Radicals only

WaniKani Tips & Tricks
#4

Radicals on Wanikani aren’t the traditional radicals you would find in a dictionary. They are just smaller parts of bigger kanji that the authors of Wanikani named on their own to make up stories they use in the mnemonics. There isn’t any use in learning the Wanikani radicals if you aren’t interested in using Wanikani to learn the kanji. The stories that they have come up with for the kanji are meant to be strange and unique–you won’t know what they are unless you read them on Wanikani.

Getting fast through the levels isn’t the same as getting proficient in Japanese.

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#5

Hows your other areas? You really dont need to know every single kanji on the jlpt to pass. Probably 85% is more than enough.

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#6

No im studying Japanese for over a year now and currently doing a exchange year. But i think i haven’t expressed myself how i wanted to, i want to get through levels fast so i can remember the radicals and also do the kanji but if i get a kanji wrong i just ignore that and let the script give me another try. I just want to get that fast 6days and 18 hours for a level and not hang on a level for 3 more days because i didn’t knew 4 of the 30 kanji. But thanks for your answer

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#7

Ahhh yes. Then the ignore script is what you’re looking for. Careful though, it’s easily abuse-able. Don’t ask me how I know, it’s certainly not from experience or anything… :eyes:

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#8

Oh ok thnaks a lot i will let you know how it turned out

#9

the speed shouldn’t be much different by doing radicals only compared to doing radicals+kanji (and anyway you’d need to enter the correct answer for the kanji to unlock levels anyways).
so if anything, i’d leave out vocabulary and only learn radicals+kanji.

But i would advise against that, because the vocab really helps remembering the kanji.
also, a lot of the vocab is useful, also for the JLPT.

i’d simply use reorder and ignore on the level-critical radicals and kanji, and go fast that way. You can stop using ignore when you’ve guru’d kanji and radicals. One and a half years is plenty to finish WK that way.

i’m doing vocab and going at 7 days a level, which means i need to do about 200-300 reviews a day at my level (it takes a while for master+ reviews to pile up).
if you go for around 9 days per level, which would be around 1.5 years, it’ll be less.
i do need 1-3 hours per day. (~1.5 hours without lessons, ~3 hours with lessons)

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#10

I have… a lot of questions.

  1. Why winter 2020
  2. Learning radicals by themselves won’t mean a thing - they won’t help at all if you’re looking to give the test in December
  3. Where are you currently with your studies? It’s going to take you a very different amount of time if you’re say, N5 vs N3 in terms of current knowledge of grammar and vocab.
  4. There’s little to no point in learning kanji by yourself when wanikani is pretty exclusively a kanji learning platform - any and all vocab introduced is used to reinforce your kanji learning. You’ve already paid for access, I’d take the time to through the levels.
  5. Having the double check script - or more likely the override script, won’t help you in the way you’re describing. Their intended use is if you’ve made a typo when you know what the reading or meaning is, but fat fingers got in the way. If you just blaze through levels and ignore all the times that you’re wrong because ‘oh yeah that’s fine, I know that one’ it will not be helpful because your active recall will suffer.

Really, speed isn’t the be all and end all. It’s said that to become proficient enough in Japanese for N2 takes something approaching 1500 hours. Slow down, it’s not a sprint but a marathon.

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#11

I don’t know if these are the same figures, but when I’ve seen such figures it’s been estimates for foreign ministry diplomats studying full time in preparation for assignments. I’d say it probably takes much more than that for a regular person, especially if you want a rounded education.

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#12

I found a website saying 1500 hours with kanji knowledge, 2200 without, but I don’t know where they got the numbers from. For example, what does hour actually mean? One hour anime probably doesn’t count as one hour.

At least it means that you put in enough time to do a full time job for 1-1.5+ years.

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#13

Originally i wanted to do it at summer 2020.
I want to learn radicals because then i can study a lot of kanji on my own building up my own stories or look at the WaniKani website for that. I’m currently on exchange in japan but it ends in June so i cant take the summer 2020, and in my county there’s only the winter one.
I study daily about 6-7 hours and im surrounded by the language the whole time so i think i will have a lot more than 1500 hours by the end of this exchange. I also just want to speed my leveling speed up so i can reach level 51 until winter, also im still going to school so i think i will forget a lot until winter 2021 and also i won’t have time to revise kanji and vocab, so the sooner the better. I’m not just ignoring kanji i just don’t want them to snow me down for 3 days. And study them when they are already guru. And not use the double check script on them. I try not to be defensive, (tell me if i am) but i think I’ve not expressed myself correctly

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#14

sorry, but it’s very unlikely that you’ll remember the kanji (including readings) if you stop reviewing it when it’s guru.
If you have 6-7 hours per day, you can easily use 1-3 hours of that on doing everything on WK (‘properly’), as i outlined.
Note that vocabulary often has its own readings for the Kanji as well.

#15

Aren’t they saying that they only study them properly after they are guru?

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#16

could be, the sentence seems quite ambiguous to me.

#17

If you have that much time to study I’d recommend to use the Self-Study script together with its additional filters and just do drills on everything so you won’t forget and can advance quicker.
Learning only the radicals and the kanji characters without any vocab to rely on is prone to fade quickly from memory in my experience.

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#18

Not sure I really understand your plan, but a lot of the later ‘radicals’ are just earlier Kanji, so if you were skipping those Kanji you might have more difficulty retaining the radicals.

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#19

Why so quickly? I’m aiming for N2 in December too, but I already have level 18 and I’m going for N3 in July first. I’m not even going to get to 60 by December. I’ll probably only get to 50 max.

That said, if by October I see myself not going to make N2 in December, I’ll even push it to July. I’m not learning Japanese to pass a test. I’m learning to be fluent. And in my opinion, going fast, does not equal being good.

But that’s just my opinion.

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#20

I don’t often say this, but are you sure Heisig isn’t the better method for you?

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#21

Or MIA/RRTK.
I’d also recommend WK over that if you have the time and money, but if you want to skip kanji and vocab, WK doesn’t make sense, so you may as well do RRTK.

#22

Ok thanks for y’all’s replies i think im just continuing with the normal wk how it should be studied and if i really am not on level 51 by winter 2020 im just gonna study the few kanji that i don’t know.

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#23

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