Hi All - I started a few weeks ago and I am on level 3.
I think I have become very addicted to Wanikani!
It may be the “honeymoon” period, but I am totally digging it. I connect several times a day and find it super disappointing when there are no lessons or reviews.
As a result, I started Kaniwani, in part to have more work to do.
I am finding these tools a great way to take 10 min off during the day between work meetings and clear my head. And learn obviously.
Did y’all experience the same? Is this just the moment before it gets really tough??
For me its coming in waves.
When I have the necessary freetime and motivation then I do my reviews many times a day. If either freetime or motivation is lacking then I am happy to at least do the reviews once or twice a day.
That being said I really recommend doing your reviews at least thrice a day, Monring, Noon, Evening. That way the new Kanji stick the best.
If you or a loved one suffers from an addiction it’s okay to seek help. (This parts a joke. I don’t think anyone’s really addicted to wanikani)
To be more serious you are in the early stages of this, it will eventually get to be a lot if you’re keeping up with both wanikani and kaniwani as srs. The thing to know about the workload is that it doesn’t all come back at once but in waves. So for now it can feel boring if you end up without reviews but in a few weeks you may be glad for those breaks. It’s easy to end up with over a hundred reviews in a day. It’s slow until it isn’t. Before it gets to that point really consider how much time you want to spend on flash cards per day. Are you also studying grammar in some form to learn to read in addition to wanikani? These questions will determine how much you will want to do in a day to keep making progress. The important thing is to keep up with it going forward and do at least a little bit every day.
I really, really, really hope it stays like this for you!
I’ve never had the feeling of “addiction” like you might get from a good game. But that might be because I tried numerous other methods for kanji before finding WaniKani.
WaniKani just turned out to be the one thing I could stick with, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s the nice colors or something.
I can’t explain it, but there’s something about this app that makes it easy to stay motivated. There’s something deeply satisfying about finally being able to understand these symbols that have been gibberish my whole life.
Well, in my case I used the extra time to study grammar. I used TextFugu – it was a great online textbook for beginners; unfortunately, it is no longer available for subscription…
Anyway, thanks to that, by somewhere around level 20 I was able to start reading simple resources like
Of course, by that time the amount of reviews I was getting per day became much higher
Anyway, WaniKani is a great tool and this addiction would certainly help you get through the periods of frustration (and such periods will most likely come – they are a natural part of learning process)…
I can see it getting kinda tedious once the reviews rack up, but right now I’m in more or less the same boat. It’s a ton of fun, something that helps keep me semi-productive in my downtime. Would not dream of doing even a single extra Anki review per day, not one, but with Wanikani I’ll happily do however many are due. It’s weird.
