Mostly looking for motivation, or at least tales from people who have restarted like myself.
I signed up many years ago when Wanikani was new, I was really keen but learning alone and life got in the way. I came back a year or so later and couldn’t remember a single Kanji, started again. In hindsight this was a mistake as I quickly got bored and lost progress again. The last two months I’ve come back, and I’ve caught up to where I was all those years ago. I seem to be remembering material now and not so shaky on my kana which helps. I am a little worried that it will fall to pieces when I hit the new material. I wanted to try a book club or a game to stay motivated, but it seems like more vocab than I can manage in one go. Any tips? Anyone the same? It was suggested I try and get to level 10 before I retry Genki 1
I can at least tell you that a book club or game club won’t be fun for you if you don’t even know the Genki 1 Grammar. The beginning is pretty hard, and you need quite a big first push to make it over the absolute basics.
I don’t have many recommendations there. The problem is you just don’t have access yet to fun material. The only thing that motivated me during this time was watching anime with English subs and trying to pick out single words or phrase structures I’d learned with Minna no Nihongo previously.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of waiting until level 10 with Grammar. Learning with structured material in the beginning really helps cement the Kana, and I recommend starting as soon as you have the Kana and a few words (こんにちは、ありがとうございます, etc.) down.
During N5 I don’t think Kanji are the most important part. They definitely aren’t wasted, but having Level 10 on WaniKani without Genki 1 just seems ineffiecient to me. You’ll loose all you learned if you don’t use it (reading, listening, doing excercises)
Well, in my case it took me 8 years to reach level 60, so I can very much relate to atleast some of the problems you are facing…
First thing I would recommend would be to just keep studying everyday – even if it’s just WK reviews. It will at times be very boring, but the whole point is to keep doing them anyway, automatically, every day. As long as you keep doing it – you’ll get there. At times you might speed your pace up, and at times you might slow down, but the important thing is to keep moving. My mistake was that I stopped for long on many occasions.
I think you can start learing grammar right away – at least that’s what I did, although waiting till you learn enough kanji and vocab – might also be a good idea.
I’d also recommend trying
(free)
and
(not free, but a great resource to jumpstart reading).
There is also a great podcast called Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners:
i was here in early days as well then my health took a downward turn and restarted for real (was my 2nd restart in actuality) a couple years ago. the only thing I can offer, is just find what interests you and learn around that.whether it’s anime, manga, film, music or even buddhism. these will keep you going during the rough periods.
I’ve just restarted again 13 days ago. Yet again, I’ve been a member since 2019… So let’s do this
In hindsight, I think the one mistake I kept on making was not actually using any Japanese. Just a growing pile of kanji without any real context. An intellectual challenge to learn them “all”. A brute force attack on kanji. It doesn’t work.
So now I’m doing it the other way around. More Japanese content, less WaniKani. Faster progress with Japanese, slower with kanji. (And it turns out you don’t need kanji to understand Japanese )
I’m just going to share what’s been helping me:
Same team, good integration.
Beginner’s course Anki deck.
Just start here, you don’t need to actually buy Genki.
)