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
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!