Hello everyone,
I have been here 15 days. Sometime last night I hit level 3. Now WK is quizzing me on items I got to guru status… a rude awakening since it is also adding new items for the new level. At first I was not convinced that I was actually learning anything but to my surprise, it seems to be sticking. I’m still on the fence about subscribing. If I finish level 3 before January 8th, I will go ahead and do it.
When did you all have your aha moment and realized that WK actually worked?
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It was too long ago, it’s embarrassing 
Keep it up!
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I had my aha moment after finishing lvl 1 XD I had always difficultys learning kanji on vocab, but with wanikani i had nothign to worry about except doing my reviews and adding new lessons. The learning happened by itself cause of the wanikani review system. Especially the writing out of the answers helped me a lot to keep the things in my head.
So do it, subscribe. It actually works if you stick with it.
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About right now as I just got my first master level item! I think it’s like an 8 day interval?
Good job! がんばって!
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I think for me it was around the first time I hit level three. I was scrolling the internet and came across a movie poster for the most recent Super Hero Taisen movie. I read the title (kanji and all) without pause, scrolled on past…and then realized what I’d just seen and had to scroll back up to look at it again. I couldn’t believe I’d just read and understood the title without even stopping to think about it!
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There was no aha moment for me, as I never doubted that wanikani works. I knew of the effectiveness of SRS before I started.
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For me it was a two-parter. I’m just inching up to level 3, but I’ve already noticed the SRS working.
When I first started getting vocabulary entries that featured okurigana, they just wouldn’t ‘click’ and my success rate on reviews dropped hard. For the kanji 大, what okurigana makes it ‘big’, ‘great’, ‘size’, ‘very’, …? And the difference between 上げる and 上がる also kicked my *** for a bit. Especially since I’m just starting out and haven’t looked at any grammar yet. But after just a couple of reviews, suddenly it just started… happening. Not surprisingly, after all with enough repetition pretty much anything will click at some point, but I was surprised at how little time I had to spend on it. (Actual time spent doing the reviews, not time elapsed since starting.) The feeling of lessons quickly going from ‘oh dear, how am I ever going to memorise all of this?’ to ‘actually, this is pretty easy now’ over and over again in small batches is a big eye-opener.
Same thing happened when I did the kana. I used Dr. Moku for the mnemonics and then Anki to drill them. And it went soooo much faster than I was expecting (again, time spent, not time elapsed).
Another eye-opener was when I started forgetting mnemonics. And I don’t mean literally forgetting them, just not recalling them anymore while thinking of the proper meaning or reading. Once the knowledge settles in your brain you don’t need the mnemonics anymore, and suddenly the vague collections of squiggly lines become characters that actually mean something.
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I’ve tried to learn Japanese a few times before this. And anytime it got to the kanji bit, there was a part of me that knew this wasn’t going to work. How they taught it I mean. I was supposed to just drill these into my memory. And not one or two, but 2000+ of them? I couldn’t see how I could get enough of a base to then start learning them naturally through using the language. (English is my second language, and school got me to that base level where I could read English with only needing to look up a few words and mostly inferring meaning from context. I have a feeling if I can get there with Japanese, it will be a smooth ride (mostly) after that if it goes anything like English did for me.)
When I read about WK, it sounded great. A complete system, intelligently designed for the adult learner. Kinda plug and play system. Just start doing it and keep doing it as the system tells you to do it. Sounded a bit too good to be true, haha, although I’m not sure I thought if that at the time.
I think it only took doing the first few radical lessons to realize this would probably work for me. The first few kanji proved it more. I didn’t subscribe until I hit level 4, but only to save money. I already knew that if I used the system, the system would teach me what I needed so I could go out there and use Japanese. (Obviously it doesn’t teach grammar and such, but I’ve learned two languages in my life, I know how to learn that. I’ve only been taught one alphabet and that was through osmosis and school, and a lot of rote memorization when I was a kid. WK is teaching me a vastly bigger “alphabet”, and I know how to teach myself the rest (mostly I know how to find the right resources that work for me).)
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tried this and that. SRS worked. wk is spoonfed SRS kanji. love ensued.
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I’m so glad to know that I am not the only one experiencing difficulties with those 大 and 上 vocabulary items.
The eye-opener for me was the moment when I understood what does the kun-yomi and ony-omi mean and rules when to use them.
But still, I’m sure that Wanikani can do much better with quite a few mnemonics here. Some of them just doesn’t make any sense (or simply stupid) and you are starting to feel that the author was just too tired to think about anything smart / easy to remember.
It was basically immediately.
I registered.
I did the radicals.
And then I was like “Yeah this seems nice I’m gonna do this”
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If the mnemonics aren’t working for you on a particular item, make them yourself using the radicals you’ve learned. If you’re like me you’ll find that stuff sticks better if you make your own mnemonic, and you’ll end up doing it for all of them. And you’ll get faster at it using stuff from your own life to help it stick. Trust me it’s better than forcing some obscure stretch of a mnemonic to stick in your brain, it’s like giving yourself a third thing to memorise outside of meaning and reading when it’s supposed to come to you straight away to help you remember the meaning and reading haha.
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Yes it’s awesome to forget a mnemonic and just know something on sight. That’s when I knew I was in fact learning. I’ve guru’d the “bigs” and “ups” but they are coming back to haunt me. Mastering them will take some time.
About 3 of 4 mnemonics I make up myself because they either don’t have any connection to the item being learned or they rely on pronouncing a trigger word a certain way. I am from the USA south and the word car for instance is not really pronounced as a monosyllable. 
It’s every day.
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Yeah, some of the mnemonics are just… weird. But that’s just an opportunity to figure out a mnemonic for myself.
And it doesn’t have to be verbal or a picture either. It could be a sound, or a smell… Even being annoyed at a bad mnemonic can be a very effective mnemonic in itself 
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Pretty much right away, as I’d already assessed that there was no way I was going to learn kanji in a “manual” way… I had even tried creating my own mnemonics, but what does it for me is the SRS, where the timing of things is taken care of for me, I just have to sit down and do the reviews. Wanikani is a God send. Can’t believe how many items I’ve learnt in the past 6 months!
I like the structured approach too. The SRS method is still iffy for me. Sure WK sends me items when it feels I need them but if I am AFK then the timing is off. The reviews pike up therefore, some items are seen after I am most likely to have forgotten them while others appear before my memory weakens. This is why I’m on the fence about the $ investment past level 3. To be honest, several items were not new to me as I have been using other resources for conversation and grammar.
Well, the thing is, using Wanikani (or any kind of SRS) means commiting to doing it everyday (or every couple of days) no matter what. If your schedule doesn’t allow you to do that, not sure the investment is worth it, as you’ll spend your time battling leeches.
My 2 cts for what it’s worth: I know myself and what I’m able to sustain for a long period of time, so in general I limit myself to 5 lessons a day (10/15 if I already know a lot of the items or for radicals), and that allows me to have some leeway in the pace I do my reviews. I can step away for a day, and so far I rarely get more than 150 reviews at one time, even if I miss a day. Because I’m not super on top of doing my reviews right when they come, my apprentice items sometimes stay apprentice for a little while longer than other people, but once I guru them it makes no difference.
Personally, knowing that I cannot step away for too long without getting overwhelmed is a great incentive to spend some time on kanji everyday. And simply put, I don’t know of any other tool that would have allowed me to retain more than 1500 items (kanjis/vocab) in 6 months, without feeling at any point like I was straining myself … (I’m aware this is a pretty low input compared to some here, but it’s plenty to me and I like that I can totally manage my pace on here 
)
EDIT: I do all my reviews on the Android app, so I’m very seldom away from a keyboard of some sort lol.
This.
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