I’m very new to WaniKani, but I’ve been really enjoying it so far. I feel like it really appeals to how I learn things and I like the sense of accountability it created. However, it is a somewhat specialized tool. I was interested in the opinion of a little more advanced Japanese speakers, do you think a beginner should pair WaniKani with something else or do you think there’s no need to overcomplicate the process in the early stages?
I know this is a somewhat divisive opinion, but personally I do not care about studying the grammar until I’m fairly comfortable in a language. Therefore I am not considering any grammar resources.
Edit:
I realized that my post didn’t really contain too much context. I do have some experience with Japanese, although it is difficult to evaluate my level in a helpful way. I understand the very basics of grammar through explicit learning or pattern recognition. I’ve learned languages before, but Japanese is the only non Indo-European foreign language I’ve ever had to learn, so it can definitely be challenging. But I definitely love it! I’ve been reading through some materials that interest me on LingQ, but it can be a mixed bag. Sometimes the sessions can feel satisfying while other times I really struggle with some sentences and I wonder if I’m biting more than I can chew.
Overall, some pretty interesting suggestions in the thread so far
What does “fairly comfortable in the language” mean to you? I ask because most people would include grammar as a prerequisite to feeling comfortable in the language, so it’s hard to give advice without more information.
Using only Wanikani will just teach you a bucket load of vocabulary and kanji. This can be good in some rare cases but I would strongly recommend complementing Wanikani with basically anything else whilst studying Japanese, be it books, manga, JP-subbed anime, etc.
Wanikani themselves “reccomend” picking up a grammar book around level 10, I did much earlier; but to be honest I’ve never finished my みんなの日本語 beginner series. I got my grammar knowledge knowledge through mainly just pure exposure, random articles I read online (Tofugu, the creators of Wanikani, have great articles over here) and later now Japanese classes at school (though I can’t really say I’ve learnt anything there, I’ve already tried the final exams and passed with flying colors for the course).
If you really don’t feel like reading through textbooks, at least find some native reading material and try to piece together some knowledge of Japanese grammar there from, that’s (almost) what I did and it’s worked out pretty well for me when paired with Anki.
Not too much of an “advanced” speaker, but just some recommendations from my own experience, just below N5 right now.
Using Wanikani for Japanese is a really great tool in my opinion for Kanji and a lot of vocabulary involving Kanji so you know how to use the actual kanji you learn.
With that being said, Kanji is a small part of the language which has lots of new grammar, vocabulary, reading, and immersion challenges.
I think starting with grammar and vocabulary to start is really helpful as they’re core parts of the language. It also depends how fast you wanna go to avoid burnout, depending how fast you wanna take it you can start lots of stuff so you don’t have start later. If you don’t already have a textbook, I do recommend getting one if you are more of an on-rails learner and you want kind of a pathway to follow. If you have the money to spend on tools like Bunpro, they have decks and an SRS system similar to Wanikani on many common Japanese textbooks.
Hmm, on the contrary, I would highly recommend pairing Wanikani with a grammar resource. Each new bit of grammar unlocks a ton of language comprehension ability and content.
If you’re a beginner Japanese learner, I would recommend going through the Genki series as you work on Wanikani. That will provide you with a super solid foundation in Japanese.
I am not at a super high level in Wanikani, but I focused very heavily on grammar, listening, and speaking for the past 8 years, so I am now an advanced speaker. I’m just trying to catch my reading up! 100%, I reccomend familiarizing yourself with basic grammar as you go along.
I’m not really sure what you’d pair wanikani with, other than grammar. You could try to read or listen to stuff, but if you don’t even know the basics of how the grammar works, like not even what a particle is, that’s not really possible. I suppose you could learn a lot of individual words despite not knowing now to form a sentence with them… But I wouldn’t really recommend that.
I had started grammar before I found WK, and it was extremely helpful in my WK work. I used RocketLanguages.com and also the Japanese From Zero videos for grammar and conversation. It all works together if you are serious about learning Japanese.
There is a point where grammar knowledge levels off and reading or listening for more exposure will teach you advanced grammar constructions, but until you get to that level, I recommend using some resource that focuses on basic grammar like sentence order and the function of particles. Japanese is structured differently from English and the European languages so learning that basic way a sentence can be made will help a lot. Wanikani in isolation teaches a little vocabulary and a lot of kanji, but doesn’t teach you to read.
My advice for checking your reading level would be to try the tadoku graded readers or some of the stories on satori reader to see what you can and can’t understand and look up the parts that confuse you as you go. That may be easier than simply cramming all the grammar a textbook is designed to teach you. Wanikani is built on the assumption that you as a learner are getting exposure to Japanese outside of your daily flash cards so it makes a lot of sense to pair it with reading real material.
I’d recommend testing out the language before waiting to be comfortable in the language. Particularly, reading a material that you supposedly know most or all of the vocabularies – and so to see what is the most important piece for going forward. Graded readers could be good for that purpose. Otherwise, teaching material chapter articles.
I think there are choices for either bear with ambiguity for now – deferring grammar, or properly remember from for now and forward.
I think it’s a concern of people that haven’t really learned a language.
I should have been more specific. I meant low-level fluency. When I can use the language in my day-to-day life, I get more interested in explicitly studying the grammar.
I would again say that if you haven’t studied any basic Japanese grammar, it will be impossible to use the language in your daily life. You can learn a ton of kanji and vocabulary, but if you have no idea how they are strung together to make meaning, you’ll be unable to make use of the language.
If you’re already familiar with basic grammar (off the top of my head, sentence ordering, て form, question form, various verb conjugations, volitional form, etc.) you can try diving in with some graded readers and easy immersion materials. For me, the point where I started to be able to converse with natives (with a lot of struggle) was when I had gotten about halfway through Genki 2, so if you already have that level of understanding, go for it.
On the other hand, if you really don’t want to study any grammar, you could try jumping in with very easy material and see what you can pick up. I think you might find, however, that a bit of grammar will help significantly.
I am at the point now where I can (fairly easily) pick up new grammatical forms from reading and conversations, without having to explicitly study grammar. However, I still am making a conscious effort to study it, as understanding a new concept genuinely opens so many doors.
Grammar is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but without it there’s no way to have even ‘low-level fluency’. Grammar is the key to being able to use language in your daily life. If you’re not ready to study it yet, definitely continue with the things that excite you (be that Wanikani, vocabulary, etc.) and when you feel limited in your ability to communicate/understand, start to think about it.
Say you want to write this sentence “Trees are big.” in Japanese. “Tree” and “big” are level 1 in wanikani, so you should learn those soon if you haven’t already. So, maybe you’re thinking you only need to look up the word “are” and you can write that sentence.
Here’s a link to a dictionary attempting to do that. The top few results are: selling area, state, to come, as it is, we are of equal status in this regard. None of those are what you are looking for.
This is because even saying “A is B” is so different in grammar, you need to know it in order to make that sentence.
I appreciate all perspectives even if they are different from mine. However, I also think that there’s a bit of a disconnect between what we’re talking about. I think there’s a difference in not formally studying grammar and not understanding the underlying structure of the language.
For example, the first time I ever looked into grammar in English, I was already at C2 level. I learned purely from entertainment media. Majority of the world was illiterate just a few centuries ago and yet they were definitely fluent in their native languages
I see what you are saying. It also depends a lot upon your native language and how similar the grammatical structures are in order to be able to glean meaning without targeted study. For example, my native language is English, and I have barely studied French, but the structures and root words of the languages have so many similarities that when I look at a French text (having studied zero grammar), I can pick up the gist of what’s going on.
Japanese has almost an opposite grammatical structure to English, plus a ton of concepts and way of communicating things that are far removed from my native language, so without learning about those, there was no way for me to pick up anything I was exposed to. Perhaps if your native language is closer to Japanese, you will have an easier time.
(As a side note, on the illiteracy thing, I would consider myself as being largely illiterate in Japanese for most of my language study, and still now! Literacy helps an insane amount, I wish I had focused on it earlier, but I learned most of my Japanese through conversation, specifically where we drilled various grammatical structures and sentence construction out loud. It was still ‘studying grammar’ because I was introduced to a concept and then practiced using it in different ways with a tutor, but I didn’t focus heavily on written media. Drilling basic constructions made me able to use them in my daily life (I now use them 8 hours a day at work))
Out of curiosity, how did you get to C2 level in English? You could always try the same approach in Japanese and see how it goes.
If it was through exposure to a ton of English media, you could try simulating that in Japanese. But to me, the idea of trying to understand Japanese material with 0 grammar baseline sounds like it would feel like banging my head against a wall. I think I would be super discouraged.
The chances of having any degree of fluency without studying grammar is practically zero. Unless you can immerse yourself so completely that you learn like a native Japanese child (i.e. you live in Japan and have to survive with literally no English / other language backup), you don’t really have much choice but to study the grammar rules explicitly. And even if you could do that, it sounds inefficient and painful.
Since Japanese sentence structure is so different from most other languages, I think you’ll find that a little grammar can go a long way. Many people formally study grammar through N5 and N4 (and sometimes N3) before just going 100% to “pick it up from exposure” / looking things up as needed. But you really do need the fundamentals for this to be possible. If you don’t have that and just immediately jump into reading or listening to native content, it’ll just sound like gibberish.
Only you can really decide when you’re ready to jump into the deep end. One way to test your skills would be to join the Absolute Beginner Book Club and see how well you can follow along.
My native tongue is a Kartvelian language, so it isn’t exactly similar to Japanese either haha. But I definitely get what you’re saying. Knowing English has helped me a lot with progressing in French as well. It can sometimes make the language learning process seamless. On the contrary, I have to re-wire my brain before I read anything in Japanese for the structure to make sense.
As for my previous approach. It was through exposure to a ton of English media. I did try to replicate it with my Japanese study, but the differences in the writing system seems to get in the way. In the initial stages of journey with English, I made a lot of progress via reading and then later on focused a lot more on listening. Eventually I returned to reading fairly difficult material, but that was probably purely for entertainment. With Japanese, I think Kanji gets in the way a lot. It forces me to read very slow and it can be tedious. I guess I just have to suffer through the initial stages and it’ll get better later down the line
As someone who started from an Indo-European language, learning Japanese structure is absolutely like rewiring my brain. And kanji is definitely a significant hindrance when it comes to native written material exposure.
If your native language has more similarities to English, and if you were able to be more naturally exposed to English material (and/or speakers?) in your country, I think you might eventually find that Japanese might take a different learning approach to English in the end. It can be hard when there are significant grammar, culture, and expressive differences, plus a limitation of access to everyday immersion (unless, of course, you move to Japan).
I can say with confidence that I think the fastest way to get comfortable with Japanese is to study grammar alongside Wanikani. But if you really don’t want to, it’s probably a good idea to keep engaging with what is interesting you the most. If, down the line, you feel frustration when it comes to comprehending native text or speech, give a little grammar study a chance to see how it can help.
