Just wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences. Granted, I was probably somewhere between JLPT5 and JLPT4 when it came to kanji before I started WaniKani so a lot of things are kanji and vocab that I already knew. However, I feel like I was doing a great job even on unfamiliar stuff. I had consistently been getting around 95% (often 100%) on my reviews even for kanji and vocab that were brand new. I just levelled up to 9, and the last two days I am having reviews where I am only getting 60-70% correct, and I am often missing kanji that I knew before starting the course.
I have been doing this round of the Absolute Beginnerâs Book Club, thinking it would help, but now I am not sure if the looking up of other vocab (and all the new grammar I am learning) when trying to read is getting in the way of my reviews. If the answer is to just slow down, I am okay with that, I am more interesting in learning Japanese well than learning it ASAP.
My plan is to stop doing new lessons for a couple of days (I do anywhere from 10-20 new lessons each day depending on the content) and clear out my Apprentice Level to see if stuff starts sticking again, but mostly I just wanted to know if other people have been through the same thing.
Iâd say 95%+ isnât normal without a good amount of extra effort behind it (prior knowledge, reading frequently outside of WK, extra reviews, ect.) That said, <70% on a consistent basis is just going to lead to a big bloat of immature items.
For around level 9 Iâd expect that to be normal. Somewhat early on users have to transition from trivial complexity kanji to things with a lot of strokes, shared radicals, similar appearances, similar readings, similar meanings⊠it leads to a lot of close but not quite there situations that everyone is going to have to diagnose sooner or later.
The why is way more important than the how fast. Slowing down wonât solve problems unless youâre cramming or too busy to do all of your reviews on a good schedule. It also wonât help if the problem is just being inattentive to the differences are causing the problems. Donât just slow down, because thatâs an oversimplification that people parrot here while glossing over how that actually leads to improvements.
However, pausing lessons to catch up is usually a great idea. Just keep at it and try to figure out whatâs causing you pain. If you can make it through the next few levels youâll have all the tools to do the rest of WK. Good luck with your studies!
Thank for the reply. I am trying to figure out why I am missing stuff. I thought I had gotten into a really good routine doing lessons at 9am and then reviews at 1pm and 9pm each day. I started that system around level 5 or 6. It really felt like it was working great for the six or so weeks I have been doing until this week.
I am currently trying to look at the things that I have been getting wrong the last few days. I would say my biggest struggles have been with vocabulary that have slightly less common readings. I missed multiple words with äșș being ăă or ă«ă in a given compound. The other thing that I find myself stumbling on is whether or not rendaku applies in a given word.
I wouldnât worry about it. I started wanikani knowing a few kanji myself (around 150 maybe?), and in the beginning breezed through them without a second thought, barely looking at the mnemonics of the kanji I knew. But in the meantime my mind was trying to find a way to store all the new information, and at some point (I donât remember around what level that was, unfortunately) the already known kanji got also filed under the new system, and I started trying to recall them using mnemonics. Of course I drew a blank, because those kanji werenât connected to any mnemonics in my head. Add to this that I started coming across many similar looking kanji, and it suddenly all felt unmanageable for a short while. It is a self-correcting problem, however. Take the time to compare similar looking kanji you confuse, or have a quick look at the mnemonics for the kanji you already knew but âforgotâ, and very soon youâll notice a significant increase in your accuracy again. I think itâs a necessary short stage in the process if you came in with prior knowledge, and only a minor hurdle. At least thatâs how it was for me.
Are you missing the English meaning or meaning + reading? Or is it a kunâyomi vs onâyomi problem? Probably worth looking into this specifically.
95-100% seems oddly high so it might be that you knew those items very well before.
That really depends. On one hand it might if youâre learning different English glosses than the ones WaniKani favors, but also not necessarily, since WaniKani kanji are not arranged in terms of language progression.
It might be worth looking into the drop to 60-70%, though.
These kinds of mistakes often boil down to three categories.
- Rendaku
- Multiple readings
- Synonyms
At level 9 you probably havenât built a good sense of when to use rendaku yet. This will come with experience, but it is painful at first. After encountering it enough youâll begin to naturally understand when rendaku makes sense, to the point that youâll usually be able to guess the rendakuâd reading as soon as you see kanji for a new word.
Multiple readings are a pain, and you will eventually get an okay sense of which scenarios use each reading, but itâs a bit less reliable than figuring out rendaku IMO. äșș will always be the worst offender here, and perhaps searching for vocab using that character and trying to find similarities and differences will help solidify a pattern into your mind.
The synonyms are the easy one. WK is fairly strict about what answers it accepts, and IMO itâs critical to have a script that lets you retry an answer. Failing an item because you said an unaccepted but synonymous word is all too common, and you should really cut yourself some slack here. Sometimes there are subtle nuances that would translate a tiny bit differently if youâre being very strict, but as long as you understand the concept of the word thatâs enough. The nuances will get refined as you begin to read more.
Iâd slow down on new lessons for a bit, try to drill some of the pain points youâre experiencing, and perhaps look towards reading some beginner material.
Wow! You really nailed. I have been going through the things I have missed the last few days, and they pretty all fall into those three categories. I actually had a slightly different issue with synonyms. My problem is actually with the words that are synonyms I missed ç 究 when it came up because it was a couple after 究æ, and I thought to myself that canât be investigation because I just had that.
Regarding synonyms, itâs a good idea to double-check them in a dictionary when in doubt. ç 究 and 究æ have slightly different meanings 
ç 究ïŒăăïŒ - to do research (like in a lab), but also to study specific fields of life sciences like chemistry, etc. (ććŠăç 究ăă)
究æïŒăăïŒ- to investigate something scientifically, like a topic, etc.
Regarding the rendaku thing, if you are having issues with it Tofugu has a pretty big article on it.
Thereâs also a script that can help explain in reviews
ăă and ă«ă are just kind of a pita. I think there was a trick involving occupations or something for some of them, but I really canât remember it.
I do wish that there would be a bit more of an explanation on the subtle differences in these sort of words. There a couple of words where I added synonyms in WaniKani to help me with that sort of thing (although for some reason, right now I am drawing a blank on it). I also donât understand why for some words like èȘæ±ș the âprimaryâ definition seems to be the less common one. For other words, and again I apologize because I cannot think of example right now, common meanings are not even listed as options.
Yes, thatâs unfortunately one of my bigger gripes with WaniKaniâs English glosses (main gloss is misleading or points to a secondary meaning), and I think someone mentioned in a thread on the forums here that èȘæ±ș is rarely used in reference to âsuicideâ, since èȘæźș is more common.
I can relate. My way of coping with this topic (kanji and sometimes also vocab) was âvettingâ the English language terms used for every kanji and vocab before learning it. I looked each of them up on jisho.org or went into my paper jisho or, later, mono-language resources to see if there were additional meanings not covered in WK. For the kanji, there were almost always differences. These I added as synonyms to the kanji and learned those that were closer to the meaning I found everywhere else. I sometimes wrote the WK team a direct message about what I had found, citing sources and asking them to look into them again if possible. This helped me strengthen my grasp of the concept of the kanji better, which now, as I am spending most time reading or do grammar studies, has helped me when coming across new vocab to extrapolate their meaning before looking them up, when I felt the need to do so.
Hereâs what my kanji/vocab books look like. Others have done the same, sometimes much more elaborate and those are truly works of art. Might be worth to search for them in the forum, I believe there was/is a thread for that sort of thing. (underlined are the âofficialâ WK readings, the others are my additions)
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Kind of like when you would take a multiple choice test in school and after choosing âCâ six times in a row, itâs tricky to ignore that past record and select yet another âCâ, and everyone has psyched themselves out of a correct answer like that many times before. It doesnât matter that you may have already reviewed a similar kanji, and ignoring prior answers is something that youâll need to actively work on for a while.
I highly recommend using Yomichan if you do reviews in the browser. Just hold shift, mouse over the word, and youâll get a bunch of additional context. It helps a lot with similar words in my experience.
For example [edit: lmao terrible example, I happened to pick a word with no additional contextâŠ]:
Early on itâs easy to fall into the mindset that WK will give you mostly unique words, but youâre going to get used to seeing synonyms very, very quickly. I also fell into the trap of âit couldnât be x because I already used x a few reviews agoâ, and thatâs just not a feasible way to reason through it. Try to ignore prior reviews and just focus on whether the phonetic reading jogs your memory, as well as whether the kanji helps recall.
Maybe you see ç 究 and the kanji combination doesnât instantly jump out at you, but as soon as you figure out the reading ăăăă ă, you recognize that as being âresearchâ. Or alternatively, maybe you see 究æ and gather that it is probably read as ăă ăăă. That doesnât ring any bells, but the kanji âresearchâ and âbrightâ make you remember âHow do you make your research brighter? By furthering your investigationâ. Even if you didnât land exactly on the word âinvestigateâ, but rather the concept of âresearching something to make it more clearâ, thatâs enough of an understanding to know the word when you read it. Anchoring to an exact English counterpart is not required.
I love the notebook idea!
When I first started I was taking notes, and then I found myself not referring. I think I am going to start at the very least making a notebook of anything I get wrong so I can do a better job of tracking what I am struggling with.
Thanks!!!
Itâs unfortunate that word was a bad example, but another trick worth mentioning for more advanced learners is that you can configure the profiles in yomichan to display a J â J entry and set a second profile to show J â E dictionaries on the next popup level. Someone mentioned mono-language dictionaries earlier and this is really nice bridge for giving better context without having to tab out all the time.
Thanks, I tried installing Yomichan forever ago, but for some reason had mixed results trying to use it (this was before I start WaniKani). I will give it another try!
Iâm just going to say äșș sucks and I still hate it (but am actually getting more consistently right about which reading it is in compounds, for some, unknown reason).
And as you go up in levels, youâre going to psych yourself out a lot with âbut didnât that other word meanâŠâ - there are so many words that gloss the same in WK, but are subtly different (Iâm looking at you, all of the words that gloss as âjudgeâ that I keep screwing up). Itâs okay - itâs part of learning - as you see those words in context, it does get better, and you do get more confident about what they mean. Learning the word decidedly doesnât end with WK - but the WK gloss is (usually) a reasonable jumping off point - kind of like knowing âminisculeâ means âsmallâ - true and good enough to get a rough sense of a sentence that contains the word, but not complete.
Relating to the Yomichan part of this conversation. Hereâs a great resource:
- How to Set Up and Use Yomichan with Anki (and SUPERCHARGE your Japanese reading)
- Using Yomichan to Learn Japanese (referenced in the video above)
It took about 5 minutes to setup Yomichan on chrome, installed the default dictionaries from the Yomichan site, and installed necessary Anki plugins to be able to 1-click add words to Anki deck. Whatâs also nice is that the generated anki cards are also editable in review mode.