Tips for incorporating WaniKani vocabulary into everyday conversations

[ioiok5]

(Kind of a weird title I know)

I’ve been having problems recalling WaniKani vocabulary when speaking in real life. It’s not that I fail to remember during WaniKani reviews but more like my mind sort of blanks out and I forget all the vocab I’ve learnt and therefore can’t utilize any words in real life. Do you guys have any advice? Has this happened to you before?

Ps: This is my second account, on my main account I’ve reached level 4 or so, therefore I’m kinda disappointed I can’t remember all the vocab I know till this point.

[sansarret]

When you speak, you are “producing language”, which is different from understanding the language. You need to know grammar (how to construct sentences), and use english word to japanese word memory recall. WK does not train any of those.

For English to Japanese recall, there are two free applicatons, KaniWani (older) and KameSame (newer), both work with your WK API token. Here is KameSame thread:

KameSame - a fast, feature-rich Japanese memorization webapp

This is a third-party script/app and is not created by the WaniKani team. By using this, you understand that it can stop working at any time or be discontinued indefinitely. KameSame’s server costs are about $80 per month, help cover them at our Patreon page Hello, Internet! KameSame is a free Japanese learning tool that is designed to offer a fast, streamlined user interface and a robust feature set that provide users with a variety of ways to learn Japanese. Because it fea…

There is super extensive community guide that covers all aspects of learning Japanese:

The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List!

This post is a list of Japanese resources and stands as a collaborative wiki gathered by the WaniKani Community. If there’s a resource you feel is missing from the list, please add it by clicking the edit button above. Include an edit reason by clicking the button at the top of the edit window. Many of the resources here are free, however, the ones that aren’t are marked with a dollar sign $ or otherwise noted. Click on the triangle symbol ► to open a section’s resou…

[theghostofdenzo]

What @sansarret says.

Also, I wouldn’t worry about this too much. It’s better to pick up words through interaction/immersion and learn those as you’ll get a better feel for the nuance/when they’re appropriate to use (assuming you have access to native speakers).

[alo]

GIve yourself a daily challenge to use one word or a few related vocab that day. At level 1, you can try using 一人, 大人, or 力. The next day you can try another set of vocab. The key is to ingrain a smaller set rather than trying for all the vocab at once.

Also, bonus points if you can work 人口 into a sentence.

[Cychloryn]

@theghostofdenzo

It’s better to pick up words through interaction/immersion and learn those as you’ll get a better feel for the nuance/when they’re appropriate to use (assuming you have access to native speakers).

Yeah, this is very true. WaniKani gives you those one-word translations, but that’s often not enough to convey the exact meaning/nuance of the word.

Like for example, there’s all these words that WaniKani lists as “condition”. But they’re not all synonyms; there’s more nuance that’s hard to directly translate. So, I’m usually hesitant to use new words I learn from WaniKani until I hear them enough in context.