Hello,
This is my first post, I am glad to meet you all. I am doing this to give hope and courage to people having a hard time with wanikani. I believe everyone has this depressed phase with wanikani where you feel like you don’t learn anything and do all your reviews wrong.
I am currently level 21. I am doing an internship in Japan in a math laboratory. I have been here for 3 months now, and every single day I spoke with a woman in the secretary. During those exchanges, I noticed how much wanikani is useful.
- Every time there is a word I don’t know, she will write it in kanji, and most of the time I will tell my self “No way I know those kanji, I understand the decomposition. This is amazing”
- Wanikani helped me deduce a lot of things in Japan, I don’t have a particular example since it is a very specific situation. But your knowledge is not just about knowing kanji.
- Did you ever think “I will never use this kanji why should I learn it ?”. Let’s assume that the kanji you are talking about is used 0.1% of the time. You are right; you will never see it. However, if there are 100 such kanji, together they represent 10% of the kanji you will see. My point is that if you take a specific kanji you will probably never see it but it is still worth learning . Wanikani doesn’t let you choose which kanji you are going to learn and that is a very good thing.
- I can remember and understand name of places and cities way better. I started to read manga, I am around N5 in grammar but I can still understand a few things and it is thanks to all the words I know from wanikani.
So yes, wanikani works, and it works very well. Obviously, it is not perfect, but I do believe this is the best way to learn kanji. I do this post because, before going to Japan I was a bit depressed . I felt like I was only able to fill in the answers in my review, and that I was not able to recognize kanji and use that knowledge outside wanikani. This is false, I was only seeing the x% of kanji that I don’t manage to remember. But in fact, I could recall and use most of the kanji I learned.
So yea, don’t give up, I know it is hard sometimes. You will doubt, and you will want to give up but don’t . Because no matter how the situation seems , you are still learning even if you don’t notice it.