I’m going to play devil’s advocate because I was actually here checking to see if there was a way to skip the reading aspect and focus only on kanji and vocabulary meaning myself.
Here’s my situation…
I live in Japan and have been struggling to learn Japanese for over 10 years. I don’t prioritize it because I have a full time job, am a parent, etc., but I do want to be able to both speak and read Japanese.
What I have found in only the first 7 levels of Wanikani use is that I can make out a lot of traffic signs, especially place names, but also just signs on businesses. This is very useful to me when driving, or just trying to figure out what type of business I’m passing by, if there isn’t sufficient katakana or hiragana for me to sound it out.
However, I don’t think that this is the way that I’m going to have success with learning to speak Japanese. I think that’s going to come from conversation practice with a tutor (in my case). Ultimately, I think the two areas of knowledge (reading kanji-based volcabulary and speaking) will merge. But, in the meantime, learning the meanings of kanji and vocabulary would go at least twice as fast if I didn’t also have to memorize multiple readings for each item.
I’ve allowed myself to drop off Wanikani for months (I have over 700 reviews waiting) mostly because of the effort involved in remember the readings. I feel like I could make much faster progress without them, and then in my conversation practice I could start mapping audible information to written information I’m already familiar with.
My wife (native Japanese speaker) also watched me using Wanikani and told me that it was a terrible way to learn to speak Japanese. She said I’d be much better off just learning to speak without learning to read kanji. At the time, I got annoyed and told her that this is how I learn. But, in retrospect, I realized that my brain approaches reading and speaking very differently, and that learning meaning of writing and learning to speak involve very different parts of my brain.
I might be wrong, but after trying to learn for a decade, and struggling to stay on top of Wanikani for over four years, and not being super successful, I’m thinking that I need something different than what I’ve been doing.
I think there’s definitely something to be said for starting more with the spoken side and leaving kanji study for later, especially if you’re in an environment where you have a lot of opportunities for listening and speaking practice. Most courses and textbooks are not very kanji heavy initially and you can get away with a traditional “just memorize them through exposure” approach to the kanji that are there. Then when you come back to some more structured kanji learning system (whether that’s WK or RTK or something else) you’ll have a better appreciation for what that system is doing for you and you’ll be in a better position to pick a system that does the things you need.
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