If I make a typo that bothers me a lot, I just close the review session and start over, losing that pair and any others I hadn’t completed.
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I used to do that but don’t you have to wait for the hour to roll over before the test resets itself. That’s how it used to be for me.
I always used anki mode script.
I suck at typing.
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Since it sounds like you’re on mobile, download Hakubun if you use Android. Not sure what the best one is for iPhone.
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I haven’t noticed that but perhaps not paying attention. By closing it, I mean just closing the browser tab or clicking the home button.
I think a compelling enough argument can be made that there IS a meaningful distinction, but I strongly feel that the best way to learn this sort of thing is to just understand the word has something to do with things entering your vision (and thus pass the card for knowing just that), and then learn the distinction for when one in natural based on 1000s of context-rich repetitions while reading/listening to real Japanese.
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Not only develop a routine but to focus on learning, not speed. So easy for me to say! I am a victim of my own obsession with speed for sure.
I’ve learned that I am more interested in conversational Japanese than to read it, and especially kanji. My original assumption was that I could “be” like a Japanese child learning to read and through that become more fluent and conversational. After all, that’s what I thought I experienced as a child. Au contraire!
It’s obvious to me now that Japanese children have a huge advantage: they are already fluent in Japanese for their age group. I needed to both learn the kanji AND the meaning as well as the Japanese on’yomi and kun’yomi. Geez.
It took some time for me to find what I believe is the best way for me to learn conversational Japanese especially including listening to it instead of automatically tuning it out. Now, I’m happily doing that. I’m grateful to WaniKani and Tofugu and anticipate returning to them in the future when I’m more confident in conversations.
So you might consider more about what you’re wishing to achieve w.r.t. Japanese. Keep that in the front of mind and relax. It’s a total journey. Have fun!
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Other have mentioned Tsurukame; I just wanted to add that I really hate doing reviews on my tiny iPhone 13 mini screen and I avoid it if at all possible, but you can actually download Tsurukame as a normal app on a Mac device, in case you have one. Tsurukame itself is really convenient and has many useful features, like “cheating”, Anki mode and the summary page WK seems so hesitant to bring back to the the vanilla page - and on Mac, you can have all that on a large enough screen, a keyboard, and a pleasing UI.
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Thank you so much for this, that’s the only solution for me right now. The app is rough around the edges but it does the job.
I don’t have an iphone and I don’t plan to get one so I’m sorry to everyone recommending Tsurukame but I can’t use it. Still, thank you all for feedback.
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Hi! Im wondering, at which level did you start having the feeling you could read well?
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Read WELL? I’ll let you know when I get there 
I’d say around level 15-20, “News web easy” started to be not so bad, and now at 30 I can go to the regular Asahi Shinbun or something like that and pick my way through it. It’s not without lookups, and certainly you get better as you start picking up the words and phrases that occur over and over in news stories - “according to”, “sources say” kind of thing. Every genre is going to have its specialized jargon and I don’t think wanikani is going to prevent having to struggle a little at first. Might as well start the process earlier than later.
I think you do need to probably learn N5-N4-ish grammar as well, which wanikani doesn’t teach. But there’s no reason to wait until after wanikani to do it. I like bunpro for that (which lots of other people say helps them as well)
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EDIT sorry ctmf I didn’t mean to reply to you, just to the thread.
I heard in one of these threads lately that when the reading section says, “This is a jukugo word that uses the on’yomi readings of the kanji. You should be able to read this on your own.” People read this as passive aggressive or judgmental. I was surprised by this, I never thought of it that way. This seems like a statement of fact to me. But also I figure that they were just trying to be strange to keep it interesting, not like they were talking to me personally at all. I’m one of thousands of people who have done this course how could they be trying to personally shame me…
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haha, that’s ok.
I have a more practical “reading too much into it” take on the “you should be able to read this” thing:
When they first started, they had to write the explanation for nine thousand items. That’s a big job, and you’d want to prioritize. Ones that seemed like people could figure out, weren’t priority #1 so they put some cut-paste text there. Notice how it’s not usually specific to the item? Boilerplate text. Essentially “Note to self: to do later: put a better explanation here”
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I was reading back a little. I totally agree even at level 60 I’m reading Harry Potter, TECHNICALLY, it’s easy for me. I know 99/100 kanji used and mostly the level 1-20 kanji are used over again. But even then, I only know 1/10 onomatopoeic adverbs. I see two kanji I know but still am like, “wow, never seen that combo before.”
You’ll never be ready to start reading. It will always make you feel like a child when you start reading. And it will be a little bit of a slug until you get a fair amount of reading practice under your belt.
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+1 to what cmtf said, though I’d like to add that if you have N5 ish grammar (or at least you’ve read explanations for it, not that you’ve memorized it totally), you could consider joining something like the Absolute Beginner Book Club here on the forums. They keep pretty good spreadsheets for vocab which helps save time on looking up words, and you’re basically always going to have to look up tons of words no matter what you want to read.
I started trying to play games in Japanese at level ~25 with shaky N4 grammar. I was looking up a TON of words, but I’d find loads of words that I would learn in the next couple levels if I kept pushing here. I’m still in that phase. I recently learned 錬金術 alchemy on level 46, and now I’m playing a game where I’m the 錬金術師 alchemist giving out potions to people. But it’s less than the beginning, and I feel more confident in my grammar than when I started, and I’m faster at looking up words than in the beginning too. I’m roughly 10x faster at playing games in English than in Japanese still, but I’m telling myself that just means that a 50 hour game is 500 hours of reading practice.
But also there’s no police to tell you “you can’t read that!” If you really want to read something, then go for it, and ask questions if you need help. If it’s too frustrating to look up 10 words per sentence, maybe consider a book with shorter sentences first. It’s way more important to be interested in what you’re reading - because the shortcut to getting good at reading is reading more.
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Haha, I forgot about grammar. I should say that I also had a tutor for the past 3 years to help with grammar, so reading would be even more of a challenge with out that…
Grammar is tricky in Japanese I remember a lot of times, I would say, I know every word in the sentence but couldn’t tell you what they are trying to say.
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Happy to help.
Yes. This sucks. There is no good reason to not have an undo button like Anki. Wanikani is seemingly married to a design philosophy that only benefits people with no self discipline who would willingly cheat the system and themselves. Those people are not going to learn Japanese, regardless of tools. Let the rest of us have an undo button.
It’s one of the main reasons (of about 3) I will not recommend Wanikani to others. Even though it 100% works and is how I learned Kanji (and my core vocab)
Japanese is painful enough without having the tools introduce even more, needlessly.
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As frustrating as it is, it’s important to remember that not only is failing not a bad thing – it is, in fact, a good thing. If you are getting stuck, it could very well simply mean that what you are doing isn’t working, and that’s okay. It’s worthwhile to take some time to explore new learning techniques. After all, learning is, itself, a skill.
Maybe you are taking on more Kanji than you can handle, try slowing down on lessons. Maybe try writing down the Kanji and Vocab you’re regularly struggling with and practice outside of WaniKani. Maybe some of the scripts written by the community can help. And, of course, it might not hurt to reset a few levels back if you’re truly stuck.
The fact that user scripts exist is a feature, not a bug. They allow you to customize your experience to work best for how you learn. Some people use tons of user scripts that make their experience very different from another user, whereas another person might just install one or two scripts that add the one or two features they feel are missing, such as an undo button.
It’s also important to make sure to enter WaniKani with the right mindset. This is not a tool for learning Japanese. This is a tool for memorizing Kanji. You’ll absolutely need additional tools to practice other parts of the skill, and doing so will help with here, too.
It’s also worth noting that WaniKani is not the only Kanji memorization tool out there. It’s stringent rules means it’s simply not going to be for everyone – that’s not a fault of the program. If you just can’t make it work, that’s okay. It’s worthwhile to look around and see what else is out there, to see if anything else works better.
Either way, at no point are you actually wasting time. Every single mistake you make is advancing your skills forward, not backwards. Every tweak you make will help you learn what does or does not work. The concept of a mistake “setting you back” does not exist – even if a particular mistake isn’t advancing your memorization, it could very well be what leads you to make a change to improve your learning environment.
And ultimately, you’ll want to actually start using the language for the sake of using the language as early as possible. Do not wait until you are ready – if you do, that day will never come. Obviously you’ll have to start simple at the start, such as by changing the language for a game that has some, but not a lot, of reading – like Minecraft. But if all your exposure with the language is in time spent learning, you’ll simply develop your technical skills without having the ability to use it outside of learning environments.
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See and I would say the people with no self-discipline (if we’re going into name-calling people we disagree with) are the ones who think “good enough” when they make an error. Just repeat it again, no harm done. It’s a few more minutes in a review session*. You’re still doing lessons every day.
*if it’s a substantial amount of time, you’re making too many errors to write that off as a wanikani problem. That’s a you problem.
I would furthermore say the people who aren’t going to learn Japanese are the ones who get all bent out of shape and want to argue if told they’re not exactly right on everything.
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