I can read around a 6th-7th grade level in Japanese. One of the biggest difference makers in reading levels is when furigana stops being used, which is right after those levels. Kanji is the biggest difference maker in regards to reading, but grammar also makes a big difference. I’ve finished all of Tobira and the two Genki as far as grammar goes, and I’m learning supplementary materials in addition to that knowledge.
Right now I’m reading the Orange light novel, which I can finish about 3 pages of in 5 minutes per day. General rule for reading to increase fluency is, if you have to look up more than 3 words per page, you should pick an easier book. While that may seem counter-intuitive to learning new words, that’s what you’re here on Wanikani for and what studying supplementary materials should be for. Reading should be used primarily to become familiar with Japanese sentence structure and being able to smoothly comprehend Japanese sentences.
Personally, I prefer making my own decks. It does take more time, but there’s also the benefit of having some extra retention from putting it together yourself. I would either find a deck for your textbook or put them in manually, and get started on that. It’ll be really helpful to know the words in a chapter before you need to (specifically, textbooks tend to put the conversation and reading examples at the beginning of a chapter, and then later teach you the vocab and grammar, which seems backwards to me).
Here’s how I study with Anki:
I use the mobile app (AnkiDroid) for my primary study sessions. I just don’t like how desktop feels for lessons & reviews.
However, I use the desktop app to put in new cards, because I find it’s easier there. I sync the two (AnkiDroid & Desktop) using the AnkiWeb service.
I do have several decks, for different things: Pokemon names, Pokemon moves, 3 different Final Fantasy 14 subs2srs decks, a deck for sentences, and one I’ve called “Wild & Hobby Vocab.” This last one is where the vast majority of my vocab goes, regardless of where I got it from, since I could see any of it anywhere. Manga, textbook, themed vocab lists, etc.
When you create a card, it gives you the option to give it tags. This is how I handle my “Wild & Hobby Vocab” from getting too crazy - I tag it with where I found it. This also helps me know how useful each resource was to me.
Also worth noting, once I get a word in WK that I’ve had in Anki, I suspend that card in Anki, since I feel there’s no point in duplicating it (and can be counter-productive).
One of my favorite things about Anki is that you can give it more than 2 fields of data. That is, you can give it a “kanji” field, “kana” field (so you know the reading for the kanji), “English”, “part of speech”, etc. And then you can take that data and make several cards out of it without having to re-input the data.
You can also set it to force you to type in the answer, similar to WK, if you want.
Thank you!!!
I might try some of the prebuilt decks, but I’ll start making my own tonight! I got my textbook the other day so I’ll start building a deck with the vocab from that.
@savee13 glad I could help There’s nothing wrong with prebuilt decks, it’s just that it can be harder to remember things you’ve never seen before and probably have no context for.
As for me, I feel like a mess ( ;∀;)
Listening: somewhere in Genki II range. I can generally understand slow sentences, or sentences with extra context (such as visuals), but fast & without visuals? Nope. I feel like part of this is also just me, I tend to have a hard time listening to things that don’t have visuals in English, too. I guess I should get a call partner, but I’m generally too shy.
Reading: going pretty good I think, but I’m way slower than I want (need?) to be. I’ve been playing Pokemon Moon and reading The Little Prince (5-6 grade), and they’re now noticeably smoother than when I started, but they’re still really slow. I wanna be able to read that text that pops up for 3 seconds before disappearing like I can in English ((+_+))
Writing: pretty well I think. I’m able to have written conversations pretty well, and composition exercises don’t scare me, they just seem boring. I need to spend more time posting to places like Lang8 for corrections, since the stuff I think is OK might be absolutely horrible. 大変だった I’ve also started a journalling app that encourages small chunks of text, so it’s easy to put a sentence or two in several times throughout the day.
Grammar: I’m about to finish The Japan Times’ “An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese” but… I have no idea how much I retained. I already have their next one (新・中級から上級への日本語) and it looks really good, I’m really excited to start it, but I think I’m going to pause on progression and take some time to solidify what I have. Also, I write things by hand to help with retention, and my hand has been hella hurting lately so I guess I need to back off on that.
Depending on how much I’m in the mood to look up and how much I’m satisfied just getting the gist of certain parts of the conversation, I can read a manga volume with simple everyday dialogue in about 4 hours. By everyday dialogue, I mean the kind of thing you’d see in a slice of life series. Just characters going about living very normal lives. That’s the kind of series I prefer anyway, but I definitely wouldn’t be able to get through more complicated material.
In general while reading I try to weigh how precisely I want to understand the dialogue against how much I’m willing to interrupt the flow of the story. Sometimes skipping half a page of bubbles when visual context clues make it clear what is being said is preferable to spending 10 minutes painstakingly guessing at radicals on jisho (which as we know are so rarely the same ones we learned on WK, so I tend to find it really frustrating).
I also find that stuff I look up while reading does not at all stick in my head the way stuff learned through SRS on WK does. I’ll often look the same word up multiple times in the course of a volume of manga. Even the ones I remember after the first time are immediately forgotten when I finish the volume. So again, I have to weigh the sometimes dubious benefit of looking something up against the time it’d take. I’d rather save some time and squeeze in a few extra WK reviews…
I find the same thing happens to me. I usually do my lookups, at this point, by checking the English version of the manga to see if I guessed correctly at the gist, rather than looking up the kanji and stumbling through vocab-synthesis and going though the whole context-switch thing. If it comes up a few times (characters do tend to repeat novel phrases or anything important), I’ll read it out loud each time and find the concept usually sticks half-decently.
(The kanji then always seems to appear in WK like a week later and I’ve already got some real-world example to tie it to, which helps the lesson step go by quickly)
Most of the stuff I’m trying to read in Japanese is unlikely to get translated unless an anime gets announced (and even then probably well after), so this usually won’t be an option for me unfortunately. Though I’m also reading less since I started WK. The two things tend to compete pretty directly for my free time, which is a bit of a catch-22.
Ah. Yeah, I plan to move on to untranslated stuff before too long (though I know scans exist for the first series I plan to tackle), but I decided to start with things where English is readily available to use as a crutch, so that I can try to maintain a pace of a chapter every other night and feel like I’m becoming less and less dependent on it. Thus far, it seems to be working.
WK eats into my time a lot, too, which is why I’m about to hard-cap myself to four batches of lessons per day, with a maximum of 20 items. Gonna leave two hours open right before sleeping to read manga/grammar chapters without interruption.
I kinda learned grammar and vocab before kanji, so now I can basically understand anime without subs and listen to anything in general, but I can’t read a lot. My listening skills are probably about N2 level, but my kanji skills are only N4. To make it even more complicated, after years of reading kanji without actually learning them, I can read at an N3-N2 level, but I couldn’t pick the kanji out of a list of possible ones. I guess I’m using Wanikani to help level everything out, and I want to take the N1 in July 2019.
I can play video games without much trouble, but I have to look up words quite frequently. Grammar is for the most part not a problem. I could probably read manga and some easy novels too if I tried.
My listening skills are still not good. I can understand slow-spoken dialogue, but I miss many details if it’s fast. I have a lot more trouble understanding natural spoken Japanese than anime because they speak much clearer and slower in anime.
I can write diary-like posts about various themes if I sit down and try, but I need a lot of help from the dictionary. I make a fair amount of mistakes when writing, but I’ve improved from when I first started writing posts.
I can’t speak Japanese except single words and super simple sentences. Besides lacking practice, I get very nervous when speaking in general, so I don’t see myself ever becoming very proficient at it.
My sources so far have been Human Japanese, Japanese 101 and WaniKani. Other than those I just search around randomly on the internet when I encounter words and grammar I don’t know. I use Memrise to create my own courses for learning new words outside of WaniKani. I previously used Houhou, but I lost all my progress when my HDD broke. My favourite J-E dictionary is Jisho, and my favourite J-J one is Kotobank.
I don’t have that much trouble writing, but I would say vocab is the most challenging part. It can be difficult to find just the right word to express your thoughts or just remember words in general. As for grammar, I feel that I know enough to get my point across.
There’s nothing wrong with prebuilt decks, it’s just that it can be harder to remember things you’ve never seen before and probably have no context for.