Looking back I should have made more specific mneumonics encorporating all the radicals to remember a kanji or phrase because as I go on so many kanji are similar and its getting confusing now. I have to go back often and write new or improved mnemonics.
Someone suggested to try to complete as much vocab for each level before moving on and thats been super helpful as well.
What advice do you have for newcomers? And have you incorporated other memory techniques besides menumonics to help with memory retention?
My biggest recommendation to new comers is, donât get cocky. It is OK if you can push through 80 vocabulary in a sitting but it WILL come back to bite you later.
I recommend folks find a speed they are comfortable with and stick to it. WaniKani isnât a race. It isnât a marathon. It isnât you vs others in the community. Itâs you vs learning and as long as you keep at it, YOU win no matter if it takes you 6 days to level up or 600.
In regards to similar looking kanji issue, itâs a struggle that only gets worse (especially when you burn content and then later learn very similar looking structures for an extra mind scrabble).
What Iâm trying to learn right now: donât be too hard on yourself when you donât get to burn that item or push it from apprentice to guru etc. I gives you more chances to better learn and memorize it than somehow going forward with struggle.
Iâll say slow down if you have to. You donât have to do a fixed amount of lessons every day. Sometimes, life happens, and itâs okay if you cannot do lessons on certain days or have to do fewer lessons than usual. It helps to keep you on track still, rather than burning you out and leading to your giving up on the language. Donât ever feel like you have to keep up with the Kardashians to be doing a good job with your studies.
As someone who has just started this yesterday, much appreciate this thread :).
Iâve subscribed to classroom lessons now as independent learning is real hard and a difficult motivator, however since a student mentioned this website, Iâm excited about the really active community and itâs a great way to learn for someone like me who can get obsessed with learning to the point where I donât memorize or learn well because Iâve shoved too much in in one sitting.
My next recommendation is, IF you can be fair to yourself and donât abuse it, install the TamperMonkey add on for your browser of choice, install the WaniKani Open Framework and the script you want is the WaniKani override.
It will allow you to ignore an incorrect answer. Sure, you can abuse it and just keep ignoring every single wrong answer and just level up because you can. That is NOT what it is meant for (and why I said you donât abuse it). It is meant to be used when you misspell something or you are too quick, type in the reading instead of the meaning or vice versa which would drop the level of that vocab or character.
I kept typing the reading to the meaning and vice versa and was struggling to level up because I couldnât train my brain to see the difference when it was asking for one or the other than just slamming carriage return. Now I donât make stupid mistakes, I just make mistakes and I let those go as mistakes so vocab and characters keep popping up in my face until I learn them properly
Yeah that would be super bad for me. Even if its a typos best to just deal with the burn. Being able to type accurately and recognize the difference between reading, meaning, kanji and vocab are four separare categories that are super important to recognize. I know itâs frustrating at first, but you get more practice that way. I do ten review clusters at a time. If I make a mistake then I stop and start over. Even with that I have to make sure Iâm honest with myself and sayâŚokay⌠that wasnât a typo. When I see it again I should just mark I donât know, but I still reset the session.
We have a huge support community for those who started this year. Itâs called âLevel 21 before 2021â. It is the single most important reason that I am still sticking with WaniKani and has been a huge reason for my success. You can join that thread.
If not, you can join its sister thread âLetâs climb Tokyo Skytreeâ for Level 21 and Higher. You can directly join this thread even if you are not level 21. A vast majority of the folks on these threads are people who joined this year, people who joined during Covid and people who returned during Covid.
I understand everyone has a suggestion on the single most important thing to do here. Mine is âCommunityâ. Just by virtue of being here, you can learn a lot. We can learn from other peopleâs mistakes and tweak things. (Not applying things blindly but fitting them to your style.)
Hereâs to a long and wonderful journey of learning ahead @Lswan san ăăăăăăăăăăžă
How much of a struggle are similar looking kanji in real life?
I donât read much other than NHK News Easy, and whatâs in Minna no Nihongo, so I donât know
I was thinking it would be like English, where the brain makes assumptions about whatâs on the page. I.e. you might make mistakes if theyâre shown individually like WK, but youâd normally get it right from context from the rest of what youâre reading.
Hereâs what I do: when I learn a new Kanji on WaniKani or DuoLingo that I want to make a point of remembering, I make a special type of Anki card for it.
This Anki card prompts me to pick out the correct kanji out of a group of similar-looking Kanji. I like to find similar-looking kanji by going to Jisho.org and searching for Kanji that share certain radicals with it.
The good news is that if you canât find similar-looking Kanji, well, that means there probably wonât be any Kanji youâll be likely to confuse it with anyway!
I might make several cards so I wonât be like, âOh yeah, I remember it was the second Kanji on this card.â
IDK, probably just depends on your experience level and what you are reading. Itâs great if you know the context, grammar and vocabâŚcertainly minimizes similarity issues or safe assumptions. But instances like titles and names, much less so. And then there are plenty outside joyo kanji used, so maybe an average educated native knows 3000+ (perhaps) or much more if specialized in a particular field so these kanji float around in native materialsâŚthat gets confusing with similar kanji but I usually know if Iâve seen the kanji before at least (or not). And then there is handwriting from pretty calligraphy to chicken scratch, even simple kanji be mixed up here so sort an incentive to learn to write more just to have better intuition on strokes when the writing is a mess. I talk about WK with natives, but they really donât understand it. Always get, âhow do you learn kanji without writingâ?
@KyokaJiro Its 5 days past so of course I am no longer at Level 19. I am on Level 20 now. I average 1 level every 8 days so I decided to slow down for Level 20, listen to Tofugu Podcasts, see if I can learn a few new things here and try to be more efficient in my studies. I will most likely hit Level 25 by 2021. My goal was Level 30 when I started back in May, but I have fallen behind in my Russian and I would like to focus on conversational for all my languages for a while. I want to reach Level 60 by 2022, but even with slowing down I think I will be okay.
The best way to make progress I would say is to stay off social media. Turn off notifications on everything and study in 20 minutes spurts throughout the day. I will not be on WK Community anymore. My break is officially over. Hopefully you guys learned a few things that will help you moving forward. I sure did! Feel free to DM me Loren.swan.Morrison@gmail.com Subject: Hey Wanikani Friend! Love you guys -L
honestly, I the mnemonics help but i am finding reading sites like NHK easy news every day, or playing Zelda in Japanese, actually reading the Japanese is very helpful for memory. Reading is how we learning spell, after all.
Iâm glad I read this thread, I just thought WaniKani and Learn Japanese Pod would be enough (as awesome as they are), but now I know that more needs to be done.
Seeing as how the levels get harder the higher up you go, actually reading native Japanese material would be a huge advantage especially since Iâve been struggling a bit in that area. Time to join the Book Club~
ăăăăăăăăăăžă 
Thanks for sharing your experience 
. I wish you the best in your goals and look forward to seeing you here when you take your next break 