Hello everyone! I am new to WaniKani and was introduced to this by a friend. I have casually been learning Japanese for a few months now but really want to get stuck into the Kanji side of things.
If anyone has any tips on how I can get started and enjoy my adventure here on WaniKani, it would be greatly appreciated.
Love from the UK!
It’ll start very slow, but pick up kind of suddenly.
Once you get a little bit higher, I recommend doing only 10-15 lessons a day, and try to keep your total apprentice count to below 100. Doing more is definitely possible, but that requires a lot of consistent extra time devoted to reviewing outside of the app so that you can knock out your kanji quickly within WK. Otherwise you’ll just get random waves of a lot of kanji/vocab. Don’t use a re-order script for this same reason, it requires a lot of consistency that if you slow down or screw up it’ll hurt more than if you just did it properly.
Max speed burns most people out. A few people have managed it, so if you need to learn the stuff quick for a good reason, it’s doable. If not, take the time to really breathe as you go ahead. Your pace is your own, and you’ll find it on your own.
Good luck.
Still pretty new here myself, but yeah I’d say give it a fair try and trust people when they say it speeds up. The first three free levels will all feel a bit on the slow side.
There are a lot of kanji learning systems out there, and some may work better for you than others. Look and see what’s out there.
Wanikani is one of the more pricey choices, but it does a lot of the upfront work of deciding what to study and in what order for you. It also tells you how often to ‘review’ in order to keep the information fresh. You will see yourself progress, and I’ve found it so far to be motivating. It’s also got a community as you’ve found of other users with a common goal to yours. Other kanji learning systems have some aspects of this for less, but WK seems to combine most of it into something that works (so far) for me. It doesn’t teach everything (e.g. stroke order, some missing Joyo and JLPT kanji), but it seems like a good start.
In any case I’d explore multiple resources and use the one(s) that work best for you.
Get yourself some userscripts.
I suggest “real numbers” and “ultimate timeline”, but you should check out others as well.
I’ll give you instead a suggestion that’s a bit different from the usual ones.
Don’t use scripts! It will teach you that making mistakes is ok, and learning Kanji is not a race.
Sorry, but this is kind of ignorant. There are many more scripts that don’t help with reviews in any way than ones which do.
This 100% depends on the type of person and type of learner you are. It’s okay to suggest not using scripts, but you should at least explain why. It doesn’t teach you that making mistakes is okay if you use them honestly.
Why? I’m just suggesting that he tries without scripts, as the basic WK experience is good enough to learn Kanji. Of course there are many kind of scripts, many useful for sure. But I feel that every time a new lerners comes in we give the impression that he/she needs to use scripts if he wants to learn better, or plan better, or make the site look better, or enjoy it better. I’m just here to say that going script free is not only possible, but also enjoyable!
It’s ignorant because you don’t seem to know about scripts other than the likes of Override and Reorder, which are in the minority. Most scripts have no way, whatsoever, to hurt your learning process.
My main advice would be to just let the SRS system work its magic. WaniKani will start out pretty slow, and even after some levels you may start thinking that it’s too slow or that it’s too easy. But rest assured, things will pick up as you get further along. Also, getting things wrong isn’t the end of the world. When I first started out I obsessed with getting everything right, and may have even cheated a bit by looking up readings and meanings, and it burned me in the end. Just go about your reviews honestly and everything will come together. Good luck! And if you have questions, take a search in the forums and you’ll most likely find your answer.
Read my message please. I’m just saying that Wanikani can be enjoyed without scripts, so that a newcomer can just jump on board without having to learn how to install scripts, and which scripts one should use, and how to use them, etc.
There’s a lot of people whose first suggestion when one joins is to use scripts, which can be a bit daunting, also because the info on scripts is scattered through so many posts over so many years. Am I allowed to suggest that one can do it also without if she/he wishes?
I just want to make the message clear that you don’t necessarily NEED scripts, but of course you CAN use as many as you wan, and I’m sure there are many which make WK a more complete experience.
Of course! But that’s not what you said. You explicitly told this new user not to use them. And saying that they teach you making mistakes is okay is also misleading unless you explain why you think that.
I think maybe just putting more detail as to why you feel that way in your first post would have cleared things up a bit. Yes, WaniKani can be enjoyed without scripts, but you can have an equally enjoyable experience with scripts as well.
That was not how you phrased it, though. You said “Don’t use scripts!” and then offered a misleading statement. 
I still stand by my original post. It was just a suggestion. Start without scripts. Less worries, more enjoyment. I say this not because I believe it’s the absolute true, but just because I want there to be one suggestion regarding not using scripts, compared with a previous one which suggested starting with scripts immediately.
I understand. I hope I clarified it better now. Cheers.
Neither of the suggested scripts had anything to do with not accepting mistakes or treating kanji “like a race.”
But the only advice I can really get behind is “go at your own pace.” For some of us, that’s max speed or close to it.
Just keep at it! I’ve been here about 2 months so far and almost to level 7!
If you have the money for it (which if you are paying for WaniKani I’m sure you do) I’d highly recommend Remembering the Kanji (some people abbreviate it as RTK).
Helps me a lot – I usually study about 15 Kanji from the book a day in addition to what I do here. By the time I get to a new Kanji in my list I usually know the meanings, and can just focus on the mnemonics which is what I think this tool does best!
I think there are two sentences:[quote=“lamarozzo, post:6, topic:31551”]
Don’t use scripts! - personal advice
It will teach you that making mistakes is ok, and learning Kanji is not a race. - this one is about WK
[/quote]
I do use review timeline and another one is showing srs status of items in dashboard. I like vanilla WK lesson and review experience.
It was always a personal advice. But I learned that suggesting not to use scripts can get you into heated debates, so I will keep this secret for myself! 