So, I’m level 26 now. I’ve been doing WaniKani for about a year. I used to be able to level up consistenly in around 10 days. Now, I’m taking over 20 days per level.
I used to do reviews twice every day, and I used to get about 150 reviews per day. Now, it’s always 300-500 reviews a day, and that just demotivates me. On days where I do the 400-ish reviews, I check the next day and it’s just 300 reviews again. Some days, I can’t even bother, it’s just too daunting.
Part of it is that I no longer remember the kanji I “learned”. I find writing it down in a book doesn’t help one bit.
So, I have three questions.
How do I get to the bottom of the review pile?
How do I actually remember what I’ve “learned”?
What schedule works the best for levelling up quickly?
To remember means to have more exposure, and this is tightly intertwined by immersing yourself in material. I don’t see it in your post, but if you have not I strongly recommend looking into immersion. This page has a lot of material The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List! I also would like to add to this that making mistakes is how we learn, so learning things means that some items drop down a lot, until they eventually stick.
The review pile is tightly intertwined with how many lessons you do every day. I see you already slowed down, but consider to slow down more. You will go faster if you make sure you can handle the load, opposed to doing more lessons and getting overwhelmed.
I think learning schedule is very personal as well. But from what I’ve experienced so far it assists most if you do things that you enjoy. This does not mean you should stop doing difficult things, but also things next to WaniKani that are fun, which in turn can be immersion.
For one, my advice would be to go away from the idea of “leveling up quickly”. There are people who are able to keep high retention while running at max speed, but if it doesn’t work for you, you shouldn’t force it.
For remembering part the only real answer is exposure and application. You need to use the words you’re learning in sentences you’re writing, and in texts you’re reading. It works the same way it does for our native languages - we remember certain terms because we use them in our daily life.
And on the bottom line of the review pile, I’d say to reduce your amount of new daily lessons for a while until you’re consistently at an amount of daily reviews you’re comfortable with again. Stopping doing new lessons altogether until then is an option, too.
An important part of healthy learning process to realise and accept is that there’s nothing wrong with spending a month on a single lesson. The more information you’re trying to learn at once, the harder it gets, and pushing far beyond your personal limits for prolonged amounts of time will just burn you out. Learning a new language is a marathon rather than a race, so it’s important to prioritize quality over quantity, and find a pace that will be comfortable and sustainable for you.
I can’t use the words in sentences because I don’t know anything about Japanese grammar, and thus can’t write sentences at all.
Because I know almost nothing about Japanese sentence structure, I don’t find immersion helpful. Also, if I were doing “immersion”, most of the words in WaniKani wouldn’t even show up.
I aim to learn all the kanji before I even attempt grammar. I did start Bunpro a few months ago, but I have a pile of over 1000 reviews on it now, so I’m utterly defeated on that front.
I asked if anyone had any tips for levelling up faster, and for actually remembering things.
If you’re at level 26 then you are well past the point where it makes more sense to study other facets of the language and slow down a lot on kanji study. “Learn them all up front” works for hiragana and katakana because there aren’t very many of them and they all turn up pretty often. It works badly for kanji because there are so many kanji and a lot of them are lower frequency.
Studying all parts of the language in parallel means they reinforce each other, and your brain gets to see the reasons why it’s worth retaining all these bits of information. And L26’s amount of kanji and vocab is enough to start doing interesting and enjoyable things with the language: “not enough kanji” is not going to be what’s blocking you from that, so pushing up that number is not the most effective way to spend your study time.
You don’t need to learn grammar SRS style with flashcards, incidentally – the traditional textbook route which leads you through with examples and exercises works well for many people. The basic grammar patterns are so common that you don’t really need flashcards and SRS to learn them as long as you’re working with Japanese somehow.
#1 => by doing your reviews every day (as much as possible) with fewer or no new lessons
#2 => preferably by going slower and getting some exposure to what you learned. There is a sweet spot and if you are overwhelmed, learning drops off
#3 => I don’t think there is a useful answer considering the other 2 questions. I’d advise to go slower. You should already have a useful level of Kanji and it makes sense to use additional material: I recommend irodori
It might sound counterintuitive, but remembering more will happen when you do other things next to WaniKani and giving it time to digest. The reason we steer you towards slowing down and immersion instead of going fast, is that there are also a lot of posts of people reaching lvl 60, and wondering why they cannot read Japanese yet.
I want to iterate that level 26 is a very good accomplishment. Languages are unfortunately not linear like WaniKani or other SRS systems. Struggling through the first few things to read etc is something that is very difficult, which I am experiencing as well currently. The more you do it though, the more it starts making sense.
Since Bunpro for grammer is not working for you, as it also did not for me. I recommend looking at Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese, this helped me get a lot more context opposed to having the fragmented information in Bunpro.
My answer will probably be similar to gangerM’s, but the reason we’re steering you towards reading, writing and listening is because the only way to learn a new language is to consistently use it.
Vocabulary on its own is, to put it a bit bluntly, kind of useless if you’re not applying this knowledge anywhere. And since our brains are lazy, they tend to delete information that is just lying around there. Which, by extention, means that you will keep forgetting the kanji and words you’re trying to learn and will continue going in circles.
Japanese is my 4th language to learn, and a lot of us have went through that journey before. We know from experience (including mistakes we’ve made on our own) that there’s no secret hack to this process. However counterintuitive it might sound at first, you’ll need to start learning grammar and apply your knowledge in order to solidify it into a neat functional structure.