Its been about 2 years since I initially reached level 60 on wanikani and have done absolutely nothing on the site since then. I also largely stopped studying Japanese for the exception of 2 semesters of beginners Japanese in college. However, I will be going to Japan for about 3.5 weeks in October and have picked my Japanese studies back up. Since I haven’t done much studying in the past 2 years I have gotten incredibly rusty on not only vocab but also kanji so i was considering resetting back several levels to try to jog my memory.
The thing I am concerned about is that I would prefer to spend most of my time on the more practical side of Japanese such as conversational things rather than dumping all my time into kanji like I was when I was actively using wk. I am afraid that if i start using wanikani again I’m going to become more focused on keeping everything going there and making sure i don’t get an ungodly amount of reviews piling up. If that ends up happening I will end up so focused on that that I won’t have any energy to put into studying the more important parts of Japanese. I’m sure picking wanikani back up would help my studies and I do want to pick it back up again at some point I’m just not sure if now is the correct time.
I’m also sure through other parts of studying I will pick up a lot of the kanji that I have lost. Also if you have any suggestions for particular study methods for conversational skills I would absolutely take those as well. Mostly because pretty much all my studying of Japanese has pretty much only come from wanikani and I’m kinda completely lost on how to study anything else. I have several things saved throughout my years of studying that I have just left completely untouched but anything helps.
Anyway I’ll stop my rambling here thank you so much for your help
I don’t have all the answers exactly, but my suggestion would be if you want to spend more time on listening/speaking/conversational vocab rather than only kanji to consider something like unburn only vocab/kanji that you think you’ll want that you’ve forgotten.
Like if you’re using x resource on talking and they mention 挨拶 because greeting people is the start of conversations, you could go unburn that specifically.
You could also consider using Jitai because I’ve heard various complaints that it’s hard to read kanji that aren’t in wanikani’s font, so practicing multiple fonts will help.
I don’t know, but I would focus on practical skills first. More on speaking and listening side. Maybe watching / listening with JP text sometimes.
Focus less on vocabularies, not to mention Kanji. Speaking may also work with asking / paraphrasing skills. Vocabularies might not be need more than listening requires.
Maybe picking back Kanji a month or two after now. Use Self Study to study Radicals and Kanji, then resurrect Radical/Kanji/Vocab as needed. Certainly, there are Kanji readings and vocabularies WaniKani don’t teach.
That’s it… You’re done with WK, now your objective should be to confront Japanese in real life.
Start consuming manga, books, anime, games, podcasts, etc. All those kanji you studied before will start to come out naturally as you use the language for practical purposes
You should follow your preference here. You’ve already done all of WK. Doing it all over again just because you can wouldn’t be a very effective use of time, it’s not what you want to do, and it doesn’t align very well with your goals, so don’t do it
(At some later point you might want an SRS of some kind for helping you remember words that you encounter in future. But you don’t absolutely have to have one, and if you do want one it almost certainly shouldn’t be WK. You want something which lets you study the words you run into, not one that has a fixed set of words that can’t be added to and is very inflexible. I would suggest you look at the other options in this space first.)
Maybe rather than resetting back several levels just do x amount of burn items per day, listen to things in Japanese, practice reading in Japanese. Fashion Dreamer is a good video game for immersion. Game Gengo is a youtuber who teaches Japanese through video games.
