Some musings at this point on my journey - about what I’ve found genuinely practical about learning kanji. I would say that I know the bare minimum of Japanese grammar. Enough to know the most common particles and roughly how sentences are structured, but barely anything beyond the first couple of chapters of Genki. I see occasional posts here about “what’s WK good for”, well here’s my response.
I had been to Japan as a tourist a couple of times over the last decade or so, but never made a serious effort to to learn anything. Recently, with another upcoming (and much longer) vacation, I decided to put some effort into reading. I learned hiragana fairly quickly and made some headway into katakana (more on this later…). I also decided to pick up WaniKani, and well, here we are 9 levels and 270 odd kanji later.
I reasoned learning to read was probably the most useful thing I could do to be not totally useless as a tourist. This turned out to be a pretty good guess and I think for someone with limited Japanese, being able to read (as a tourist) is much more useful than being able to speak (let alone write). I left Japan somewhere around level 7 and it was remarkable what a difference that made to the experience. I should point out I had no particular goal before I arrived - I could easily have started a few months earlier with a larger vocabulary. I don’t watch much anime these days, so visiting Japan was really an acid test for me.
- Arriving at the airport, I started to see words that were immediately familiar: 海外, 外国人, name, day/month/year on the forms and so on. Auspicious start at least.
- Air conditioning (and toilet) controls are no longer gibberish when you know the kanji for power, strong/weak, above/below, left/right etc. I learned 風 partway through the trip and that was another mini revelation. Almost worth learning just to be able to confidently set the room temperature.
- Cardinal directions, also useful. I feel like Japan is somewhat unique in how it names station exits by direction.
- I discovered I’m not very good at deciphering strings of kanji, as in place names, but if you give me a list and a target romaji I can probably pick out the right one. This turns out to be very useful for street signs, stations on the metro and so on. I think the difficulty here stems from recognising which reading ought to be used, but it was pretty helpful to confirm where we were trying to go. An odd example of this was hiking the Kumano Kodo and being able to read all the shrine names in the official stamp book, because none of that information is in English.
- Occasionally - but magical when it worked - I could translate faster than we could use Google Lens.
- Turns out that being bad at katakana is a big problem. Of course we travelled to Japan to enjoy the food and that vocabulary is all loanwords.
- Knowing the basic counters was handy and it helped to put those words into context when ordering things in restaurants. I definitely screwed up 3 vs 6 once.
- WK is of course structured in an way that builds on radical and kanji frequency: turns out that covers a lot of useful words quite fast. But there are still a lot of words that you don’t encounter for quite a long time on the journey. 駅 is one that doesn’t crop up until level 13. 番 is another one I heard a lot but I didn’t learn that until the a few days before we left.
- Every kanji starts to be seen through the lens of radicals. This is something a lot of learners say, but it’s odd when it started to happen - I no longer feel intimidated by kanji, I just see a bunch of familiar symbols and understand I haven’t learned that one yet. Someone likened it to deciphering an ancient language and I really like that analogy, it keeps it fun.
- One upshot of this is that re-identifying a new common word (like 温, or 梅酒) felt fairly easy.
- 空車 felt like a weird phrase to learn, but yup, there it is on every damn taxi.
In all I was pleasantly surprised at how much I could understand, as little as it was. While I don’t think our itinerary would have meaningfully changed if I hadn’t done any WaniKani, it definitely saved some time and stress.
The main take-away I have so far is that learning kanji is super helpful, but also how it goes hand in hand with grammar. I couldn’t imagine going through Genki or another course and trying to rote-learn this stuff, and starting with a good base makes early chapters feel great knowing you can ignore the furigana. I’m curious where the utility of WaniKani tails off and grammar becomes more important, maybe around level 20? Who knows. I’d like to get a tutor at some point, but for now I’m happy plugging away at the reviews.
Some general thoughts about WaniKani, the program:
- Bang for buck feels high, even at this level. I say this having gotten to around B1 in a couple of languages, and it’s still hard to speak to locals. If you’re going to Japan and want a better experience without a ton of learning, kanji are the way to go. Maybe throw in one of those beginner audio courses like Paul Noble or Michel Thomas.
- I can’t really speak for people who are learning this because they like manga or anime. At some point you need to know grammar to really understand written language, and knowing kanji is mostly useless for listening (although you do pick up a lot of vocab).
- I think around level 7 I realised that the context sentences are actually graded. They use (mostly) words you’re familiar with, and some grammar. I use Tsurukame on iOS and it blurs them so you can practice, and if I’m really feeling motivated I’ll try and translate them, but that easily triples the lesson learning time.
- I hate that mnemonics work so well.
- I don’t know when the penny dropped about the general rules for onyomi and kunyomi, but that also helped.
- Days, months and year can go to hell. All the variations on げつ, がつ and so on. Looking at the notes I think some of these actually have mnemonics which I totally ignored, however 毎月 is “This word has the on’yomi reading for 毎 plus the kun’yomi reading for 月” Unhelpful.
- I paid for half-price lifetime ($99) and I feel that was good value for money. I know you can do all this stuff for free with Anki or other SRS, but WaniKani feels polished. Frankly I’ve often found other people’s Anki decks to be weird and this mostly works.
- Whether it’s worth the money? Shrug. I paid the cost of 4-5 language lessons and I think it’s at least that valuable. If you don’t have disposable income I can understand it being a tough decision.
- I could manage 8 days per level at the beginning but that tailed off pretty quickly. I guess just over a year is possible, but I’m looking at ~10 levels in 6 months. So maybe 2-3 years is my target.
- There are odd inconsistencies between what Tsurukame and the web app will warn as errors, and sometimes it’s inconsistent even where in the phrase the error is allowable.
- A common complaint seems to be that you can get to a high level and still not understand Japanese. I feel like anyone who’s tried to learn another language would understand that being able to read is vastly different from having a conversation with a native speaker, or even being able to understand TV/movies. This seems like a non-issue to me.
- Computer keyboard is way faster than the phone and I make fewer typos. Should probably learn Flick input, which is what most Japanese seem to use.
Anyway, here’s to getting to level 10 and beyond and hopefully this is interesting to someone.
