I just reached level 60 (I haven’t touched the lvl 60 kanji yet) and I thought now would be a good time to review my experience of WaniKani, as well as give some tips. [tldr: I think WaniKani is good and has little to no flaws.]
(ignore level 1, I created the account and then didn’t use it for a while)
I finished WaniKani in just less than 2 years but I would recommend not doing what I did. I tried speedrunning some of the levels and while this is fine and all, I left a lot of vocabulary words in my lessons and at one point, I had 500 lessons accumulated while I only unlocked kanji to level up faster. I strongly make sure you do the vocabulary and don’t just leave it in your lessons. There is almost no point in learning kanji individually because you need to see how the kanji is used in vocabulary words to actually benefit from WaniKani.
Which leads me to my review: I think WaniKani is currently the best way to learn 2000+ kanji and vocab. However there are 3 things that I think WaniKani could try implement.
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Vocab
WaniKani could try to enforce users to unlock vocabulary before leveling up to avoid the mistake I made. -
Radicals
WaniKani should make more radicals. I’m not sure why radicals seem to disappear in higher levels because there are still characters that could use them. (For example: 賁 appears in later level kanji but is not made as its own radical) -
Mnemonics
Please improve the mnemonics for readings. A lot of characters have their readings based on radicals present in the character, but WaniKani rarely mentions this. I’m assuming WaniKani wants the user to find that out on their own, but I think it would be better if WaniKani taught these readings alongside the radical. (For example: they could try calling the 冓 radical ‘Lifeguard Kouichi’ because characters with this radical are read as ‘kou’)
Another aspect of the reading mnemonics I don’t like is the consistency. I understand it might be easier if every character that’s read as ‘gan’ uses gandhi in the mnemonic, but for 眼 (eyeball), it would make more sense for the mnemonic to be something like "you use your eyeballs to take a gander (がん). There are a lot more examples of this where they use the consistent reading mnemonic over a really obvious mnemonic.
But aside from this, I don’t think there is any good alternative to WaniKani. I’m one of those people who was struggling to find a way to learn 2000 kanji in an efficient way and WaniKani was the best solution to the problem. I know some people might not like the cost of WaniKani, but personally I think it was 100% worth it.
Tips for WaniKani beginners:
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not really a tip, but just a reminder that the hardest levels are 1 - 10 because you’re still getting into the rhythm of lessons and reviews.
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do your reviews, even when you don’t want to. the number of reviews never goes down until you make it go down. if you have hundreds of reviews, don’t just procrastinate or be intimidated by it, do them.
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as i said, do your vocab.
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yeah that’s about it. the great thing about WaniKani is its simplicity. You kinda just do your lessons and reviews, not much more than that.
I don’t wanna make this post a repeat of what other people say, like ‘do WaniKani at your pace’ or ‘don’t use WaniKani as your only source of learning Japanese’ because these seem really obvious.
Anyway thanks WaniKani cuz now I know a lot of kanji.
