I’ve previously reached level 60, but then a couple years ago I started over now that I’ve been doing daily manga and book reading for the past three years (I’ve now read thousands of chapters of manga and am currently halfway through book five of Harry Potter in Japanese).
But more and more and MORE I continue to come across readings for kanji and vocab combinations that aren’t included on WaniKani, so I constantly have to stop and look things up and find out “Yep, there’s another one that WaniKani didn’t teach me”, including many that are very common or way too important and should’ve been covered.
This didn’t used to bother me when I first did my 60 levels, but now that I actually read everyday it’s stunning and irritating, because WaniKani is a great tool, but man, it’s missing SO much.
Is anyone aware of any resources that specifically include things WaniKani doesn’t?
I think the list of words is pretty open-ended. I don’t expect you will find anything that exactly teaches you the words you will encounter.
In the grand scheme of things, you probably need around 25-30k words known for your lookups to go down significantly. WaniKani teaches ~6700? words which is a fraction of that. On top of that WaniKani does focus on words that reinforce the part of the Kanji they want to teach. No non-kanji vocab, no usages of the Kanji that are rarer.
WaniKani focuses on getting your foot into the door. Giving you common readings for Kanji and getting you to not fear the “big wall of Kanji” that scares away many people from even starting to learn them. Many people overestimate what the program can actually do for you.
I think there is no utility in adding every reading on here, even for the Kanji WaniKani teaches.
The best thing that you can do is mine cards with words that are relevant to you directly from the material you are consuming. That necessarily involves lookups. Making your lookup setup as smooth as possible is one way to reduce the friction.
You could alternatively try to prelearn targeted for your material with a system like https://jiten.moe/.
Regarding this point, they do occasionally add some words or even knew Kanji. Giving them feedback on what you feel like is important might sway their decision. I know I would love to see 呟く, 嫉妬, (recently 携える) etc. on here for sure. I expect everyone who does seriously use the language to have such a list. The interesting part would be the overlap
jiten is nice and shiny and have a strong prebuilt deck content but unfortunately doesn’t teach kanji cards (yet) to my knowledge.
For acquiring new kanji through reading I like its grandfather https://jpdb.io/ that automatically teach the kanji of your vocabulary cards if enabled in the settings.
jpdb parser is decent and creating a custom content deck by copy / pasting your raw text relatively painless.
There is also a great reader browser integration (notably with ttsu, but that’s becoming kind of a standard with those custom SRS / vocab management / dictionaries websites) that makes adding cards to your current mining deck while reading a breeze.
I don’t want “good enough” and I don’t want to have to use a worse studying method just because this one wants to keep it’s tagline of “2,000 kanji, 6,000 vocabulary words, in just over a year”.
They could have additional levels that they group separately as advanced, or charge extra for more.
My point is that there’s still plenty of kanji and vocab that WaniKani hasn’t covered, and learning them one by one as I come across them is extremely inefficient compared to using WaniKani. It’s a great tool and there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue to be used for thousands more terms.
Sure, if you must study them to acquire the words, it’s less efficient. At some point you don’t really need to do that, though. Right, like surely you still come across a new word in English (or your native language if it’s different) now and then, and I doubt you’ve ever farmed an Anki deck about it.
Sir, you’re making it pretty difficult not to troll.
At level 99 having a mining setup is pretty much the norm. If you reaaaally like WK there are Anki setup and userscript that emulate the WK experience pretty well.
Are there unseen aspects that prevent you to do so ?
Jokes aside, if you’re seeking a solution to a problem it’s okay to vent your frustration but maybe explain why the multiples answers given by the community don’t fit.
Honestly I think a good portion of us feel the same and this is why there can be so much adverse reactions once we fall off the honeymoon.
Unfortunately hoping for many changes is probably a dead-end (as you can consult the profuse history of the forum about it…) and you’ll save much more sanity by letting go.
I would like to add some perspective, with my experience being English as my second language.
During high school I think I learned around 5000 words in a period of 5 years. I had grammar during this period as well but I never got it fully until my immersion caught up about 5 years after high school. Given that, 6000 is in the same ballpark.
My current trajectory puts me in for a 6 year journey to go through WaniKani, I honestly think that I will have difficulty stopping at that point as well, as it works very well for me, and it has been fully integrated into my daily life. I am glad I read a lot about immersion on the forums, as I realized this is how I mostly learned things for English as well.
Only about 3% of people who start wani kani ever actually make it to the end. Any additional would only target that small pool of users. Fluency exists in the long tail so it won’t be found here but its an excellent starting point.
The 3% comes from all the people who presumably watch anime, get inspired to learn JP, then realize its work and not easy like the kawaii desu-nee anime and quit. And some proportion from those who try to hero their way though and end up crushed under 300-400 daily reviews for months.
I think it would be cool if they did a WaniKani 2, with more stuff, another 60 levels or something, not to get into the weeds (although… getting into the weeds to do “video game language” or “anime language” would be fun), not to teach hardcore N1+ stuff, but just to expand the base.
But that said, you are doing a lot of reading, and you are learning these other readings from… your reading. I think the intention is to get some basics with WK, then to flap your wings and fly! WK doesn’t teach grammar either (obviously); it’s not meant to be a one-stop-shop. WK isn’t meant to teach you everything. It’s meant to be a cheat code; it’s meant to be snow tires so you can drive through the harsh conditions of learning Japanese.
I would definitely not be opposed to more being added, though, or a sequel course that reviews the first and adds more. But I’m not sure there would be a lot of profit in that since most customers probably don’t even finish all 60 levels!
There is nothing wrong with your topic; I think people are just responding to your frustrated tone.
I would pay extra for a “bonus” course that adds the next most common 500 kanji and another set of vocab to go along with them. But I’m not gonna hold my breath on that ever happening. So yeah, just immerse, read, look stuff up, learn the natural way, which is “healthier” anyway, gives you a more solid understanding of the words when encountered “in the wild” in a variety of circumstances.
