is often understated, I think, when evaluating different tools and methods.

I think also, with regards to the question of efficiency, it depends on what you’re planning on using the language for. I have a few friends who are pretty much exclusively immersing themselves in wrestling to learn Japanese (whereas I’m planning on reading manga and news and other mediums, once I get further along). If you’re only interested in one very specific thing, WK and textbooks are probably too broad of a tool to use, and you will likely learn a lot of things that you don’t actually need (and therefore you will likely forget them anyway), so a lot of the time you spend will be wasted.

But if you have a goal of more general fluency and are getting exposure to a variety of native materials, having a broader base of knowledge isn’t going to hurt you. I’m not overly concerned about forgetting things and having to look them up again. The fact that I already learned them once should make it easier to pick them up again in the future. I often forget the precise meaning of some English words and more obscure grammar and have to look them up again. And besides, with wrestling at least, all kinds of ridiculous and strange things come up in promos and such, so you truly never know what weird vocabulary you’re going to need to know, haha. Like, I know a wrestler whose finisher is a pun on the Japanese word for canned cat food. I feel like if your scope is too narrow, these are the kinds of things you’re going to end up missing. Maybe the trade-off is a more imperfect understanding of many things instead of a more perfect understanding of fewer things, but if you keep at this long enough, both will eventually get you to the same place.

15 Likes
42

Yeah, I second this. This whole post is just a dumpsterfire full of bad takes, many could be refuted but it feels like a bit of a waste of time on someone who has already decided to quit.

I think they have an absolute lack of understinding of how WaniKani should be used and what the tool is for. To begin with the mentality that 70-80% of the vocab here is unnecessry to read manga/novels or watch anime is NAIVE as hell. There will be planty of works that utilize less common words and phrases to emphasize character traits, to create comedy puns etc.(feels weird even saying that since WaniKani focuses on common stuff anyway but…).
Especially if you start getting into more serious novels I can imagine that even WaniKani vocab won’t be cutting it. When it comes to anime and TV then even more the reason to learn the vocab since so many words in JP sound so smilar or even the same, if you don’t have the kanji in front of you to identify that it’s something you don’t know then it’s not difficult to misunderstand something. Also when you learn a language you should strive to learn it properly, so that you don’t have to constantly look shit up in dictionaries.

When it comes to the pricing of WaniKani I dare to say that it is EXTREAMLY cheap, if you were to pay for JP lessons with a tutor it would surpass what WK costs very fast and your rate of progress would not be nearly s fast. Not to mention it would probably include hard-beating Kanji into your head from textbooks. Even if you were to go for a free alternative I would argue that the time you would have to spend setting up the learning material for your self would quickly justify just paying for WK, not to mention that since you don’t know the language yet it will be difficult to choose the correct things to learn. The only benefit to setting things up your self is that you will probably retain better memory of material if you have to prepare it.

I’m also not a native english speaker and from my expirience learning a language I can tell you that WK is a great tool. It doesn’t do it all and sometimes you are forced to make your own mnemonics because theirs are just bad however it will teach you a lot of necessary vocab that will create a foundation for you from which you can learn the grammar and structure (heck I’m even learning some new english vocab from it lol…).

Not to roast the guy but reading his post did feel like he put the same kind of half-hearted effort into learning English as he’s putting into Japanese.

One additonal note - It’s true that the end goal is to actively be able to think in Japanese and not in an English interpreation of it however that is something which should come naturally with time and not something you should try to bruteforce by forsaking the advantage that you already speak another language.

9 Likes
43

549×550 41.1 KB

25 Likes
44

To put a cap on what I was struggling to word, I think my lingering qualm with the estimated-percentage-of-words-likely-to-encounter metric, even with the extreme “just want to read one book and stop forever” use case, is just that it’s easier to read a book if I know the words that aren’t in it too.

I guess that’s just what Leebo said about word reinforcement, I’d just go even farther and say on a macro-level, words and forms and sources reinforce each other and strengthen how well you can read each of them. 40 kanji I’ll never see on a page again are 1. 40 kanji that might surprise me after all, and 2. 40 contrasts to help me recognize the kanji I do encounter and why the author chose them.
So that’s my pitch to even the hypothetical One Book Jones why they at least might not want to discount a general source based on the word list disagreement issue!

In general though I think if these threads were called like, “I’ve progressed enough to be confident to switch to targeted vocabulary resources, bye!” they’d be less contentious… (actually come to think of it I think there was one of those and it was pretty contentious) The SRS treadmill makes it easy to feel like “60 is finishing, less is quitting” but maybe it’s not the be all end all.

11 Likes
45

The stories may be long to remember sometimes, but I find that my brain gradually compresses those stories as I begin to recall them faster. Example…

擬 as an apprentice card, I remember a bunch of nonsensical things about my mother asking me to hang my spoons and arrows on a coat rack, so I doubt she’s my real mother… it means “doubt”.

As I progress, around the guru stage, the story becomes more compressed… okay… spoons, arrows, coat rack… I remember that string of words to mean “doubt”.

Hopefully around the enlightened stage, I will look at those radicals grouped together and immediately think of “doubt”, maybe even forgetting the original story that I used as my crutch…

Finally, I shouldn’t even need to look at the radicals too closely… simply seeing the kanji will make me think of doubt…

5 Likes
46

Finally, I shouldn’t even need to look at the radicals too closely… simply seeing the kanji will make me think of doubt…

That’s right, exactly how it happens for me! Except… was it “doubt”… or “suspicion”…? :sweat_smile:

2 Likes
49

Your entire post comes across as angry and disrespectful. I feel you’ve let the wanikani community down which was up until then a thoughtful and interesting response to someone’s experiences.

2 Likes
50

An interesting take and I won’t bother going over the many points others have gone over and I agree with in reply to this thread. Feelings have definitely been ruffled and those here will get defensive over a tool they have been a good amount of time (and money) using. So I will instead just state my own reasons for continuing to use this tool despite some minor shortcomings.

I have ADHD which was a diagnose I received as an adult. What that means is my brain craves interesting things (overly simplified). The tedious nature of language learning process is perhaps the opposite to what my brain wants. Since my brain interferes with my motivation and willpower to get things done I need to find a more reliable solution. That solution usually being discipline and habits. It is essential to me to be able to reduce any kind of obstacles I might face in learning. Wani Kani removes many of the tedious aspects of assembling vocab, kanji, mnemonics, keeping track of sufficiently learned items, pacing myself, and just a ton of those little details.

Brain, guess what. You don’t worry about that junk just pop in every day do your reviews and occasional lessons to reach the maximum active items in you allotted for yourself. Can’t keep track of the difficult kanji? No problem. just stick it back in your queue if you get it wrong. My pace is slow but there is definite progress as opposed to being frozen with my inability to get organized and start the learning process.

Now if I can only get my butt in gear learning grammar. That will probably require me to find some loose brain cells in my skull. Take those and make them cooperate in figuring out a system that will work out for me haha.

4 Likes
52

I don’t know man… Your comment is also passive aggressive in my perspective. It’s not that much better than his. May be my English knowledge is limited and give me false impression about your comment.

I’m not saying he is right but I don’t think you are either.

13 Likes
53

My biggest disappointment with WaniKani is the hyperfocus on reading kanji. It doesn’t help me with using those words or phrases in a sentence, or recognizing them in speech, or how to write them. Sure, I can click and listen to pronunciation when asked for the English translation, but that slows me down. Which is a problem because…

I’ve found this true for me, too. I want to use WaniKani as part of my routine, maybe only twice a week, with different activities on other days. I have Anki, a couple beginner-level books to read, a calligraphy kit to write with, and a book showing the historic pictographs behind kanji. But the WaniKani backlog just keeps growing, and I don’t know how to slow it down. I took a long break at the start of this year, and now my backlog is discouragingly over 800.

I don’t want to spend 30 minutes every day on WaniKani. So I do wonder if it’s worth the cost.

This is the most important thing to understand for anybody learning anything. I’ve found WanaKani very helpful in my reading skills. If I encounter a new word but recognize the kanji, my guess for the meaning is usually close. And if I can sound it out as I read, that helps retention (and sometimes makes me recognize a phrase I hear all the time but never knew how to write).

I have three goals:

  1. Read manga without having to wait for translations or putting up with translators that drop cultural context.
  2. Watch anime for the same reasons as #1.
  3. Travel to Japan as a tourist and verbally communicate with Japanese shop owners and museum guides. Because I hate “on the rails” tourist experiences. I don’t want to be limited to places that appeal to English speakers.

WaniKani has helped a lot with #1, a little with #2 (but other activities would’ve helped more), and barely any with #3.

I agree here, too. If my mind naturally translates words as I hear them (because that’s what WaniKani reinforces), I’ll miss out on the rest of the sentence. It’d be nice if WaniKani mixed it up by giving sentences with the target word or phrase in bold or a different color. Then I could reinforce the other words without having to directly translate them.

My last personal gripe about WaniKani is how I have to add synonyms for everything. The developers probably don’t want to overload people with 10 possible meanings for each kanji, but it sucks so much when I put “to forbid” and get rejected because they only accept “to ban” and “to prohibit.” English has a lot of words, most of them synonymous with at least 3 others. And I don’t want to memorize English words, just the abstract idea. So if I feel like my answer should’ve been right, I look up the Japanese phrase on Jisho and add all their translations to WaniKani. Sadly, this also slows me down while chipping away at my backlog.

All that said, I’ll stick with WaniKani. It’s helping me learn more kanji, which I still need. And, aside from some infrequent book purchases and the N5 exam, it’s the only thing I’ve paid for when learning Japanese. I don’t think it’s too expensive, and I get that it takes a lot of work to make and maintain this material.

1 Like
55

I recommend setting the audio to autoplay so it will play every time you correctly answer the reading. I found it to help a lot with recognition and pronunciation because I would repeat it every time I answered.

I also remember them as abstract ideas and my brain loves to do this thing were it can remember every synonym except the one I need. I use the double-check script to mark these kinds of mistakes as correct as long as my general understanding is on point. My accuracy goes down by 15% if I’m not using the script so it’s really invaluable to me. I recommend you try something similar. If you’re doing review on a mobile device and not a computer try using one of the user developed apps. I think most of them have a feature like this though you may need to turn it on in the settings.

WaniKani isn’t for everyone, but there’s a lot you can do to try and make it work better for you. It’s one of the best things about it.

2 Likes
56

I think way of speaking should be reserved for the campfire.

57

Just a reminder that language learning is a hobby for 99% of us and that no lives are at stake in these conversations. I know these discussions often get frustrating but at the end of the day none of this is that serious.

10 Likes
58

for me it was the opposite effect: as soons as the mnenomics became huge wall of texts (very bad actually) that I couldn’t remember the exact meaning of the word, I started creating my own mnemonics, thus boosting my will to learn more and more.

and many of those words I thought I wouldn’t find them soon, actually I find them on nhk easy news. Very interesting I think.

1 Like
61

I find it really funny that the #1 complaint about a kanji learning website is that the vocabulary is irrelevant to real life.

4 Likes
62

“These words are useless”

LOL

“$200 is too expensive to learn kanji”

LOL

“WK has too much structure”

LOL

8 Likes
63

I agree. It may be irrelevant to your life now, because you don’t speak Japanese yet. But if you speak with Japanese people, consume Japanese media, travel in Japan, these vocabs suddenly become very relevant.

4 Likes
64

Good news is, that’s fairly in line with what the original poster wrote:

As for consuming Japanese media, it then comes down to how wide a breadth of genre and content type one will consume, which is what I think they were to convey.

2 Likes
65

Wow! Thats a real essay there! I find it hard enough to make time to get through my reviews let alone get through essays on Community! But thank you for your points and generosity <3

66

You don’t choose what type of content you will consume based on what words you know. You just read/watch/listen to them and you encounter new words or phrases. Sometimes these phrases come from baseball, and if you currently don’t live in a country where baseball is very popular, your language will not use a lot of baseball terminology. But baseball is Japan’s most popular sport, and they use baseball lingo quite often.

4 Likes