Overwhelmed by kanji

I am learning Kanji from WaniKani for almost 5 months. I’ve reached 10th level and I feel I am struggling with learning more new kanji.

I started my journey by learning 15 elements (radicals/kanji/vocab) every day. After doing 7 levels I lowered that number to 10 elements per day. But I still think I am struggling while learning new kanjis.

The more kanji I already know, the more time I need to spend to learn new one.

Also I feel that I have same set of kanji that are going from Apprentice to Guru level and while doing reviews, I am failing, so the same set goes back to Apprentice and the cycle continues.

The most problematic for me is learning reading of the vocab/kanji, but I feel I am starting to have trouble with learning meaning too.

Did you faced similar problems on your journey with Japanese?
How did you manage to improve and go through this struggle?

For now I thought that writing practice could add new sense (touch and manual work) and through that, improve process of memorization. But the amount of kanji since level 1 that I would need process is holding me back a little bit.

This helped me, I would just make a handwritten list of all the kanji I failed (including in vocab) in a given session and then practice writing lines of those kanji while keeping the meanings and readings in mind. I did that for a while while not doing new lessons (until my review accuracy improved) and now I practice writing new kanji as I learn them.

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Are you doing any grammar study? Learning grammar and then interacting with the language by starting to read will help a lot as well.

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Perhaps you are simply studying too many kanji too quickly. If you reduce the number of lessons you do (or even stop for a while), the reviews will calm down a bit and you may be able to focus on the meanings you already have.
I have tried several strategies (and restarted) - my most successful option has been just to add 5 new lessons every day. I am progressing at about half your speed, but along with my grammar studies and reading I am very happy with how I am going.

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Are you spending enough time learning each item? Or do you just try to burn it into your head and move on? Because you need to create meaningful connections to remember it.

Observe the kanji and think about what is the first thing that comes to your mind. What does it look like to you? When you see it in review, what is your first guess? Do you look at answer right away or analyze the bad guess? Do you do reviews according to schedule or let it bunch up? If a kanji is similar to another kanji, compare them next to each other and focus on the differences. If the mnemonic you use doesn’t help you, find a better one that fits you personally. You don’t have to remember it exactly the way it is presented here.

Other factors may contribute as well, like when do you introduce new items? Morning, lunch, evening? Do you immediatelly jump to other things? Do you learn other things in your daily life? Since you already want to train writing, try physical flash cards. Keep them close and use them often.

Learning anything starts with learning about yourself. If you know how you think, you can do things more efficiently.

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I did struggle and came to the same conclusion you did. Writing down the items with their meanings and readings was definitely a game changer, it really helped me make a significant jump with dealing with new kanji outside of wanikani. I try not to learn more than 5 new kanji and even less when it comes to the radicals, so I can space the amount of new materials in a way that doesn’t overwhelms me.

Keeping an eye on the level of my apprentice (trying to keep it between 50 and 70 as much as possible) and trying not to go overboard with the number of lessons per day has also helped, it means not doing new lessons some days, which is fine. And always backing it all up with grammar and graded readers and now with gaming.

It took me some time to create real familiarity with the writing system, there’s only so much you can deal with when it’s all new and there’s nothing familiar that you can build the new information upon. Reading is important because it gives you some real feedback where you are not being tested, you just doing stuff at your own pace, and when you read material that is suitable for your level it’s an excellent positive reinforcement of everything you’ve learned.

You can read about people’s journey while it happens in the study logs section you’ll be able to find all kind of approaches see if anything speaks to you.

You can also see some examples of how to deal with leeches and mnemonics that don’t work for you on this thread Confusing Mnemonics and Leeches Help Thread

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About vocabularies, and then Kanji reading, I find recalling more important than the effort to memorize. So, grammar, reading, listening, and production can easily be useful.

Kanji shape, and perhaps meanings, may involve more memorization effort. However, knowing enough vocabularies for a Kanji, and Kanji meanings would be covered too.

I also have found that handwriting is useful, up to vocabulary level. Individual Kanji writing and vocabulary writing helped in different ways. Say, how much do I recall while writing each time. But I don’t write meaning or reading, only type in WaniKani.

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I am doing Bunpro and I am in like 1/4-1/3 of doing everything on N5 level. But I still think my grammar is on too low level to start reading.

Do you know some resources I could try?
How did you approached reading? When you started?

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And how do you feel with that pace? Do not you feel doing it too slow? Or being behind?
I had that problem when I was going down from 15 lessons to 10 per day.

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in terms of reading/recognition - context, context, context.

kanji by itself is difficult to learn. but kanji in context is much easier.

if we’re cooking, we’re more likely to be seeing kanji like 水、燃、食.
talking about clothes - 着、履く
studying - 勉強、学校、生徒
weather - 日、雲、雪、晴、雨 etc

reduce the possibility space of what things could mean. soon you will internalise the most common things you see and don’t need to use actual processing power to decipher, so you can move on to the things you see less. it’s a virtuous cycle.

if you think you’re a complete beginner, try tadoku readers. start from level 0 and work your way up.

the key is also sustainability. i dont like the learn x per day method because sometimes you have off days or you’re busy or whatever. if your review load for the day is going to be high, it’s okay to lower your new lessons or whatever. they’ll be there tomorrow.

learning is a marathon, not a sprint. the important thing is that a year, two years from now, you can keep going

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I think you are right that I was trying to burn everything into my mind.
Until now, my approach was to do 10/15 lessons, repeat last done lessons (default WK option) three times and that was wasn’t focusing on mnemonics because some of them was bad for me, they didn’t match the kanji/word I was learning. Maybe because I am not native English speaker.

I was doing my lessons around noon. And trying to do review in few sessions. Usually I was looking at the reviews schedule and trying to not let them create too big stack.

Yes, I am aware of that and it’s something I am always keeping in mind. I am trying not only to learn Japanese, but also observe the process of learning and improve it all the time.
Just this issue with kanji was something that I had no straight idea how to solve. That’s why I decided to ask you about your ideas and solutions.

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And how do you feel about this pace? Don’t you feel that you are learning too slow? Or that you are behind? I had this issue when I was moving from 15 lessons a day to 10.

Yes, this is something I am also keeping in mind. I am always below 100 items on apprentice level. Right now I want to let it go down to around 30, ideally even more.
My priority for now is to get rid of the “always coming back” elements and improve my accuracy.

May I ask at what level of Japanese knowledge did you started reading? Where did you found books/materials to read?
I wanted to start but I always feel that I am lacking on some part of Japanese.
I had struggle with small vocab, now I feel that my grammar is not good enough to start reading.

Thank you very much. I will look at them for sure. I hope I will find some inspiration to improve my learning process :slight_smile:

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Almost everyone new to Japanese has the same problem eventually. I think it’s mostly because your brain isn’t very good at learning this stuff yet. The symbols are unfamiliar, the sounds are unfamiliar, and it just keeps coming.

When you start to feel the pressure of not remembering, the first thing to do is slow down or stop lessons for a little bit, continue with the reviews, in the grand scheme of learning Japanese this won’t set you back at all. In addition to what I’m going to say below, reading, watching, listening, and then speaking Japanese should be the focus of learning the language, WK is just an assisting tool, don’t get too hung up on it.

Once you’ve got some of the stress out of the way, the next thing to do is have a proper process for learning kanji and really stick with it.

For me, the initial process I followed was:

  1. Mostly ignore the mnemonics given.
  2. Create a small story that went from the radicals to the meaning of the Kanji.
  3. Have a story element for every sound that any kanji can make, and add that to the story for the meaning. I had to keep a note of them because my memory is rubbish.

So… for a simple one: 情, feeling, has the soul and blue radicals, makes the sound じょう. The story would be about Joe (じょう) feeling blue. Early on these mnemonics were pretty outlandish with visuals / sounds to make them memorable, now it would be “Joe’s soul is feeling blue”. Then, on first recall after learning, ignore the fact that you can probably still remember it and go through your mnemonic to get the answer. Later, you look at the kanji, see soul & blue, oh that’s “Joe’s soul is feeling blue”.

Then you need a process for learning words. Some are nice and simple and just make the sound of the kanji and have an obvious meaning. For everything else, listen to the sound of the word, repeat it out loud - this is especially important for rendaku and small tsu replacements, saying it helps you get a feel for them and eventually you end up being surprised when a word doesn’t do it when you expect. If its meaning or sound is at all non obvious create a story linking the kanji to the meaning and the sounds in the same way you did for the kanji.

Another simple one: 幸い, “Simon, why are you always so happy?”, さいわい, happiness.

Once you have been doing this for a while there’s a later stage. Remembering kanji becomes easier, and you will be more interested in the differences between similar kanji and similar meanings, so you adapt your process accordingly.

At the same time, you’ve got a bunch of words and kanji tucked away so you can start to use them as well: “Ah, what was the onyomi for head? It’s in 叩頭 which is こうとう so it’s とう. In fact the mnemonic was something about head being next to some toes…” etc.

I have done a bit of kanji writing practice to help differentiate similar kanji, and it did work. Too slow and too much effort in the end to use all the time though.

HTH.

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I’ve been working on this for years off and on, not really trying too hard and overwhelm myself. I think it started sinking in when I began learning grammar and trying to read simple sentences, the pieces starts to fall into place. And then gradually it just builds up from there.

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I’m not a beginner, I had a 4 years break after learning for about 2-3 years in which I started it super casually and after about a year added wanikani to the mix.
Learning for me is not about speed is about understanding and building familiarity.
The pace I do reviews now is flexible, If the items are items I already know, I’ll increase the amount I add to the lessons, since it doesn’t add to the stress of recognizing new material.
Wanikani level structure is just a structure. I’m in a place where what important to me is my overall ability to read and deal with new kanji (which wanikani taught me how) so while the gamification aspect is fun and rewarding at times (new level, I can recognize x amount of kanji) it’s not what I’m focused on, it’s just one of the things I’m using.
I have those moments when the only thing that interferes with understanding a sentence is just the kanji, and yes it makes me wish I knew more already, but I also know that learning takes time, and I can only learn one item at a time not everything all at once, and 4 years of chaotic studying got me pretty far.

So I started reading graded readers at about level 10. And this was the what I used and then I bought some of their printed material when I went to Japan (as well as Genki 1 and 2 that I used at some point but not as deep studying cause I don’t like the format)

Another option is Park’s You can read Japanese! short stories for Japanese learners. It can really help you with some of your leeches like counters and such.

If you are familiar with the masu form, you’d be able to read graded readers and parallel texts just fine, the first levels don’t go beyond it, you have furigana and with some graded readers there’s also audio narration. The parks ones have a glossary and an english version of the story at the end of each story.

You also have The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List!
and this thread Graded Readers and Parallel Texts "Book Club"

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You can start reading whenever you want. I have a low grammar level too, but I love reading so I do immersion reading practice everyday and pay attention to when I see grammar that I already know.

In the meantime you could try MaruMori as they have reading practice in between their grammar lessons. There are also Japanese language learning video games on steam that you can wishlist. One of those games are out right now. The best immersion I have seen is Wagotabi, but you’d have to request being a beta tester for it. It quickly gets you reading in all Japanese without overwhelming you.

I think it’s also okay to cut back to just doing 5 a day instead of 10 a day if you are getting overwhelmed.

There is also Crystal Hunters which is a manga that teaches Japanese. You read the guides first and then the volume.

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Aww yes, level 10, about the time that burn reviews start. This is when you release that your previously workable lesson amount no longer works because burn reviews take so much more brain power than any other review combined.

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I think it’s normal not to remember everything. There’s a lot of stuff in WK, lots of vocab words, and also lots of stuff that I’m certain I will hardly ever use. I’m at a similar level as you, and am also having more trouble with WK.

The main thing for me is to be realistic. I try to focus on the important stuff, and am currently trying to ramp up my reading through Satori. After all, the real goal of using WK is to be able to read. If you come across the kanji/vocab often, it will start to really get burned into your memory.

I personally also use an undo script. If I fail an item that I think it’s important, I really fail it and will come back soon in the reviews.

My personal nightmare are verbs. Transitive/intransitive, I hardly ever remember one or the other. I try not to pay to much attention to that. Learning a language is a long process, and if I ever need the verb or encounter it through reading, I will then learn it.

So I would really recommend you to start reading. If you want to get more acquainted with simple grammar structures, I recommend you the Michel Thomas Japanese course (you can try to find it in youtube).

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I’m happy with my current pace - I was doing 10 lessons a day up to around level twenty and then I slowed down. I have a good base and prefer feeling unhurried.

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What helped me a lot in the beginning was to test my ability to recall (with an app like KaniWani or Kamesame). It gives you the English word and you have to remember the Japanese.

I used it as a drill, where I put an item that I failed back in the queue until I got it right.

Best of luck!

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