Need some guidance

Japanese Language
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Hey everyone,

Pleasure to be part of this community! I’ve properly started WaniKani about 5/6 months ago, and reached level 12.
I’ve been learning Japanese on and off for a couple of years now, but kept hiting “the wall” i.e not being able to read and remember Kanji, which is why I’ve decided to focus on WaniKani for a bit. I have an okay grammar base, but I’m struggling to find a place to really learn. At this stage, being able to read and understand complete sentences would be perfect, I can later on work on my listening and speaking skills.
Does anyone have any tips, or can share their experience? If you’ve gone through a similar experience I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks!

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Welcome to WaniKani and this community! catwave
We have a very nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaice commeownity and I really hope you’d like it here! love2

As I understand, you do have some grammar knowledge, but don’t know enough kanji and vocab yet, but would like to start Japanese reading, right? In that case, I’d recommend trying

It makes reading as easy as possible.
Alternatively, there are these YouTube channels

They are the next easiest option.

It’s also not a bad idea to just concentrate on WK for a while either…

The important thing is to study every day. Some days you would be able ot do more, some days – less, but as long as you are doing at least something Japanese related every day – you would keep learning and moving forward :slightly_smiling_face:

Anyway, best of luck with your studies! wricat

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Hey! Welcome! You have quite a fast pace right there, level 12 in 5-6 months is amazing.

Honestly I’m not the best reader and I suck big time at kanji too, but I learned a lot outside of Wanikani by immersion. My experience was, as a mere N5 holder and level 3 WK (years ago, I’ve only recently started paying for WK), I started reading a manga that I liked that was mostly not translated into English. It was a struggle and I had to resort to Jisho for every single dialogue bubble, but I learned a lot. Some of the words I learned stick until now. A large majority didn’t, but that’s OK by me - it was a sports manga, but I don’t play or follow the sports in real life so a lot of the sports terminology is completely wiped from my brain after I finished reading.

Some questions that may help to find out what’s a good way to learn for you specifically:

  • What media are you trying to read previously? Was it way too complex or uninteresting? Finding media that is around your level and being able to understand it is much more valuable than jumping straight in to difficult ones and becoming discouraged.
  • What are you interested in? Some people are able to study for the sake of studying and read all sorts of media with the goal of learning, but some (like me) are way more motivated with only media we like and already care about. Starting with something that you already like or know is probably good as a foundation in general, since it will come with some context you’re already familiar with, and that helps a lot when you’re not fluent.
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I’m sure my advice isn’t 100% universal as learning needs are a very individual thing, but I think you’re making the right call with WK- and I’d probably suggest staying especially committed to it in the short term. If your goals are reading full sentences (and reading in general) there’s obviously more to it than just knowing vocabulary, but I have definitely found that a strong vocabulary foundation makes it significantly easier to start introducing more complex material.

For example, if you’re wanting to study grammar or immersive content, not having to continually decode the words used in the material lets you better pick out and focus on the grammatical or cultural concepts that make reading especially challenging. It removes a further tug-of-war and adds focus- and it goes a long, long way.

There’s not really a specific sweet spot or objective threshold to it, but in my own experience and what I’ve seen on these forums- if you can reach the mid 20’s to early 30’s, you’ve filled in a pretty significant portion of the common gaps you’d find in reading material. Even I, someone who is definitely behind on my grammar knowledge, was able to sit down and pretty comfortably read the most recent Yotsuba volume not too long ago because I didn’t have to stumble with the vocabulary used terribly often. I still had to make assumptions, pull out a dictionary a few times, and generally read it a bit crudely- but I still picked up on the humor and effectively never felt lost in the process.

The temptation to jump knee-deep into reading ASAP is definitely a real one, and I certainly don’t blame you for feeling it and I think it’s awesome you’ve given it a lot of effort- but as annoying as it is to gather all the wood and heavy it can be to carry it all at once, it makes the eventual bridge-building process a heck of a lot easier in the long run.

If you are struggling with retention in the meantime, I would highly recommend (if you haven’t already) learning how to write the material you’re learning and practicing it at any opportunity you can. Definitely not without some tedium, but if you spend an active amount of time in your brain recognizing and applying stroke orders and all the little nuances, chances are you’re going to also better reinforce your memorization of meanings and readings. Pen on paper goes a long way, and Jisho.org has stroke order diagrams and videos for all their Kanji.

Level 12 is a great milestone, 1/5th of the way through! I hope you are proud of all the work you’ve done and can’t wait to see you keep learning alongside all of us. I’ll let you know if I think of any more advice as these are just off the top of my head, but luckily you’ve stepped into a very kind, fun, and helpful community and I’m sure they’ll beat me to the punch.

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About this, I think WaniKani could be a great place to learn vocabularies, or some other platforms to kickstart vocabularies (e.g. jpdb.io), but I am not a fan of pre-learning vocabularies forever. That’s where immersion comes in.

Kanji themselves could make a good pattern to remember vocabularies, visually. So, focusing on Kanji could be helpful, but more so for reading aspect.

Biggest downside of WaniKani is probably leeches, and also old items coming back. It’s a thing for any SRS platform, but WK may have it worse than others.

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Adding to what @polv said, are you fluent enough already to understand some random examples sentences on jpbd ? There is a BIG inflection point when you start to be able to get the gist of 20% to 30% the examples sentences, because a sentence is a coherent unit that has a lot more context for your brain, especially the curated ones with audio and simple grammar patterns (lots of N5/N4).
Having voice and patterns helps a lot with drilling the most common kanjis.

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Thank you so much! I’ve started looking at Satori reader, so useful - and the basic free version is more than enough, thank you!!

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Yeah, I’m doing WaniKani mostly for the reading - I realised I could make some progress with grammar and tenses, but kept being frustrated by not being able to read anything, and only understanding a few spoken words.
Have you used jpdb.io to read or learn vocabulary? And what do you mean by leeches?

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I’d say so - some sentence structures are still a bit too complicated, especially when there are random hiragana words. I’d say 20%/30% is about right, I might not be able to translate the sentence perfectly, but I understand the general gist and the meaning.
I’ll work on reading and understanding sentences from now on, at least a little bit everyday. Thank you!

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Hey! Thank you - my secret is to do the reviews in between workout sets, great way to pass the time :slight_smile:

  • I tried to read some manga, but the basic ones were really boring (shirokuma for example), and recently tried Naruto which I really liked reading in English. As you said, I have to stop every two sentences which is really not ideal as I’m reading on a computer. Maybe having a physical version helps?
  • I prefer focusing on things I like, but I’d rather have something my level. Unfortunately, that mostly means kids books which is not great! But I’ve tried Satori reader yesterday, and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised!
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Super advice, thank you!!
I honestly do not have issues remembering the kanji, even out of context, which I’m happy with. The issue is rather doing the opposite: how to say “battle” in Japanese for example. I can recognise the word straight away if I see it, but ask him to translate from English to Japanese and I’m lost.
I had the same issue when learning English, and reading/watching movies with subtitles helped a whole lot. For Japanese, as my reading skills are not top notch, I’d prefer starting to read and then move on to audio content.
But super good to know about reaching the mid 20s/30s!! I was wondering when things would get easier, at least now I’ll know what to expect :slight_smile:

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I have, but I didn’t get used to it. Though, I have used Anki for a lot of vocab before that. Some people, like @YandrosTheSane, have good experience with it.

Maybe just call it a pass, if you can recall from seeing Kana form, or picking up by ears. You might not need that many EJ until you have some steady immersion, and you really want to communicate.

imo, immersion of even anime with EN sub (JP dub) works for recognizing without Kanji, but if you don’t take time to carefully parse sentences, you won’t learn to parse sentences. Another method is mnemonics for the pronunciation, no need to focus on Kanji first. (I find Kanji a distraction sometimes.)

Reading in Satori, or reading something easier could help, to get to used to parsing without over worrying. (But taking time to parse something harder might work too. You just might need to prepare a lot of grammar ahead, or ask for help quite a bit.)

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For sure parsing is a bit of an issue, particularly when listening in. I’ll use Satori for now (reading and listening) and see how it goes!

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Between workouts is an interesting choice XD

Naruto should be a good start, shonen/shojo has furigana which is super helpful! But I suppose, stopping every 2 sentence to check the dictionary can be super unpleasant. There are some browser extensions like Yomitan, Rikai etc that works as a dictionary, but I don’t know if they work on manga as they are in image form and not text. I found that there’s an OCR dictionary app called Kaku, but they are on android only. If you have an android phone or tablet, it’s definitely worth checking out!

As for physical, it really depends. I suppose you can utilize your phone for OCR translation/dictionary, but in my experience that’s not always convenient. Sometimes it feels more clunky than just opening up a new tab in a browser for me. But another advantage of physical is that you could put notes/bookmarks/post its etc which can be very helpful for learning. If you could access physical books, maybe you can try and see if it suits your learning style.

I’m glad to hear you found something useful! I haven’t checked out Satori reader myself but I do hear good things from WK users. Hope you can find more resources that can help your reading input.

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If you’re able to have the text of something you’d like to read you can prepare it as a custom deck in JPDB (‘create deck from text’ option) (for manga and images I’ve had great results asking ChatGPT to extract the raw text) . It’s an investment of time and can get a bit overwhelming at the start BUT it will make you progress a lot if you keep at it and enables you to decipher anything you can extract the text from. And being able to go through something you like even at a snail pace is wonderful.

Doing the method above I’ve gotten about 450 additional kanjis (either not in WK at all or in levels I haven’t unlocked yet) and 1.2k words in the last six months so it is working (for me at least).