Recommened resources to fill gaps in learning Japanese?

WaniKani
1

Hi y’all, so I’m looking for advice on what I should do to fill in the gaps with my current Japanese study plan and trying to “future proof” as well. Right now I’m using Wanikani, Genki for grammar, and Bunpro solely to review the grammar learned in Genki. Moving at a solid pace. I’d like to get into reading as soon as I can, I heard that it’s a good time to get into reading after finishing Genki 1.

However, I know that Wanikani doesn’t cover all kanji/vocabulary, and I know that there are other resources that do cover a lot more but then there would be overlap between the 2. I really do like Wanikani and don’t want to replace it completely with something like Anki (unless it would really cover everything and wouldn’t just be substituting one platform’s shortfalls for another, which seems like a guarantee). I’m really just looking for a resource that covers the few kanji and thousands of vocabulary Wanikani doesn’t. What do y’all recommend to learn vocab that Wanikani doesn’t teach and when should I do that? Is there an Anki deck just for non-Wanikani stuff?

Similarly, because Genki 1 and 2 only cover grammar up to N4, what do y’all recommend after that? More advanced textbooks after that, and keep reviewing with Bunpro? That doesn’t seem so complicated as the vocab issue.

The problem I’m facing is that it seems like figuring out how to learn the language is harder than actually doing the work. If I set my mind to a specific plan I can show up everyday, put in the work, and make great progress. I get more burnt out than anything trying to engineer what plan to even have than actually learning. I have a high-intensity career starting soon and (although not 100% possible) I’d like a “show up and do the work” structure as much as I can. It seems like you can have 3-4 resources, carefully use them for their exact purpose, spend hours on it everyday, and still be missing something very basic and have to study that separately. I know that to some degree you do have to get used to not knowing everything, but I’d like to avoid that as much as possible. Fill in the gaps whenever possible.

TLDR: 1. What do y’all recommend to learn vocab that WK doesn’t teach, and when to focus on that? 2. What grammar resources do y’all recommend after Genki 1 and 2?

Thanks y’all.

Love,
Fish

2

Not super experienced but something that’s been working well for me is the vocab decks on bunpro! You can sync it with your wanikani so it doesn’t reteach you vocabulary you already know, and you can have it only show furigana for kanji you don’t know from WK. In addition to the standard bunpro n5-n1 vocab decks, there are also lots of community decks which can help with more niche needs! (And you can make your own.) There are even decks specifically for certain manga & anime which can help with starting immersion.

3

read and listen. using the language is a tremendous gap-filler. it sucks it’s difficult and it’s slow but it gets easier every day that you do it.

for example, i discovered just now that i have learned the word 偉い, which uses a level 51 kanji, just by coming across it enough: my first time i remember hearing it is in JoJo—in the Egypt arc there’s a villain who says 偉いね！a weirdly large amount. then it got used once or twice in my reading and today it came up again in よう実, which doesn’t have furigana, and i looked it up just to double check and yep, i got it right! 偉いね！

i don’t have an anki deck for vocab or anything, i just look up words and grammar patterns i struggle to parse. and then i look them up the next time. and the next time. and then eventually i don’t need to look them up.

4

Don’t overwhelm yourself with finding resources or using too many. I have been using Wanikani for kanji and vocab it provides, and Bunpro for grammar. The more you advance levels in these tools the more likely you are to forget previous items you studied.

If you want to be able to read, speak, and listen there’s no getting around the struggle of actually using what you have learned on actual things you like, be it reading manga, listening to podcasts or anime, or talking with natives. I think this is what ultimately takes you to comfortability and often we get stuck trying to find the best tool. Keep studying, keep consuming what you like, and take breaks.

5

Perhaps writing, but not sure how to make it minimal and fit into daily routine. Maybe something like Japanese Sentence a Day Challenge

Getting corrections in LangCorrect.com could give some better understanding of grammar. What you were led to believe to be, but not really so.

imo, it’s still a different skill from s proper two-way communication, but I am not quite a conversationalist myself. It may help to get a private teacher, or make a live chat for that. There are also several Discord for the purpose.

6

You sound pretty well covered with what you have for now. Major things you need to learn to start deciphering some Japanese are grammar and vocab, and your sources will get you started on those. Really, once you can successfully get a foothold in reading and listening, you don’t need much of anything anymore. I just used WK and Genki (some optional side things like Satori Reader as a quick onramp to reading) and after Genki 2, that was it. Look up everything you don’t know, if you have the patience for it, plug new words you discover into Anki, and you can ride that all the way to fluent understanding. Of course, writing and speaking will need their own practice to whatever level you want to. But that general path is what I’d recommend after just sticking with what you have now for a while.

Also just want to note that after Genki 2 tends to be the more doable time to start reading for a lot of people (not counting learner-aimed graded readers and the like). Still super difficult at that level, but Genki 1 alone leaves many very basic holes in your knowledge. That said, do attempt and work at it any time you feel up to it; there are people out there who basically do that from day 1 and just look up everything, bashing their head against the wall really hard for a bit, so “too early” is only a matter of your own tolerance. Just want to set your expectations that after Genki 1 isn’t a manageable level for a lot of people so you aren’t set up to be disappointed if you find it to be not quite time yet.

Oh also want to note that there are actually quite a lot of kanji not covered on WK; you’ll be discovering new ones forever, so there is no filling in the gaps thoroughly. I’m assuming you’re thinking of the jouyou list or something, but that’s not exhaustive and plenty of things not on it are more useful to know than things on it. In the end what you really need to come away with is knowledge of how to learn new kanji, words, and grammar for yourself because no resource can take you anywhere near all the way.

7

I like that idea, are you able to sync it so it doesn’t teach you any items you have done a lesson for on Wanikani (not just burned items)? Does it resync if you then do new lessons on WK?

8

Huh ok, that’s interesting. I would’ve thought more advanced textbooks after Genki 2 would be the move, but the idea of primary learning grammar through Japanese material after that is very appealing to me. I don’t necessarily mind the bashing head against the wall strategy so long as you can reasonably trust the process. I think I would get burnt out quickly trying to jump into reading right away, but after Genki 2 seems reasonable. I feel like I’d want to know at least know most-ish of what’s on the page. If it’s like 30% unknown, that’s ok. If it’s like 80% unknown, I would feel its not an efficient use of my time and I should spend more time studying first. I’ll make the plan to mostly start reading after Genki 2 for now, maybe use bunpro for some advanced grammar review. Try some graded readers and such before as well.

9

Personally I would be careful to not get too much reading input without listening. It tends to result in mediocre pronunciation. If your focus is mainly reading for now that’s okay, just something to be aware of.

When it comes to reading I would recommend targeted vocab study for your text. Nothing helps you reading as much as actually learning the words you will come across. Let’s assume you want to read manga x, I’d search for it on jiten.moe or jpdb.io and pre learn a good chunk of vocab if you don’t like looking things up. If you don’t mind lookups that much, pre learning only a little might be enough. Don’t overdo it or you will forget a large amount before you see it actually in context.

I’d limit my SRS time (WK, jiten, bunpro) to MAXIMUM 1h (less is more) and concentrate on the thing that actually excercises your wanted skills. All assuming you have the basics down as daisoujo already said.

Also recommend to not overthink and instead experiment a bit with what you want to do and simply see how it goes.

10

It works great! Going for more textbooks can be fine as well for some people, and there’s always the option to get grammar books like the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series to refer to as well if you like to have more detailed explanations once you’ve encountered something. But yeah what you’ll find when you hang around people who have reached a high level of Japanese understanding is that the prevailing thought is usually that your best, real learning and internalizing happens more than anything through encountering the Japanese in context and just repeatedly being exposed to it.

I did quite like Satori Reader if you want an in between step of full graded readers and native Japanese. The book clubs on this site are also very helpful to walk you through and break apart anything you struggle with.

Can vouch for it myself, no direct study after genki 2 (and I went most of the way but not quite all on WK) except on and off anki flashcards for new words I came across in what I read, I’m somewhere beyond N1 at this point. I’m still tightening up my ability to listen to rougher speaking styles well at times but speed of spoken JP is no problem and with reading outside deep end hard stuff my focus is basically just on getting faster at it, too. Unknown words never fully stop but they’re very tiny inconveniences now. It absolutely works. To be fair I’m pretty weak at output because I keep getting derailed when I think it’s time to get more serious about practicing it, but we’ll get there eventually :sweat_smile:

11

Honestly, I am not sure about throwing custom vocabularies in the SRS. “Memorization” doesn’t equal “SRS”.

Actually, imo, anything that requires you to recall would help build into medium and long term memory. Well, short term may be something different.

About vocab list of a reading material, personally I am not sure to use that outside textbook essays or learner-oriented reading materials, that is, vocab list at the end of the chapter. I have some degree of mistrust towards computerized word segmentation (that is machine-learning, not humanistic).

That being said, I am not against learning vocab outside context, as long as you can find a good dictionary for each vocab. Though, that might not be a good use of limited time per day, that you mentioned.

I think がんばって with looking up vocab and phrases might be the way, just with moderation and care for time used, while grammar and Kanji are being built up.

12

According to bunpro’s website, there are three settings for vocab imported from WK:

  1. Default
    • Marks items Guru and above in WaniKani as Seasoned (SRS 8) in Bunpro. Burned items get marked as Mastered. All imported items will be added to your Review queue.
  2. Practice
    • Marks all items Guru and above in WaniKani as Seasoned (SRS 8) in Bunpro (including Burned items). All imported items will be added to your Review queue.
  3. Mastered
    • Marks all items Guru and above in WaniKani as Mastered (SRS 12) in Bunpro. No items will be added to your Review queue.

For kanji, you can set it to not show furigana for kanji you learned on WK (guru or higher). For both settings, sync happens automatically every time you open BP.

13

If you’ve already been doing WK for a while, I strongly recommend using the Mastered setting when you do your first sync. When I started with Bunpro I used one of the other options and was hit by a tidal wave of 2000+ reviews.

14

Definitely agree! I was only level 5 when I synced so it was only a hundred or so reviews a day at first, less as time went on.

15

I might not be much further along than you. I’m sort of the opposite, though, using maybe too many resources vs not enough.

That said, my advice would be: don’t be Anki-averse, and don’t be averse to covering material in more than one spot. It’s okay to learn things twice.

If you’re not ready for reading a lot of native content yet, I’d say do one Anki deck: the Kaishi 1.5k deck. You can add furigana to it, if you like. And turn FSRS on in Anki, if it’s not on by default. It is light-years ahead of the SRS that Bunpro uses for vocab. Even if you do the Bunpro vocab decks, Kaishi is great and is a frequency deck, and the FSRS is wonderful too.

If you find the sentences in the Kaishi 1.5k deck too hard, that means there is some vocab or grammar lag, in which case I’d say do an N5 deck first (the Bunpro one if nothing else is preferable). Nothing else is as good as Kaishi 1.5k with FSRS turned on though.

Satori Reader is also great (for reading material, not to drill vocab), and it links with WaniKani similarly to how Bunpro does.

For grammar, you can use Bunpro to learn it, not just to review it. It always points to external resources, which can also be used. Yokubi and Tae Kim are both great. It wouldn’t hurt to read both. Again, covering the same things more than once, from different sources, is a great way to learn, not something to fear.

Other than that, a lot of reading and listening (and people can recommend sources for that too)! Of course, there are other resources as well. Pimsleur is highly imperfect, but it does some things well that nothing else does, and I’ve been enjoying blitzing through it. You have to use what you like best and what works well for you!

16

I prefer textbooks Nakama 1 and 2 over the genki textbooks. After those beginner level books you can use tobira for n3 level. Then Authentic Japanese: Progressing from Intermediate to Advanced for n2 level. Then shin kanzen master for n1 level.

17

Just another plug for Satori Reader. Not only do you get some reading practice, but it’s all recorded with native speakers as well, so you can listen to each sentence as you read it (click to play one sentence at a time, nice). Plus, one of Satori Reader’s best kept secrets, and very valuable, is that any word you click on will have the IN CONTEXT definition shown, not just “all” the definitions like most dictionaries will show. They actually took the time to curate everything to such a degree that it boggles the mind. You won’t find that level of care anywhere else on the internet. In addition to all that, they have little mini-lessons spread throughout everything (which are optional), so you get reminders or lessons on grammar or other little tidbits that are well done.

I’ve never been more happy to give someone my money than when paying my annual subscription to Satori. I read one “chapter” (really just a couple pages worth) a day, so for me there’s a few years worth of content there.