I have been using WaniKani for a few months now and I am really enjoying the process. However, I have been hitting a bit of a roadblock recently, and I was hoping to get some advice from those of you who have been through this phase.
I am finding that I am forgetting a lot of kanji after I’ve “learned” them, even though I’ve gone through the SRS system and seen them multiple times. I’ll recognize them in the reviews, but when I try to read them in real-world content, my mind just goes blank. It’s really frustrating because it feels like I’m putting in the time, but not seeing the progress I was hoping for.
I’ve tried some additional techniques, like writing out the kanji by hand and using mnemonics more actively, but I’m still struggling. Has anyone else gone through this kind of slump? If so, what helped you get past it?
I check this: https://community.wanikani.com/t/frequently-used-kanji-that-are-not-on-wanikani-or-appear-in-really-late-levelalteryx But I have not found any solution. Could anyone guide me about this? Also, do you think it’s more effective to slow down on lessons and focus on reviewing what I’ve already learned, or should I keep moving forward and trust that the reviews will help solidify things over time? I’d love to hear what’s worked (or not worked) for others who might have had a similar experience.
My guess is that you are associating the answers with the wrong part of kanji. Don’t try to remember it as an image, but as series of strokes. How many lines? How are they connected? If you remember it as a static image and always associate the meaning in context of seing it alone on screen, you may not recognize it in different font or even color. Brain a tricky thing, isn’t it?
Are you reading the context sentences? Maybe you can try some user script that change fonts.
The hard answer here is that you need to spend more time in real world situations, even if that means less in WK.
Font style, size, even background colour can be part of what your brain is pattern matching against, and you need to refine that recognition to what’s actually important.
I mean I’m no expert either, so take my answer with a grain of salt. But I find the more I learn The Language, like knowing grammar and vocabulary, the more I can remember the kanji because I know what word it should be. I can hear it in my mind in the sentence or conversational context.
It’s why all these things – reading, listening, speaking, grammar, vocabulary, kanji – are inter-related and it isn’t as simple as do this one first, then this one. Whichever one you choose, in isolation, is going to be very difficult until the others improve to support it.
It’s just hard, that’s all, and if you don’t use it you’re going to forget it. There’s no getting around that. The good news is, progress seems to be exponential, so it won’t always be this hard.
This is very normal, for people learning any language. When you do SRS, you do it already knowing that this is an item you’ve seen in this specific app. When you go in the wild, especially early on, you don’t have the advantage of knowing that. So you first have to think if you know it (which is a lot of work over 2000 to 3000 kanji!) and then the meaning could be anything, not just a short list of meanings you likely have in short term memory as “meanings you saw on the app” and can almost treat like a multiple choice test in your mind.
So honestly, really, do not worry about it. Most of us are still doing it years in.
There are multiple reasons why it’s easier to recognize kanji in reviews, especially early on:
You know that when a kanji is in review, that you have learned it before. It can’t be an unknown kanji that looks similar. In the real world, there are many cases where you’re not sure if you’ve even seen this kanji before.
You might know roughly what items are due right now, so you can narrow down the possibilities of what the answer could be.
The font is the same one you learned in the lessons. In real world, sometimes kanji look slightly different because of the font, and that could throw you off.
