New People Questions! ~~~<3 [Lost?! Confused?! We're here to help!]

To be completely honest here, an accuracy of 60% for me would be too low even on incidental basis (i’m personally frustrated if it’s any lower than 90%). Maybe in this case it’s not just the reviews, but also the mnemonics you use when learning them. Perhaps good to just relearn some of them if you keep having trouble with a specific set of kanji or vocab. But that’s something you can maybe play around with to see what works.

I think I am just going to have to keep experimenting with ways to improve my accuracy. Thank you for the advice.

Hello. I am level 4 and I was wondering what would be recommended manga reading material to just get used to reading at or around this level. My ultimate goal right now is to be able to read LNs at the source. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks

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Welcome!

Usually the bigger barrier to entry into manga is grammar knowledge rather than kanji or vocabulary - it’s easier to look up words than grammar, and many manga (particularly shounen and shoujo) have furigana on all kanji to tell you the reading, which makes it easier to look them up. I don’t know where you are on your Japanese learning journey - so I’m going to point you to some resources for beginners, and if you’re looking for something else, please ask!

If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend looking at The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List! to help you find a resource for more grammar and vocabulary. WaniKani gives you lots of specific vocabulary to help you learn kanji, but it’s not always the most practical beginner vocabulary (because a lot of common, conceptually simple words have fairly complex kanji)

If you know some beginning grammar (or are like me and like to hit your head against things that are too hard for you repeatedly until something sticks), よつばと!is a common recommendation for beginners because it features mainly every day vocabulary. Fair warning though, it uses lots of casual grammar, which often is not what you learn first in grammar in general. I find Flying Witch uses more polite grammar, which is helpful for learners, and can make for an easier read (I didn’t personally find it that interesting, but it was relatively readable).

My main rec for starting in on reading native material would be to check out the Absolute Beginners Book Club to look at past choices, which would have a reader populated vocabulary list, along with threads for the chapters where people have asked and answered questions. This can be super helpful for starting reading, and often if you post a question, even on a long dead thread, someone will come along and answer it for you.

I know it’s not exactly what you asked, but that’s the best insight I have for you - if you really want to read soon, and have high tolerance for frustration, learn some grammar, and then hop into native material and be prepared for it to take a long time to read anything (I’m currently sitting at 15-20 minutes per page of my first light novel - but more like 30 minutes per chapter of a manga - depending on the amount of dialogue). Look up a lot of stuff. Ask lots of questions. Try to memorize more vocabulary.

Good luck!

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Is there a script you can use to drill answers you got wrong in a review (like how you can use a quick study for everything you got wrong in kitsun.io)

I find doing this helps me a lot in kitsun, would love the same option on WK. Preferably something I can try and use on mobile since that is where I do most of my reviews.

There is a separate webapp that you can put your API key into - BishBashBosh: Cram Apprentice 1 items and recent failures - unsure if there are also scripts available.

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Tyvm! This seems to be exactly the functionality that I was looking for and it’ll work on mobile.

I’ve been here for only a few days so far, and should be done with learning the level 1 kanji soon, and after finishing most of them I already have 32 vocabulary words to learn. It feels like a lot, so I feel it’d be good to ask sooner rather than later, but what kind of pace I should be going at while using WaniKani? How many lessons should I go for at once, and how many reviews should I do each session?

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I would personally recommend starting with 15-20 lessons per day and seeing how that goes for you.

For reviews, I always finished all the reviews I had pending whenever I did a session.

One way to pace it that’s often recommended is to only do lessons when your apprentice count is below 100 or so. When you guru items, you do another lesson or two to refill. This will keep your number of reviews in check.

I’ve done very minimal grammar learning on Genki and Tae Kims guide. So I will try and dive into that. I’m doing like 3 different anki decks to just familiarize myself with writing. Hopefully some grammar will settle in with patterns I see. I will check out all the links you posted and see what works for me.

PS. I love Flying Witch a lot. >_< I love how laid back and casual it is. So I will try reading that.

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If you’re going to do that - here’s a link to the old book club that read all 10 volumes - there’s a thread for every chapter (fewer as they got into later volumes and there were fewer questions) where people have asked and answered questions they had while reading (and people probably will answer your questions if you post them) - ふらいんぐうぃっち・Flying Witch (Beginner Book Club) :broom:

Good luck!

Hi all,
I was wondering if there was a userscript that shows what levels your apprentices are. I’m not really talking about the 1-4 SRS status, but the distribution of levels in that SRS status. So if you just accessed level 11, you expect to see level 11 and 10 a lot, and a few leeches from earlier levels.
Edit: I’ve found something to this effect. Please ignore!

Also, there used to be a page where you could see your level progress over time, and also an overview of kanji per JLPT level with your API. Does anyone have a link to this site? I couldn’t really find it easily and used to use it quite a bit.
Edit: https://www.wkstats.com/

Hello,
I was wondering if there’s a way for me to see all the vocabulary I’ve learnt until now by word group, i.e. adjectives, verbs, nouns etc?

This would be useful to bring the various words I know passively via Wanikani to more active use when doing my Japanese homework, for example when I have to write sentences to practice adjective present/past tense conjugations.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

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Good ol’ Grammar… It’s a thing as you know :confused: truly… seriously… HONTO!!!

hi!

not sure if you’ve received any answers through another post or do not need it anymore but i saw a similar thread and think i found a suggestion:

by using the speech filter, it will show them. the advanced search filter will also do it!

(if you’re going to use the speech filter, you must enable it from the settings as it’s optional)

hope this helps :slight_smile:

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So, general question. In Japanese, are there regularly spaces to indicate groups of kanji or certain words? Oristherewritingjustlikethisandyouhavetofigureitout?

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There are not regularly spaces. As you get better at grammar, it becomes easier to parse out where the words are - kanji also really help with this. In beginner materials you sometime see spaces. You might also see them in children’s books written in all hiragana because it’s much harder to parse out word boundaries when there are no kanji - the long chunks of hiragana between kanji often feel a bit like ‘kana soup’ - lots of looking for particles, familiar verb endings, and words you know to try to figure out what is/isn’t a separate word.

Honestly, it gets better as you get experience reading, develop stronger grammar and vocabulary etc.

But it’s a super pain when you start and you can’t even figure out which characters comprise the word you need to look up.

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It’s a bit more like OrIsTheWritingJustLikeThis (in terms of how it feels), because the words include information within them that tells you where the breaks are, with some rare exceptions. The grammar makes one interpretation the only possible one (or at least extremely likely compared other interpretations).

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Bro I’m confused constantly…

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