God I hope this question hasn’t been asked before, and I’m creating a duplicate thread. The WK community is an explosion of awesomeness … but an explosion none the less, and a little intimidating for a newbie such as myself.
Anyways, I’m looking for some resources that would help me introduce the vocab I’m learning into simple sentences. I love the WK system so far, but I’m personally missing two things.
One, I need to apply vocab to real life sentences. I can see “大きい” pop up on a review, and after some thought and self doubt finally decide … “Oh yeah, that’s big”. But that’s honestly the first time I’ve typed that outside of a review. I’m starting to think I only really recognize kanji with a pink or purple background, and in the font I’ve come to know. I really feel like typing simple sentences like “That is a big tree” or “An adult raises a child” would really help me to give really meaning to “大人”, instead what I call “Wani-Meaing”. Like, I feel like I can peg this in a review, but in real life it would never occur to me what it means.
The other issue is that I notice myself making typos. I’ll switch し and ち (frick’in 大した got me on that more than once), and other little mistakes where after getting it wrong I’ll look at my answer and exclaim “Wait! I didn’t mean to type that”! I feel like typing words in sentences would really help work out some of those kinks.
Another issue is - as I just noticed - I can recognize 大した as great when I see it. But to type it from memory is another trick altogether. Seems to be another point for simple sentence practice.
Is there a good way to take my words, form some sentences, and just start banging them out “I’m in trouble with my parents” style? Or another method that I could get some structured practice typing vocab outside of reviews?
Sounds like at least part of what you’re looking for exists in KaniWani or KameSame, which are “reverse WaniKani” sites that use your API to import your data from here.
They present you with the English meanings and you have to answer with the reading.
That does solve part of the problem. Honestly one of these sites alone would probably get me more than half way. This might actually hold me over until I get to the recommended level 10 for grammar. Thanks for the suggestion!
Since you want to be able to create some simple sentences, I would suggest starting on grammar now, even if it’s the most basic stuff. It’s perfectly normal to do that before level 10. That way you’ll have a basic understanding of sentence structure, and you can pretty quickly begin to utilize these words to help you cement them.
One of the things I did was write journal entries on a site like italki and ask natives to correct them. It’s free and people are generally happy to help you. ^^
Some common resources for delving into grammar are Genki (a textbook + workbook), Bunpro (paid online resource with SRS), and Tae Kim (a free site).
Thanks for the advice! I’ll take a look at those resources over the weekend (I hope, Lord knows that keeping up with WK by itself is slowly turning into a full time job). I know it’s a resource allocation problem. Stick with WK for longer, then have an easier time with grammar. Hit grammar early, and maybe have kanji/vocab resonate more and more reliably knock out WK reviews. I also know that everyone has their own ticks for learning, so I’ll try a few other routes and see what works best for me. Thanks again!
It can definitely be a balancing act, especially as you advance in WK and have more reviews coming in. It really helps to take the first couple levels to determine what’s best for you in terms of workload. Maybe you have 10 hours a day to devote to your studies and can handle doing 40+ lessons at once, or maybe you have much less time and can only handle 5 lessons per day. Both are totally valid, and as long as you continue steadily making progress, you’ll see improvement in your Japanese. Consistency is key here.
As @SleepyOne said, it would be good for you to start grammar soon. Many of us were learning Japanese, including grammar of course, before coming to WaniKani. There’s no real reason to wait. It’s just a matter of finding the right balance.
This happens to me as well. I think the best solution is to read as much as possible. Writing can help too, but unless you get your writings checked you risk practicing mistakes and forming bad habits.
For this I recommend the script Jitai, which randomizes the font during reviews. You can even install additional fonts on your computer and add them to the script for more variety.
I’m in a similar spot. I’m also using the Mirai Japanese app which I really like. Sadly it lacks a SRS system… They do provide several sentences for all the vocab and grammar points they teach. So I just took those sentences and entered them to Kitsun.io for SRS purposes. This does help a lot but is also a huge time consuming task…
