Just wanted to give a bit of a shout out to everyone who posts here frequently. I post once in a while but I lurk daily and I’m always coming across interesting and useful tips from the community.
I’ve been reading some different threads lately about different strategies for wanikaniing, and this last month has been a huge success for me. I changed the way I was approaching studying, thanks in big part to some of the different advice from the wanikani community.
After 2.5 years I’m finally hitting a steady pace and hopefully I can keep it going.
I think getting in the right mindset is one of the biggest hurdles. Some days I would get distracted and maybe not finish reviews. By focusing on putting the time in and staying consistent I feel like its become a habit to hop on here right away in the morning and plough through.
The other big thing was I started using reorder script to spread out my kanji lessons. Before I would level up and have about 130 new lessons which would take me about 1 week to get through.
Instead I hit the radicals once I level up and then everyday I do 5 kanji lessons and 15 vocab. By the time the radicals hit guru, I’ve already been reviewing the other kanji. Also by the time I’m about to level up again my lesson count is close to 0.
I didn’t realize how much of a slog it was before trying to get through lesson piles
Lastly, a lot of the community has talked about spending more time using the language and less time using resources. I’ve been shifting my focus away from other SRS and spending more time reading/watching shows with JP subtitles. I think this has taken a lot of the learning stress away and helped me focus on WK/bunpro as the only SRS type learning tool I use right now.
Sometimes you get into a routine and its hard to break free. I think by learning from other people’s experiences I’ve been able to see the flaws in my old study habits and try something new
Well done, that’s a big improvement!
It’s always inspiring to read other people’s stories on the forum where they’ve struggled to develop a solid study routine and then finally found a combination that clicks and really progressed.
Maintaining consistency can be such a huge struggle for so many language learners, and even more so if you happen to be teaching yourself. Its hard to stay motivated sometimes with all the ups and downs of language learning where one day you feel like you’re doing great and everything seems to be making sense and then the next day you’re staring blankly at これはぺんですand wondering whether learning Japanese is even possible.
I’ve wanted to try this for a while now to see if it makes things any easier, but I’m not particularly visual when it comes to mnemonics and so I’ve become quite reliant on the vocab dump to try and reinforce the kanji as much as possible before they come back for review in a week’s time. But as you said, reviewing in this way delays your kanji progress by several days with each level up and really slows you down a ton.
Do you find it’s been more helpful to try out various new strategies in combination with one another or just one at a time before adding other things into the mix?
This was actually a lot bigger change than I had expected. Before I would have a week of doing lessons everyday, and then about 3-4 days with 0 lessons to do while I wait for kanji to guru. The new way has made it the same amount of studying, but more consistent. Instead everyday is just 20ish lessons always whether I just leveled or am nearing the next one. The other thing I noticed is my brain catalogues the kanji and vocab completely separately, so I think I have an easier time doing mixed lesson sessions of about 6 kanji/14 vocab rather than 20 kanji or 20 vocab at the same time. Before I would get some kanji confused if I learned them in the same session
I think it depends how you learn. If you are really set it your routine, maybe change 1 thing at a time rather than completely revamping your daily studies.
I sort of phased out 1 thing at a time over a few weeks and put something else in that time slot. In that way I still feel comfortable without breaking all my habits at the same time. It would be weird to wakeup tomorrow and not do any of the study habits I have spent so long to hammer into my life
Yeah this is super relevant for everyone I think. I can’t count how many times I have had this happen. In those moments I like to look at my notebook from when I started and laugh at the mistakes I made. It helps to see how far you have come
