I have been doing wanikani nearly literally every day for almost 3 years now. I went into vacation mode once during a surgery. It has been one of the few things unchanged in the time period. I got married, changed jobs, moved to my first home, and adopted a Shiba Inu. But during all that I kept plinking away at kanji. Full of leeches and one of readings my kanji progress slowed under the weight of reviews. I previously tried to keep around 100 apprentice items, but I was unsustainably doing 40-50 lessons all at once. The new 3 batch a day defaulted to 15 lessons for me, this has been the best change the team has made since I started. I went through level 33 in 12 days a feat I haven’t been any faster then since level 4 back in 2021.I was on level 32 for 132 days because of leeches and mistakes on “mastered content”. This is exactly what I needed to get a second wind and double down. I will hit level 60.
Unfortunately I need to make the same commitment to grammar, without Wanikani’s “gamification” of learning I have not kept up with any other learning. I think this will help me jog my memory and “relearn” some of my burned kanji additionally. I hate using ANKI but may have to finally give in on that one. Does anyone else find they lose the “story” behind the radicals and some of the readings but typically the meaning of the kanji stays memorized? Certainly does me a disservice for similar kanji but I dont think my brain can hold those stories forever : P.
I am dedicating my month to immersion and at least 1 hour of new grammar study per day.
Have you tried bunpro? I’m not personally a fan, but if you find studying grammar in a straightforward way too dry and hard to keep motivated for it, the SRS/level system of bunpro might be right up your alley.
I can only talk about the story part: I too forget the storys. But thats not a problem since the kanji stays in my head. The stories are just support wheels for me until an item is in guru, then I remember it without the story.
The stories are supposed to vanish, as you don’t need them and they only serve for initially recognizing the Kanji and helping your brain to “dissect” the different components, the last reason probably being, why WK is a good option for Kanji. If you still need the stories to get to the meaning of a Kanji by the time its enlightened or burned, you probably don’t know it very well by then.
Also as you said you already burned out from WK SRS, I would advise against any other SRS method. Anki can be helpful for specific words and in small doses, but it will absolutely burn you out if 15 WK lessons already rob you of all the fun with the language.
If you want to try something more “fun”, I would just get Satori Reader (or any other stories that interest you, maybe news articles or whatever) and look up points you think you absolutely need to understand to get the gist of the story/article, like important vocab or even grammar points. I always found Tae Kims Guide quite helpful for a quick search of beginner/intermediate grammar points.
Getting the gist of most stuff is absolutely enough in the beginning, more will eat up most of your time and you will get better quite fast!
Beyond the very basics, I wouldn’t /study/ grammar unlike kanji and - to a point - words, it’s not something you can usefully memorize outside of context. Read, listen & shadow, and look up grammar you don’t know.
Obviously it depends what they mean by study, they could easily be familiarizing themselves with grammar they don’t know, looking up example phrases, or even making their own.
So my plan was to work through Genki I, and II using both the books and Tokini Andy. Outside of the tests on his website I would have to look up Genki answers to see if I am appropriately answering questions and etc. Outside of that I wanted for this month specifically to immerse, following up and break down sentences that are sounding nearly decipherable in audio content. Be that news broadcasts or youtube. Perhaps trying to play something like Dragon Quest 11 and “understanding” sentences as I go at least trying to get the gist of what is being said. So far I can usually recognize a majority of commonly used kanji but readings can be a bit iffy. The grammar surrounding it being alien is what is pushing me to dive harder into grammar.
I really struggled with understanding more complex sentences until I did a grammar based shadowing course. Although it took almost 9 months, being forced to do the hard work of understanding and creating sentences based on grammar patterns in the language (rather than “this particle does this, this and this, here’s some examples”) worked for me.
If you can do that yourself from free sources, all the better. One thing I think works well is asking yourself “How would I say this in Japanese?” throughout your day. Thoughts, actions, bits of conversations you have, etc.
good to know its not just me… hopefully that will work for us both long term!