Hi! I started WaniKani about a month ago. I like the SRS system and have been doing quite well with it, but I find it a bit shallow for me. I find that I can default to high pattern recognition so that I can blitz through reviews but I worry that may not be very efficient for drilling the readings of the kanji / words in my memory.
What I’ve been doing lately is forcing myself to do (most) of the vocab reading examples provided on each card. This is to tune my pronunciation and to practice rapid recognition of kanji / hiragana / katakana. This made me notice, for instance, that even if I have 100% accuracy on something like 大 and its derivatives in the reviews I actually struggle / mix up the readings when I encounter it in the wild. I find that WaniKani is not really training for a kind of “anticipatory reading” where you must identify the context of a kanji in a sentence (what surrounds it) to get its reading which is the backbone of immersion. This additional practice made me a lot faster in reading hiragana but also showed me how much I struggle with katakana.
Naturally, this means my vocab lessons are taking a lot more time than before (and quite tougher), and I’m not sure if it’s really optimal down the road / if I should use WaniKani for more efficient simple vocabulary / kanji learning and just switch to immersion later on.
Let me know what you think!
I read the other day that for for English speakers, getting to C2 in Spanish takes maybe 1000 to 1500 hours, while getting to C2 in Japanese takes 3000 to 5000 hours (this was what the Google AI feature pulled up, so it might not be accurate). Basically, it’s going to take a long time, whether you read the examples in detail or not. You could do an experiment where you note for example 10 vocab you read the examples for in detail and 10 where you don’t, then compare the results to see what works best for you.
Because of my work schedule, I try to learn the new words early in the morning so that my first review is at a time when I can take a break easily. So, I write down the kanji, reading, and meaning, but don’t always study the sentences, and if I’m having difficulty, I will go back and re-read it later.
Thank you for this question. It got me to think about this. I wasn’t reading the sentences at first, but then found that there were kanji and vocab I wasn’t remembering, so started to read the sentences. I think they are not the best sentences to use. I just asked AI to produce two everyday sentences for a vocabulary word. The sentences produced by AI seemed more natural and useful as memory aides than the wanikani sentences.
I definitely wouldn’t encourage anyone whose goals include “being able to read Japanese” to read less Japanese. Putting the kanji into actual practice with reading is the real way to “burn” them into your memory. That said, the WK context sentences are pretty flawed in a lot of ways, especially as you get to higher levels - the ones from 1 to 10 are actually the best of them, and they only get worse from there.
So if WK context sentences aren’t working for you, try finding some other resource where you can train your reading skill. It’s going to be painful no matter when you start, but it’s worth doing. Personally I really like Bunpro, where every vocab word has multiple context sentences that show up during reviews, not just lessons. A lot of people also swear by Satori Reader, which has longer form stories for different reading levels. Both have Wanikani integration so that you don’t need to relearn what you’ve already learned here.