Wanikani feels the same as when I left it years ago. It’s not the worst thing. Having a familiar environment is keeping me up with studying, and reminds me to work on my Anki decks, but I cannot recommend WaniKani to anyone as it currently is. The only think it’s got going for it over an Anki deck is it makes me type the answer, and the mnemonics are built in. If I hadn’t paid for lifetime years ago I would have just walked away. I know a lot more about learning Japanese now and there are so many free resources there is no reason to spend a single penny to learn Japanese
You can have cards in Anki that require you to type the answer. I use that for my own deck.
The WK experience is cleaner, simpler and more user-friendly (four answer buttons?), and you can sit right down and start learning from professionally curated materials. You install Anki and you have nothing; time to start researching fan-made decks and hope you don’t download one that sucks, or was transcribed from an authoritative source incorrectly. Or make your own, which you may or may not be in a position to do effectively.
Newbie here but what I can tell from recently starting studying Japanese in person in addition to doing 3 levels here and taking a look at some other competitors (or alternatives) mentioned here, I think some of the comparisons are not fair?
Renshuu and Bunpro seems to be targeting teaching Japanese language as whole (not just Kanji) which is a whole different ballgame. Which also implies that their goals, business strategy and trajectory would be different and complex. While WK is specifically for Kanji. Anki is somewhat a close comparison but the thing I like about WK is that it takes care of picking the right/necessary vocabulary and path for us. Anki seems a lot of work and requires a pre-knowledge to know how & what to study before we even study the ‘study’ (and right now this just reading, as we know there is another whole aspect of writing Kanji which very few people/apps/services take up.)
For something like Kanji, I think this pre-knowledge is critical and not everyone has it. Because if you look at other Kanji only programs like Kodansha, they too focus only on Kanji and knowing how to go about learning Kanji is major part of the learning itself. I like WK seems to take care of it for us. WK imo seems to be suitable for studying Kanji with as less bells and whistles but also have the guarantee of mentored structure and appropriate path.
Having said that, I do agree that if people feel that the vocabulary/Kanji list is not enough (or not what is claimed to be for the paid service), then that’s a valid concern.
From the UI perspective I will admit I am a newbie so I haven’t gotten tired of anything yet lol but ‘Undo option’ with a time limit would be nice. Typos are very common and a constrained Undo (like how Gmail allows to unsent your email for few seconds after clicking send) will take care that people don’t abuse and cheat too much while allowing speedy review process.
Was, the kana vocab update and the big “lifetime of Japanese learning” banner on the sales page suggests to me they are trying to become a one-stop-shop
I’m having trouble understanding why you think it’s really necessary. I don’t use a reorder script, and that’s my progress chart there. The first paid levels took a bit longer as there are more lessons and I was still learning the system, but after I got into a groove, I had no problem leveling up every 7 days, and if I were willing and had not purposely slowed down to 14 days a level after level 30, I wouldn’t have any problem (that I reorder script would’ve helped) leveling up every 7 days all the way to level 60.
In order to keep this pace you have to start all radicals immediately (or within a few hours at least) when you level up and then all remaining kanji when the radicals guru, correct?
If you don’t have a reorder script IIRC that basically means that you have to do all your lessons at once or at least until you manage to start all radicals/kanji you need. That usually means a big batch of lessons twice a week.
With a reorder script you can smooth things out in order to never have to do more than ~20 lessons a day, every single day. You go exactly as fast, but it’s significantly easier to handle IMO. I prefer to have 200 reviews every day than some days with 100 reviews and some days with 300. I did what you did for the first ~10 levels before using a reorder script and it was quite annoying.
But you’re absolutely right that you can maintain “full speed” without any addition, technically.
I think vanilla WK lets you say to do all radicals now before finishing up the previous level’s vocabulary.
I see those options:
The closest you get is “ascending level then subject” I believe, but that means that in order to start the new radicals you have to start every single lesson from the previous level first (and if you just leveled up, chances are that you have a few vocab lessons left).
There’s no built-in order where you can always do the radicals first when available, then kanji, then vocab, which is generally what you want when “speedrunning”.
You only did the first few levels, which I mentioned has more lessons than typical (~190 vs ~160), so you didn’t see what happens after the first 10 paid lessons.
The typical level has about ~7 radicals, ~33 kanji and ~120 vocab, ~160 total lessons.
When leveling up, there are about 10 to 20 vocab lessons from the previous level that I would do right away to get to the 7 radicals, so I might have sometimes gotten 30 lessons on those days, but it was hardly noticeable since I was doing about 20 to 25 lessons every day to level up in 7 days anyway. The only real noticeable difference from the other days is that I had to do these lessons promptly right after finishing the reviews.
I’m assuming the second big batch of lessons you mentioned would be when you guru the radicals, but the newly unlocked kanji get to the front of the vocab lessons by default, so you get the kanji lessons right away without having to do any reordering. The only situation where you would need reordering here is, ironically, if you use a reorder script and get behind on your vocab lessons. Without the script, you never have vocab lessons from previous levels when you guru the radicals, so a reorder is never needed.
So that you have an idea of what happens before leveling up, here is a wkstats screenshot that I took when I was at level 28 close to leveling up. Notice that there are only 12 lessons that are locked, as the other 13 can be done before leveling up, so for this level, when you level up, you immediately have to do no more than 12 vocab lessons, to then do the 6 radicals for level 29, about 20 lessons in total.
BTW, you mention never have to do more than ~20 lessons a day, every single day. It should be no more than 25, or 30 for the earlier levels. It’s mathematically impossible at 20 per day, unless you don’t care about doing all the vocab lessons, i.e. if anyone does 20 per day with a reorder script, the vocab lessons would just pile up.
What I can say is that I went one level/week like you for the first 40 levels and the experience was a lot nicer after I reordered than before. One other element for instance is that I wanted to do the items blocking leveling up first, but then I liked shuffling the rest for instance (so that while I waited for the radicals to guru I’d learn a mix of kanji and vocab every day, instead of just kanji and then the vocab). I believe that in order to do that on the standard interface you’d have to mess with the settings every time.
Also rarely I would actually let lessons pile up for a few days because I was particularly busy, but I still wanted to cherry-pick the level-up lessons to maintain my pace. Then I would catch up in the following week on the lesson backlog.
At any rate this debate is a bit moot at this point since apparently WK is about to introduce a lesson picker that will let people decide precisely what they want to study every time, effectively solving this issue.
Well as you mention it varies depending on the levels since they don’t all have the same number of items, but overall there are 9226 items on WK so that’s an average of almost exactly 22 items/day to maintain the one level/week pace over the course of WK. Since I always do my lessons in batches of 5 that meant 20 or 25 lessons every day.
I also don’t really count radicals as proper lessons/reviews because I would effectively autopass them, so that reduced the effective number of items for me (and there are quite a lot of radicals in the early levels as you know).
That feature can’t come soon enough for me! I subscribed while still at level 3 because I hit days with no lessons and no reviews. I thought I needed to pay to access content (yes, despite the warnings to wait ). Now I realize that happened because I was pacing myself to do 10 lessons per day only and limiting sessions to 8am and 8pm. Bad mistake. I now realize I will be stuck on level 3, with barely any new content in the practice sessions for weeks on end.
At first I thought, nevermind, happy to support the devs for the time I’ve spent already. Until I read whole threads about level 3. Known issue, nothing done, so probably considered a ‘feature’. Cancelled sub for now, but looking forward to the lesson picker
You can access a beta version here
Just saw this thread, so wanted to cross-link to a post about how useful I find it.
Late reply to your reply, but ya generally speaking base WK is good, and granted they have added some new content in terms of kanji and vocab.
I don’t think it needs a ton of new features per se, but clearly some of the really popular user scripts would be worth implementing into the code as options at the very least. Darkmode, phonetic-semantic composition, font randomizer, heatmap, etc. These could all easily be toggled with settings/options if you want them.
They don’t have a developer anymore.
RIP
wish there was an offline mode