Hello everyone i’m a fellow japanese learner and i am not very good at organizing my time. Therefore i usually find it hard to do both grammar and kanji learning and vocabulary learning in a day.
My dilemma is: which one should i prioritize over the others? If i only had the slot for one of the 3 things, which one should i choose? What if i had 2 slots?
Should i do them all with the risk of doing all of them bad?
My biggest concern is driven by the fact that i think that kanjis are the pillars on which the other parts of my learning are built on, so not going through kanji learning daily kills me, but at the same time, i should not and want not to neglect grammar, neither vocabulary.
What do you guys say? Looking forward to hear your thoughts and suggestions about this one.
Unless your time is extremely limited I’d probably find a way to juggle a little of everything if at all possible, chip away at kanji 5 at a time or whatever. That said, that’ll make you spend much longer on kanji, which becomes partly a financial consideration of subscribing longer so that doesn’t necessarily mean definitely stick to WK, depending on what works for you.
But if you do feel the need to make cuts, kanji should be your lowest priority. It’s the most avoidable part of Japanese. If you know grammar and some words, you can read written Japanese with furigana, you can speak to some level, and you can understand listening. Everything is built on those core skills. Kanji is very important to open up the written work you have access to, but that’s all it does, and on its own without an understanding of the content it does next to nothing.
I think you should choose progress, not choose either grammar, or vocab, or kanji. If you don’t have time for all three, you should consider rotating your active slot. You need grammar. You need vocab. You need kanji. None of these can be skipped, sadly.
What is your primary focus? To read? To speak? To just learn the language in general?
If your primary wish is to read, lowering the priority on kanji learning wouldn’t be very effective. Mastering kanji is years of active effort, so better to start sooner rather than later.
For me, grammar and WK worked very well. Of course, WK is not a vocab source, but I still find that a lot of useful words are covered. So upside of WK: you’re partially combining vocab and kanji study.
Downside of WK: it’s very time consuming. Especially if you want to finish it in the foreseeable future.
I know that I wouldn’t have been able to get my kanji, or even vocab level, where it is today without WK. I needed the hand-holding of radicals (yes, even their fake radicals.) I benefitted greatly from the mnemonics. I really don’t see how I could have taught myself kanji without it, and unless you’re focussing only on listening and speaking, kanji will always be a part of vocab learning.
Being at level 11, you have insight in your kanji learning, and you can probably assess for yourself if you think you can make similar gains without it. You have a blue badge, so you’re on monthly or yearly, so there is also the notion of cost coming into play.
I would second @Omun in asking what’s your primary focus? Tailor your activities to what you most want to achieve. Understanding kanji is not that helpful for understanding spoken language (although I think it is at least a little helpful).
I personally found wanikani incredibly useful, so I wouldn’t recommend quitting it entirely at your level, but that could be bias, as all of us are here because we use/used wanikani.
You can know a thousand kanji’s but if you don’t know how to form a proper sentence than you are still left with only a little bit of japanese speaking skills.
I would prioritize learning N5/N4 grammar over kanji if you’re limited on time. If you’re on WK liftetime, you can just reduce the number of lessons so the daily review stack stays low to make time for grammar.
Are there some days when you have more time than others? For example, is your time 30 minutes daily during the week and 1 hour on the weekends or holidays? That’s what my schedule used to be like, and this is what I did.
I would suggest learning maybe 5 Wanikani a day (I find the reviews give me consistency and force me to study, since I don’t like seeing them pile up). If you still have some time after reviews but not a lot on a regular day, I would recommend reading to help solidify the kanji/grammar/vocabulary you are learning. If you don’t know where to start, try the Absolute Beginners Book Club.
On days when you have more time, add in vocabulary and grammar (perhaps alternating). You could also try to include some listening to get used to the sounds of Japanese language, if it’s something you’re not exposed to regularly.
Basically, this is what I did last year when I was swamped at work: make sure to do my kanji reviews and keep up, then add in other materials when I have time. I also take a one-hour online Japanese class every week. Fortunately, I’ve switched jobs, so I do have more time for my Japanese studies, which makes them more enjoyable.
Kanji will become much more manageable once you are familiar with a few thousand Japanese words to associate them with.
So I’d argue you should focus on learning some vocabulary in the form of hiragana + pronunciation, before you touch kanji at all.
For example read+listen a few sentences of “NHK news easy” every day and look up every word with a yomichan-like addon. Skip any city names and technical terms, focus on everyday words and basic sentence structure.
Once you know some vocab, you might even decide that SRS that quizzes you to type in a specific English keyword associated with an isolated kanji component, is not the best use of your time.
Learning and studying are means to an end and depend on your goals.
For example, if you have a goal of traveling to Japan, listening practice is crucially important and not at all on your list. On the contrary, if you’re mostly content to read Japanese content, you could do without it.
Japanese is one of the most challenging languages for English native speakers, and it really takes some consistent time investment to gain competency. This may be an opportunity to work on your time management.
I think it’s important to maintain at least some minimal amount of WaniKani practice; if you take time off and come back to hundreds, or thousands of reviews, it can feel like a tall mountain to climb and be a motivation killer. Keeping up with reviews and avoiding taking on too many new cards at once helps with consistency and not reaching those motivation-killing walls.
Do whatever you think is providing the most benefit at the current moment. You need to learn all these things, and you could say there’s a “perfect order” to it all, but in the end you should probably do what you feel is giving you the most progress for your time.
That said if it all feels the same to you, I’d say grind out more kanji. It’s such a long road that every step counts. It works better for me to focus on one specific thing at a time than a few minutes here an there, but everybody is different.
Whatever you do, don’t burn out. If you feel the burnout coming, switch to something else to study for a while
If you don’t have time for all three, you should consider rotating your active slot. You need grammar. You need vocab. You need kanji. None of these can be skipped, sadly.