I started Wanikani a couple years ago, then stopped, then tried to start again, then stopped again, so on and so forth. As my NY Resolution, I decided to finally stop making excuses, start with Wanikani, and get japanese lessons.
Since January 1st I have put 25 minutes of my day to do reviews and lessons. First reviews, then new lessons, if no new lessons, then extra study (mostly burned items, as I burned most of them when I first started, years ago, so it’s nice to have the practice).
However, I get I’m just level 4 and that it gets progressively harder. I was wondering what your ways of studying are? I know 25 minutes a day is not much, but I prefer to set myself realistic and achievable goals at first and go from there.
So, it would really help me to know what other ways of studying there are! I read there’s some folks that do Radicals First, then Kanji, then Vocabulary. I personally go with the standard mixed scenario.
Hope this is not the most asked question ever. Hope to have a nice discussion/conversation going out of this! I would be very happy to read about different experiences and what works for whom.
I would just say Kanji are not the most important part in the beginning.
Be sure to have strong Hiragana and Katakana skills (preferably reading and writing) and start with some grammar + vocab independent of WaniKani as well (Textbook, MaruMori, Bunpro, whatever). Preferably also listen a ton to natives (YouTube, anime subbed, dramas, podcasts) etc. to develop your ear for Japanese as well. It’s not about understanding >50%, it’s about picking out a few words here and there and getting used to intonation, inflection, long/short vowels etc.
From my experience, Kanji actually only become a bottleneck when you want to start reading or tackle JLPT levels N3 and up.
Kanji certainly don’t hurt in the early parts of your study, but I feel on this site, many people put too much emphasis too early into Kanji and forget the other basics. Then, when they are in a place where they benefit from the Kanji, they have already burned and forgot some of them
TLDR:
Def don’t do more than 25 minutes on WaniKani for now. Focus on other areas of the language first.
for me personally what makes the journey easier is knowing key words. e.g. because i remember the word for peace (へいわ , “HEIWA” ) i can more easily remember the reading for 平 and 和 which are the components of the word.
Since I have a lot of prior Japanese basic knowledge (mostly N5 and some N4 words, from Genki 1 & 2 textbooks from my university days) -there’s a lot of words like that.
Other words I know from Anime or J-Dramas , e.g. 最低 (Saitei = the worst, the lowest)
your brain remembers words much better than it remembers the Kanji in a vacuum. So my recommendation is - try to focus on building the vocabulary itself in parallel to WaniKani, preferrably in stories, sample sentences, etc.
Also, I can recommend using AI (like nano banana) to visualize the mnemonics.
What I usually do is I first try to just rely on the SRS alone. if i see that i fail an item once or twice, I go and create a visualized image for it. this helps solidify it in my mind.
Here’s my visualization of 保 preserve (tree + mouth + leader + hoe )
25 minutes of WK every day will get you where you want to go very quickly over time. If that’s the only thing you can do, just do it imo.
for me my motivation to do other stuff in japanese has really increased as my kanji knowledge has (i happened to have ~N4 grammar and kana already), so imo just keep WKing and you might find that other stuff opens up as exciting to you.
