Rethinking WK

I’m basically asking myself these questions already, which led me here. WK has been TREMENDOUSLY helpful in improving my reading and vocabulary ability. No question about it. My concern is that I am overly focused (due to the time it consumes) on just this one aspect, so I wanted to make it as efficient as possible.

Luckily, my potential job in Tokyo will not require much Japanese, if any. I’ll basically be alone crunching data at a computer in English. I do want to have a full and rich life outside of work, though. Years from now, I hope to get good enough to look into translation work, but I don’t know what the realistic qualifications are as of yet. Might be a pipe dream.

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Anki doesn’t really solve your problem. It lets you go at a faster pace and spend less time reviewing but the flip side is that what you learn won’t stick as well because of the lack of mnemonics and looser reinforcement from the vocabs. If you’re able to spend that freed up time on reading practice then maybe you come out ahead overall but I think mileage will vary from one learner to the next…

I think the bottom line is that learning the kanji is a big endeavour and there’s no real way around that. Whether or not investing so much time into it is the best way to advance your japanese learning depends on your goals (how important is reading to me) and where you’re already at (beginner, intermediate or advanced?). It’s probably fair to say that you get diminishing returns as you learn more and more kanji as you learn the most frequent ones earlier, yet the way WK works your workload tends to increase as you make more progress. For most learners there’ll be point where it makes sense to increasingly redirect your time to other aspects of japanese studying but the way to do that is to simply ease your foot off the gas (do less lessons) rather than toss WK out the window.

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I should specify, the WK decks on Anki do have the mnemonics and even the color scheme from WK itself. The advantage is the ability to do more lessons, suspend low priority vocab, suspend repeat reviews of super easy words (although I did just burn アメリカ人 today!), and save time by turning off the typing. One could also argue that adjusting the SRS timing could be beneficial to memory if the right spot is found. I sometimes feel like WK waits too long on missed items.

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If you can get a deck with all the mnemonics I think it would definitely be worth giving it a go cos I do believe the real value of WK is in the mnemonics.

I do actually use Anki myself although I use it augment WK rather than replace it. I study a 10k deck with everything from WK suspended so I’m effectively just filling in the gaps. It’s definitely beneficial to be able to suspend things (eg, low value leeches) and to be able to adjust your SRS timings although it did take me a long time to get the timings to a place that felt good. In some ways I prefer the WK timings altho you can’t really replicate it perfectly using Anki.

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isnt using wk decks with their mnemonics on anki stealing?

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Why? Why do you need to keep up the pace? If your kanji level is doing okay for where you’re at in Japanese ability, and you have to focus on other aspects of Japanese, why wouldn’t you slow down a bit with WK? Not stop, just slow down. The speed is less important than the learning. You want to learn Japanese for a job, right? Then start focusing on listening/reading/whatever and let WK go a bit. Maybe use Anki for vocab sentence reviewing only (I dunno, never really liked Anki myself, but it seems like it would be useful for that).

I’m not trying to be mean, I just want you to be realistic. If you’re going to be working on other things than just kanji (which everyone really should be!) and you’re worried about time, then yeah, slow down a tad, like to 9 or 10 day levels. Kanji isn’t everything with Japanese, and just because you’re WK __ level doesn’t mean that you’re a higher level in comprehensive Japanese. It does mean that you have stronger basics with reading and wide exposure to vocab, which will help you, I promise, even if it doesn’t seem so now. I thought 鑑定 was the most unhelpful vocab when I had already learned 評価 until I started the process of some home repairs. Changing it all to Anki would (probably) speed you up, but at the cost of actually learning the kanji and related vocab.

Also, as someone who started working in Japan with lower intermediate level Japanese, your listening and conversation skills will SKYROCKET after a few months even if your job doesn’t technically require it. So don’t worry too much about that, really! I’ve found the hardest part has been kanji and their readings, so WK has been invaluable for me.

I know this was super long, sorry :sweat_smile:… whatever you end up choosing to do, best of luck! I hope your Japanese job goes well!

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sisterray,

I think you have this figured out pretty much. I just want to put in my two cents in hopes it reinforces what you’re thinking.

WK, and pretty much any SRS, is diminishing returns after a while. I hit 60 today and am way over it. I think the SRS concept just metastasized through online language learning because Anki was free. Before Anki people learned languages somehow, their methods lost to the depths of time.

You should have plenty enough kanji for day-to-day and many texts after level 35 or so. If you want to switch over to that Anki deck with better timings, cool, but more flashcards is probably not the answer. I suggest using WK reorder scripts to leave some of the vocab & reviews aside. If you don’t learn a word after a few WK reviews, you’ll learn it later, it’s in your brain somewhere. I cut down my WK time radically the last couple months (2389 undone reviews, who cares) to focus on reading and the KLC graded readers. SRS is just so linear, so repetitive, so unlike a living language.

The less you do SRS and the more you do other stuff-- conversation, textbook, actively watching TV shows-- the more your brain will have the building blocks to rapidly put it all together when you’re around it 24/7. Then spend time in Japan going to bars (or whatever) and talking to people, virus permitting.

I’m jealous you get to go. I can’t even leave my apartment, and my country’s leaders are trying to kill us all. 140,000 so far! USA! USA!

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:open_mouth:

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:joy: whoops gotta fix that typo haha

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If you have a job in Tokyo that doesn’t require Japanese, then the amount of Japanese you “need” to live can be acquired on the plane ride with a phrasebook.

I get that you’re enthusiastic, but it doesn’t seem like there actually is that much of a rush.

I thought you needed N1 this winter or something.

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Thanks for the tip. I’d never thought of using Google News (partly because I’m not very familiar with it).

By the way, since you mentioned further down in the thread that your job is going to be data entry in English in Tokyo… well, first of all, I hope you’ve checked out the company, because there are some people who unwittingly end up at black/grey companies which they didn’t know much about to begin with. We have a Russian guy on the WK forums who ended up in that situation. I hope he’s found a way to quit. It’s probably easier for us to be fooled as foreigners who might not know what is shady and what isn’t. There are websites listing black companies, if I’m not wrong. This is just a word of caution. I’m aware that not all companies in Japan push people towards karoshi.

Secondly, while I understand the desire to learn as quickly as possible (my Japanese learning journey literally started as a ‘how much can I learn in three days before flying to Tokyo?’ challenge), if you’re not going to need much Japanese at work, then you could actually stand to give yourself less pressure? Tokyo is fairly international, even if English speakers might be rarer than in many other major cities. I don’t mean to discourage you, and I’m all about pushing limits myself, but I think there really is only so much we can learn within a certain amount of time, even if it’s possible to accelerate our learning.

(PS: I guess I might come back here to share my findings if I one day discover a way to make my Japanese level skyrocket the way I did for French. For now though, I haven’t found a textbook as efficient as the one I used to rapidly pick up advanced French, so I’ve been stuck working on my own using Tobira and anime, and I feel like I’ve hit a plateau, even if there are obviously still plenty of words I don’t know.)

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OP, you are almost halfway through the whole thing (depending on whether you choose to go full speed during the fast levels, which would take even more time per day but be over quicker, or choose to keep a steady leveling speed). Might as well keep going.
If your bottleneck is the number of hours you have per day, then I cannot think of a better tool than WK for what it is doing. Now, I do agree with @Leebo that there’s no rush. You could slow down on lessons , which would decrease time spent doing reviews.
At the same time, I would indeed encourage you to consume native content. You mentioned that it is time consuming for you as well, but you can reduce that load by reading things from the WK book clubs, especially old picks of the “beginner” book club. Previous readers have filled vocabulary list that will save you the time that you would spend looking up words. At the same time, whatever question you have about grammar or structure sentence has probably been answered already, so that’s also a lot of time saved.

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Good luck @anon1067447! Reading through these answers, grammar + immersion sounds like the best plan for you right now. :blush:

A1-2 level is “tourist fluency”, B2 is literally university-entry level :wink: (cf. descriptions in CEFR levels)

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Yes, actually. If there was one thread that resonated the most with me on the entire forum, it’s this one. (The other ones that usually resonate well are the ones about disliking WaniKani’s pacing or when people are genuinely being nice to each other hah.)

Brief context: last year, I got a job offer in Japan, and before even that I was already turned off from WaniKani due to its pacing. The “best” methodology out there is relative to one’s learning goals. Mine was to recognize and read (at least one reading) kanji quickly and then pick up other readings via input, all the while immersing as much as I could. In this way, my personal preference aligns a lot with the MIA.

Here are the adjustments I made that saved WaniKani for me:

The first was(/is) to use the reorder script to prioritize kanji in lessons. I can’t always do 20 lessons per day, so when the vocab lessons pile up when I guru a kanji, the growing lesson queue slows down my new kanji exposure. For this reason, I’d rather keep a steady stream of kanji and always supplement time gaps by picking up the remaining vocabulary. This is what my current lesson queue looks like.

Obviously, for everything you skip or deprioritize on WaniKani, you’ll need to pick up some other way. I maintain a steady stream of Japanese input. This is where Anki comes in for me, my second adjustment. From this input, I make sentence cards (plain old vocab cards are too boring for me). The sentence cards are “i+1” meaning that they’re not so far above my Japanese level that I’m trying to learn 3 things at once in one card. Just one thing–a word or a phrase or a grammar piece or a kanji reading.

Input this way for me is fun and engaging. I read, watch things, play video games, take pictures of restaurant menus and signs I don’t understand, catch spoken words that I can repeat but don’t know the meaning of, fail to say what I want to say and make a note to learn how, etc. You don’t need to be in Japan to do any of these things, of course, but it’s always easier when one has no other choice in their environment :slight_smile:

I make my own decks in Anki. I have nothing against using decks that already exist, but making my own is more effective for me, mostly because I create sentence cards but also because sometimes I script things for fun as a side project (nothing fruitful out of these side projects yet /tangent) and require my own note types.

I use Low-Key Anki to modify the review grading and scheduling in Anki.

Regardless of your engagement with WaniKani, you’ve got to read. This is probably obvious, but many people only do reviews and flashcards and Anki and etc. for hours a day and wonder why they’re not really making much progress toward fluency, so I might as well state this. As you say, too much out-of-context work produces artificial mastery.

The pre-MIA AJATT philosophy resonated deeply with me, so I surround myself even in my home with all-things Japanese. Japanese language on my computer, Japanese on my phone, Japanese games, Japanese Netflix, Japanese Amazon interface, you name it. I read all the Japanese junk mail I receive (god, there’s so much of it at least in my parts!) just to test myself.

I also work through various Japanese textbooks (ex: Genki, but also some I picked up here in Japan) to force myself to learn new grammar.

Where am I at right now/how did it fare for me?

I’m happy with how things are going. My adjustments work well for me.

Things have settled down since I moved here, so I sometimes do tens of lessons of vocab on WaniKani a day to work on draining my vocab queue. This big backlog has actually been a benefit to me in two ways. First, it confirms that my personal methods are working for me. I recognize a lot of the vocabulary I work through in my queue. There’s always something new to learn, though. Second, sometimes I lapse on certain kanji I’ve already burned. Seeing “new” vocab lessons for this kanji is a quick and easy reminder. It helps keep things fresh in my mind when I don’t happen to be coming across such readings/words in my input.

I can piece together a lot of what I see in public, so I feel I can get around fairly easily.

Weaknesses

My learning is heavily slanted toward recognition right now, and I’m not forced to output in my professional environment, so my output is pretty weak. I accept this trade-off in my current circumstances, though.

Also, burnout. WaniKani is cool because it has levels and graphics and a community of people who all complain about the same things, and so it’s easy to stay engaged. But when I start making modifications, I’ve got to force myself to schedule my other learning activities as regularly as I schedule WaniKani.

I don’t do JLPT, but I’m about at the N3 level (as gauged by my Japanese teacher at my job), and my personal observation is that N3 is this really amorphous state of being where it’s difficult to feel like you’re making tangible progress. Earlier on, you’re learning all these new radicals and kanji and kana and basic grammar, and a bunch of common-place Japanese is all of the sudden making sense and everything feels great. And I imagine at levels of general fluency, learning is a lot more surgical, where one can say, “I heard this exact phrase that used a word in a nuance I haven’t heard before, and so I learned this cool, native, niche way to express X,” and it’s obvious that you’re learning more sophisticated parts of the language. But at around my level, I learn a bunch of new words and some grammar, and I don’t see if reflected too frequently, and so it’s easy to burn out and feel like I’m off in the weeds. If you’re at this stage, hang in there–you’re building part of your foundation you’ll walk on later.

A final word. I mentioned “my Japanese teacher.” I’m not actually taking classes. I took classes at work for maybe 5 weeks, but I dropped them due to personal preference. Even in Japan, I am doing self-teaching.

Anyway, the most important thing is that you adjust your methodology to what seems to be the most effective toward meeting your learning goals. The above is my personalized way, and hopefully some anecdotes are helpful. Good luck to you, and congratulations on the job opportunity in Japan!

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I found that video a few weeks ago, it may be worth a watch for you as I think you would be enclined to follow his method:

Edit: that is basically what @orphen wrote in his previous reply.

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I meant that ‘tourist fluency’ is my personal name for it, with an emphasis on the word ‘fluency’. More accurately, perhaps, I should have phrased it as ‘fluent tourist level’. I’m aware of the CEFR levels: I used to refer to them a lot when I was chasing my C2 diploma in French. I suppose I have to admit that my choice of terminology is misleading, but let me explain my rationale:

When I first went to France, I was there for a two-week immersion programme in a French lycée, where I attended classes with a French buddy at the secondary school level. My level by the end of the trip was probably roughly B1? I passed the B2 exam for French the next year. Anyway, what I found while in France at that level was that I could roughly talk about school, my family and so on, but I wouldn’t be able to go much further or explain anything particularly complex, like my views on an academic or political subject, or an expression that I might have grabbed from English and translated directly without knowing what one might say to explain it in French.

That brings me to the word ‘tourist’. Why do I say ‘fluent tourist’? Because I’m thinking about what a tourist might need to talk about. Generally, a tourist who seems fluent would be asked about stuff like reasons for travel, family, work and plans for the trip. They might also converse with hotel staff and ask for information in the target language. In theory, someone at the A1-A2 level would be able to discuss most of those things, but in practice, people at A1-A2 aren’t confident enough, and their vocabulary is too limited for the conversation to last more than 5 min. On the other hand, someone at the B2 level would be able to respond to such questions in detail, but probably without much technical language. That’s what I mean by ‘fluent tourist level’: someone at the B2 level can do everything a tourist could conceivably be asked to do in the target language, without much difficulty and without getting dirty looks from the local populace for lack of comprehension…

Sure, B2 is university-entrance level for some courses, but whether or not it’s truly sufficient depends on the course. I know some people who arrived with a B2+ level in my science- and engineering-focused course, and well, they handled the scientific stuff fine, but French literature was a huge struggle. I know people from my country who had supposedly reached C1 before leaving for a double degree in France and who still had trouble with lectures. (Granted, these were maths and physics lectures for people in their 3rd year of university, but still, they should have had an easier time if B2 were sufficient.) I don’t remember the details of what it was like to be at the B2 level, but I think I would have struggled immensely with physics if I had been sent to France after passing my B2 exam. The more language-dependent the field is, the higher the basic level. Maths, for example, transmits a lot of meaning through symbols and logic, so it’s not as necessary to have a good grasp of language.

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I’ll admit that I haven’t tried RtK (I haven’t tried any of these methods because I learnt Chinese as a child), but my recommendation would be to continue to learn kanji readings even if you switch to RtK. I like the fact that people who use RtK tend to use writing as a tool for remembering kanji, but simply knowing keywords that capture the meaning of each kanji along with some ideas about what each radical means isn’t sufficient. RtK might allow a learner to rapidly recognise a large number of kanji, but it won’t allow you to use them in context.

I personally think taking ‘all Japanese all the time’ literally can be a little too extreme for some people, but I won’t deny that using French as much as possible (to the point that to this day, I run my phone in French) really did contribute to my fluency. All I’m saying is that there’s no need to force yourself, even if immersion is good and helpful.

I am myself French and did exactly that for English :slight_smile:

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I feel like it’s all depending on what your goal is. If your goal is to become as Kanji literate as possible until next year, Wanikani is a pretty good way to do that. As someone who studied a 2000 kanji Anki deck before Wanikani religiously for a year (I reached over 1000 Kanji) - I wish I would have saved the time and just used Wanikani instead, it was a tremendous waste of time.

If your goal is to become as good as possible in Japanese until next year - put Kanji on the back burner! Focus on Grammar, Listening comprehension and speaking, vocabulary and maybe pronunciation as well. You already have a decent kanji base, I lived in Japan for a year and worked at a Japanese App company and I can only tell you that any gains you can make in your conversational ability until next year will prove infinitely more valuable than any reading or kanji skills.

If you need to pass any JLPTs, just do enough to pass these, but not more.

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Slightly off-topic, but out of interest which textbook did you use to rapidly learn advanced French? Right now I’m trying to polish up my French to take a shot at the DALF C2 exam, and I’ve been patching together resources but I haven’t found the right textbook yet.