I am currently level 12 on Wanikani with about half of the vocabulary left from level 11 to do. My problem is that after awhile there was to much information to try and remember and I wasn’t really benefitting from it anymore. I have had my account in vacation mode since October while I try to figure out what to do. The main problem is that I wasn’t using most of what I was learning and so even with doing reviews, I wasn’t retaining most of it.
Does anyone have any advice on how to continue with Wanikani? Should I just study kanji for awhile instead of vocabulary? Or perhaps make flash cards out of the context sentences in the vocabulary pages to help retain information? I have been studying grammar and that has been helping tremendously with being able to identify pieces and particles in a sentence.
Putting the problematic vocab in a https://jpdb.io/ deck was the easiest way to work on sentences instead of vocab. I can vouch that it was a good solution for me and it was the start of reading practice.
Although i did a lot of manipulation of those sentences in the end mainly with LLMs. Most of the jpdb sentences are correct difficulty wise.
Some were way too difficult at the time so I adapted the sentence to something that would help me.
I am only on level 8, but I reduced my lessons to 1 a day about 4 weeks ago because I realized that although I was chugging along in wanikani, I was not really learning. Each person’s learning style and strengths seem really different. Some people do seem to able to speed through wanikani and retain the material. I need some context outside wanikani to “own” a new kanji or vocabulary item. I didn’t want to use vacation mode, because I would just forget everything if I was not doing reviews. Currently, I am taking an intensive one month Japanese course and I am awash in new vocabulary and kanji. Doing wanikani a bit did help with the avalanche of Kanji I am now experiencing. What I think will work for me personally is to go through wanikani fairly slowly as I add more vocab, grammar speaking and listening skills. After the course I plan to do 5 new lessons a day and self study the other areas of Japanese. Also, after 4 weeks of only 1 lesson a day I only have a few reviews a day, 10 or 15. Again each person’s learning style is different.
How far did you get? That would be helpful to understand what you might need.
Are you reading? I personally found that kanji knowledge didn’t stick well until I learned a lot more vocabulary and gained reading skills, so perhaps that is something to try (but we would need to know a rough grammar level and what you’ve already tried to help here).
And then, after knowing the above, is when I would consider this question
But I would already say for part 2 of that question - no, please don’t just do kanji and ignore vocabulary. After you’ve been here a long while you notice that people who do that can finish WK and burn those kanji, but they eventually forget them and can’t read most related vocabulary anyway. If the kanji and vocabulary aren’t sticking, it’s because you don’t have enough context and exposure for them to stick, hence my grammar and reading questions / suggestions.
imo it’s best to build up multiple skills alongside each other, eg., grammar, vocabulary, kanji, reading, listening, speaking, writing (not necessarily all, just be mindful how relevant they are to your overarching goals and interests)