I started WK on a bit of a whim. I was stumbled across a random video of Tim Rogers of Kotaku fame playing Chrono Trigger, the legendary SNES RPG. It was in Japanese, and he was playing it with a colleague, who mentioned in passing that he had just started learning kanji on a site called Wanikani.
I’ve been learning Japanese off and on (mostly off) for years, but nothing really stuck. Still I knew Japanese grammar well enough and could read kana, but not kanji. So I thought what the heck, I’ll try this Wanikani thing out, thinking I’d probably get bored after a few months and give up. Well 6 years (yes, SIX!) years later, I’m still here. I’m fairly amazed I made it as I have a memory like a goldfish and I have a very busy work life which limits my free time greatly. I took many breaks along the way when work got the better of me, but I always came back.
When I started WK I had an idea in my head that it would let me pretty much read anything without issue. Well as we all know now, that certainly isn’t the case. When I read manga, as I’ve been doing for a few years now I recognise almost all (but not quite all) the kanji, but vocab is the issue. WK does of course teach vocab, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to what you ideally want to know.
Other observations:
Review timings are often pretty bad. If there was a way to force reviews to appear in certain time windows, that would be a lot better. Having a big pile of reviews arrive just after my lunch break has finished isn’t great.
The vocab WK teaches can be pretty head scratching, especially towards the end. Lots of weird stuff in there, such as why are there so many baseball and legal terms? I can’t imagine ever needing those. I had to look up what the English meant before learning the Japanese, as it was so completely obscure. And yet on the flip side, I’ve been building a deck of what I would consider very useful vocab on MaruMori, which WK doesn’t teach. It’s sitting at about 600 now.
If you have a bad review session, such as when I’m too busy at work and need to rush it, the punishment beating WK hands out is extreme. I pay for a bad review for days afterwards. It’s rough.
WK doesn’t help spoken comprehension much. I know that’s not why it exists, but still, I sort of expected to get better at this, and I didn’t improve much. Sticking on Japanese subs helps, as you would expect.
The question I’ve been asking myself is, would I still do this, if I had known how demanding and time-consuming it would be? Honestly, no, WK is incredibly demanding of your time. But I’m glad I got here all the same. Next up, do all of MaruMori. Oh, and I started learning French and German too because I guess I need help. I’d love to learn Cantonese too, but there are only so many hours in the day.
That’s an awesome story. Well done on getting to 60 and good to know it’s only the end of the beginning. Thank you for sharing the journey and the advice. I hadn’t heard of MaruMori until I saw your post. It’s terrible finding new awesome resources when I’ve already paid for a year/lifetime of several others jokes aside, it does look awesome! So that’s your plan now - continue your learning journey on MaruMori?
It’s pretty maddening, and if you dare use vacation mode, get ready for reviews to occur right through the night when you turn it off. It’s completely random.
Still on the plus side, at least WK supports synonyms. I’m not American, and WK is very, VERY American in its use of English translations. Sometimes they’ll add a more neutral translation in there, sometimes not. I don’t know how many synonyms I must have added along the way, likely hundreds. I guess I never realised just how different American English is to English.
After roughly 4 years, I’m still here, and I’m nowhere near completing WaniKani. I’m hoping I can make some headway this year, but my motivation for learning Japanese is incredibly variable, so we’ll have to see.
I’m also beginning to think that this isn’t worth it. I regret the reset I did when I was around this level, all the way down to level 1, which forced me to restart everything. Without that, I’d probably be a lot farther in my Japanese journey.
Good luck burning those remaining turtles, assuming you plan on doing that.
As for it being worth it, I do basically share your sentiment. I expected to be able to pick up any manga and just read it without issue at Level 60 but that’s very far from reality. Yes I can read manga, but I’m looking stuff up very often. And I have to pick my battles, too much unusual language in there and it’s painfully slow work.
Turns out Japanese really is a spectacularly difficult language to learn.
First of all, congratulations, but you didn’t “somehow” finish - one doesn’t somehow simply walk into Mordor…
I’m with you on the WK / MM thing - with the caveat that I prefer WK for how they teach the kanji from radicals and the consistent mnemonics, but MM definitely has more vocabulary (and the grammar). I’m still happy to be doing both. But I definitely see your points as well, but you didn’t let that stop you and look at you now!
jokes aside, it does look awesome! So that’s your plan now - continue your learning journey on MaruMori?
