Has anyone here tried using Kanjidamage and Wanikani together before, during or after starting Wanikani to help pick up the smaller details of certain Kanji and words? I’m most definitely continuing to use Wanikani until level 60, but wanted to know if anyone’s tried using both services to help them out. How did that experience go? Are there any other services you’d recommend I use with Wanikani to learn more grammar/vocab? Thanks!
2 Likes
I haven’t really used Kanjidamage. But sounds sensible for getting a better understanding of some of the meanings. Sometimes I can’t really work out what WK is getting at with their definitions!
But I do use KaniWani. It’s linked to your Wanikani account so you see the vocab you know, but backwards - it gives you the english and you have to produce the Japanese. So I find it useful to help get the WK vocab in my head better. (It’s a bit infuriating but I don’t take my scores too seriously - sometimes there are several answers for the same definition, so you get it marked wrong even though you were ‘right’). It’s the same vocab as WK so may not be quite what you’re after. But I think it’s useful to me at least, so I thought I’d point you at it!
2 Likes
I don’t really see much of a reason to do both. Unless you have some real desire to learn Japanese as if it was taught to you by an edgy teenager, there’s little actual benefit to using Kanjidamage if you’re already using this site.
1 Like
Thanks for the tip! I definitely will start using KaniWani to help my ability to recall words. Have a good one.
1 Like
I never really thought about the fact that eventually I’ll have to start learning Kanji on my own since I will most likely encounter a lot of them as I read and (perhaps) write. Thanks again for the tips! I’ll read the forum posts that you linked- I plan to start up with grammar exercises too. Once I complete level 6 on WK, I’ll head over to Genki.
Fair point- Kanjidamage really is, essentially, an edgy teenagers’ approach to learning kanji 
2 Likes
At one point, I tried WK and RTK, gave up on the RTK. Tried WK and Kanji Damage, gave up on Kanji damage. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking in both instances. My advice; pick one and stick to it. You will gain very little (in terms of Kanji) by doing both and a ton of Kanji workload. You might (most likely) even reach a point where you’ll see no benefit in doing both and drop one anyway.
2 Likes
Has anyone here tried using Kanjidamage and Wanikani together
I’m doing exactly that! I started with Kanjidamage and decided to first memorize the symbols but not the sounds (neigher kun or on). Then, when I was about 30% through Kanjidamage, I signed up for WK and started learning pronunciations. Now I continue doing both, and there usually is a lag between the moment when I learn the kanji symbol (from Kd) and readings (from WK).
Since kanji order is different, occasionally I meet kanji that I haven’t (yet) seen in Kanjidamage but mostly I only have to add the readings to my already existing knowledge of the symbol. Personally, I like this workflow, since it allows me to divide the learning effort and get additional reinforcement for some words.
This can seem an unusual way to study, but it works for me. Somewhere I’ve actually seen recommendations to learn symbol-meaning and sound-meaning connections for words independently, since then they can automatically come together when you see a certain word - for me, it does work that way and feels more natural than remembering all the kanji readings and then trying to solve the puzzle for a word I am not very familiar with. Of course, for this to happen another learning resources are needed, from which the sound-meaning connections can be learnt. These can be textbooks, video or audio lessons, or even another Anki deck (one of Core vocabulary decks, for example).
An interesting side effect of this strategy is the unique experience of being to be able to roughly understand written text without knowing how to read it aloud, which comes earlier than by conventional methods of learning symbols and readings simultaneously. For me, this was certainly an advantage, since it allowed to start immersion and understand text in websites/games much sooner.
2 Likes
That’s an incredible approach I truly wouldn’t have come up with- I think it might be a bit too late for me, but if I could start over (to be honest, I don’t feel like starting over right now 
) I’d probably do the same thing. Thanks for the insight! I greatly appreciate it.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.