One of my goals with learning Kanji and Japanese in general is being able to read and comprehend manga and RPGs.
I would like to start with very simple versions of both, for manga something like よつばと! And I’m not sure for an RPG, but something with simple dialogue.
What Wani Kani level should I be before I try? I’m expecting it might be different for an RPG vs manga?
The short answer is probably level ~20, but make sure you start with something easy before you do the big rpg you really like.
The longer answer depends on how your grammar is. Can you read basic sentences, and if so, how long does a sentence get before you can’t read it? If you have a textbook on grammar, you can start reading it, and/or use one of the book clubs to start looking up grammar you don’t recognize. You’ll run into simple sentences that still trip you up because the structure just feels different to your brain.
Wanikani is teaching you kanji and some vocabulary words, but for every word it teaches, there’s probably 20 common ones it omits that readers of popular rpgs and manga might run into. So at some point you’ve got to start giving yourself something to read that’ll cover common vocabulary and be prepared for whatever you pick to be a slog at first. Any native text you pick will have a lot you don’t recognize even at the beginner friendly level. Knowing your kanji is helpful, but it’s like learning root words in English. Knowing that graphs are written helps recognize grapheme and phonograph, but they’re different words and would show up in different places. There’s a lot of words to learn.
For よつばと, since it has furigana, you don’t need Wanikani to start reading:) Just grammar and vocabulary.
Yeah, level 20 is roughly the level when people start reading, provided that they have been studying grammar in parallel.
Btw, a good training for reading RPGs is The Tile World Chronicles
WK level is just part of the problem. Don’t expect to reach a certain level and be able to read just like that.
You need to invest a lot of time in grammar as well. I’d say when you understand most of N5 + N4 + N3 grammar then you will be able to understand most of simple text, provided you also know common vocabulary that you should pick up as you study grammar and do WK.
In the beginning you will struggle a lot with parsing sentences: where are the word boundaries, which words are grammar expressions etc etc.
In summary, for reading you need grammar, vocabulary, kanji. A lot of simple text has furigana, so arguably kanji is not that important.
Of course a lot of text only has furigana on less common kanji or doesn’t have it at all. For that you’d need to know a lot of kanji, probably lvl 35+ on WK, and even then you’d be looking up kanji/words frequently. In addition, more complex text will also use rarer grammar, so you’d need to learn N2 and N1 grammar. all in all it’s a lot of learning, so you can’t expect to pre learn everything and start reading afterwards. You need to gradually read more and more over time.
The easier way to start reading is to read online text and use browser extensions to lookup words on cursor hover, like 10ten
I started around where you are with Final Fantasy VIII. Had to look up everything, spent 30 gruelling minutes decoding around 10 lines of dialogue and didn’t even manage to understand everything. Then every week or so I would give it another try, restarting from the beginning every time.
It sounds horrendous but I really recommend it:
you get to encounter the basic kanji you’re still learning all over the place. That’s motivating and makes your study feel more grounded. It always feels like a win early on when you encounter a word or kanji you learned in an app or textbook in the wild.
you get to gauge your progress better. By design your WaniKani prowess will never really improve: if you have around 85% accuracy at level 5 you’ll have around 85% accuracy at level 50 (possibly even less because of the leeches). It can make it feel like you’re not progressing.
it’s motivation to keep learning, WaniKani levels become more than mere numbers: if you look up a bunch of unknown kanji and your notice that they’re almost all below level 25, that motivates you to push for that level because your know it’ll improve your reading ability tremendously.
it will also make it apparent if your studies are too lopsided (very common if you mostly only use WaniKani). For instance I wasn’t studying a lot of grammar until I got to WaniKani level 25 or so, but then I realized that I knew the vast majority of the kanji in the games I played but struggled a lot with the grammar. So I studied more grammar.
it makes the transition into reading as smooth as possible: many learners start reading too late and cheat themselves of valuable practice because they’re scared of failure. If you start early with very low expectations you can work your way there organically.
By the way I ran some kanji stats with WaniKani level breakdowns for Final Fantasy VII and VIII here:
https://community.wanikani.com/t/video-game-thread-what-are-you-playing/13837/6104?u=simias
https://community.wanikani.com/t/video-game-thread-what-are-you-playing/13837/6108?u=simias
You can see for instance that you get around 90% kanji coverage in FFVIII by level 19 and 97% by level 35.
The other part to this is: how do you look up an unknown kanji? If it’s in your browser then there are extension for that. If it’s on your screen there’s ocr scanning options (on screen reading, I like YomiNinja but there are others.) And obligatory KanKan is great for searching by radical if it’s a compound word where you know one kanji and not the other
If it’s a real physical book? You can take a picture and go back to OCR…or you can search by radical, which works when you know your radicals and it’s not too many kanji at once, but it’s a pain if it’s half the kanji.
Also Natively has rankings for how difficult manga and other books are, so it’s a valid strategy to start with easier books and work your way up, but the early levels can get boring.
Personally, I started at 24 (after having read through genki 1 and 2 putting me at ~N4 grammar). It was slow and I was looking up a lot of things, but I tried writing down everything I looked up. It gets faster over time. I’m still (at currently level 55) looking up a bunch of new vocab, but vocab is a lot easier when I know most of the kanji and it’s just combined in a new way. I also wrote down the wanikani levels for any vocab (I used 10ten browser extension to do this quickly). It was extremely gratifying to be level 24 and tell myself "well 靴 is level 27, 恐ろしい is level 29, 捨てる is level 32…but there were lots of words like 校長室 that aren’t on wanikani, though you learn all of those kanji by level 7, so they weren’t hard to look up. I’m playing games that I enjoy anyway (and aren’t on a timer, so I can pause and search for kanji for 5 minutes if I need to), but because I’m interested in them it’s a lot easier to sink 10 or 100 hours into playing them slowly than an easy manga where I’m less invested in the plot.
You need to be able to read as well as recognising kanji, and only thing that will change with your WK level is how much you have to look up.
So, start reading graded readers now, the free ones are fine, then by the time you’ve got through a bunch of graded levels your ability to read and your WK level should be good enough to start on manga.
yeah I would start immersing asap, sure it will be frustrating at times but should try to go into native content like games and manga early on with a positive attitude of “wow, I understand this panel, or I can read all of the hiragana and katakana, oh I recognize the word 猫（ねこ）or 食べる（たべる)” From day 1 I started reading manga magazines and while it was hard and I couldn’t understand a bunch of what was said, I found ways to feel positive over my work- and realistically, within those mediums of manga/games there is a ton of visual/audio-visual context that will help you close the gap in understanding. If you were to flip through a comic in Chinese you could probably figure out the gist of the situation, even if you don’t speak Chinese. Eventually for me, reading manga got easier and easier, especially as I propelled through grammar resources/wk levels. Being comfortable with vagueness is a key to better understanding of Japanese. Sometimes when I’m immersing I just get the gist of a sentence, and then I just move on- other times I try to be more intensive about studying and breaking down the sentence. By doing this method for a year and a half or so of studying my tutor says continually that she is surprised by my level of reading comprehension and that I’m very good at correctly understanding sentences that I feel fuzzy on personally. As an addendum I also was reading lots of low level Tadoku readers in tandem to the harder native material. So something more boring but level appropriate and something less level appropriate but motivating and exciting for me.
It really depends on how much effort you want to put into it. If you start sooner, you will need to look up a lot of things and it will be inefficient, but it will get you to the finishline faster. If you start later, you will be better prepared, but you may need to relearn some stuff because you weren’t using it. It is up to you where on the scale you want to be.
Good balance is to start with grammar around level 10 and start with reading around level 20.
Another important factor is how fast are you going through WK? If you are pushing hard to do 1 level every 7-8 days, you may leave reading for later. If you spend a month on each level, start reading sooner.
This sounds terrible… but honestly I’m gonna pick something and do the same once I feel like I’m ready
Good news! You’re level 28, you’re ready!
Pick something you already know fairly well in English and don’t hesitate to skip over things that seem too difficult.
Also graded readers can be a good way to ease in if that’s your thing. I personally never cared for them but they can be really helpful.
They can indeed!
Here are some free ones:
This is really great, people! Thank you so much for the input I appreciate it!
To answer a couple questions: I definitely do multi-faceted studying (grammar, vocab, Kanji, immersion/listening). That being said I think I’ll wait for level 20 to even attempt an RPG.
In the meantime I will keep doing what I’m doing and maybe start read a little bit here and there.
Thanks again everyone for the responses. I appreciate it.
Echoing what others have said: Wanikani only teaches kanji and some terms, so it won’t help much with learning grammar.
I personally felt okay with starting to read beginner manga like よつばとafter the first couple Sections of Duolingo and around level 10 of Wanikani because:
One thing you’ll also realize about beginner manga and need to be comfortable with: it can include VERY informal language. I struggle with Yotsuba and her father talking, versus their schoolgirl neighbors communicate is more polite language that you learn in a classroom setting like with the Genki textbook. I like to read a few pages, try to parse it together, then go back with Google translate and read through the English translation, then go back and compare so I start to memorize the words and grammatical structure.
I highly encourage you look at the Wanikani forum book clubs as well: not only for recommendations on beginner manga but also because you can learn from others who struggled through them. For example: Polar Bear Cafe is simple to read but is full of puns and cultural references that are dizzyingly confusing - until I read a forum explanation, “oh, this is a reference to this popular tv show / festival / clothing style” etc. Then it becomes fun to read the cultural inside jokes.
“simple” RPG lol, “basic” manga. Summer child. I have found that even basic manga meant for children can be hard because children are often used to unprofessional language that is harder for textbook learners to deal with than even complicated professional material.
I’ve never seen a simple JRPG. But I do recommended reading ASAP. Level 10 or so, and children stories will be accessible. But grammar will always be the bigger problem than kanji honestly
Look, I’m level 40 and I know around half of N3 grammar and as far as RPGs go I can manage, like, Pokemon. Anything else and you look up too much which, imo, defeats the point of reading. When it’s about 80% comprehension then reading as an activity teaches you most. Everyone is right that you should start to read ASAP but don’t expect to jump into a game just like that. I tried many times and it’s too exhausting. You have to gradually move from the easiest things like children books (Tadoku) to simple manga (よつばと, ハピネス, ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん) to a bit less more simple manga (Dragonball, idk, you have more options at this point). You can play something like Final Fantasy I but Persona series, or recent FFs have too many kanji that WK doesn’t teach, and you need to know grammar, and you need to have general reading experience. Sentences become so long, that you just have to get used to them.
Not to discourage you or anything, I just had this exact same question and it’s important to have realistic expectations as well ^^’ Games are possible, but for 99% of the people it’s better not to start with them right away.
To add a bit more, level-wise I’d say 10-15 is good enough. While you’re getting there, start with basic grammar. You don’t need to know any kanji to learn about verb conjugation, particles, etc. Then by the time you know a little bit more kanji you’re good to go.
Totally agree. I think Persona4Golden is actually not horrible. Due to the limitation of the text box they actually keep the sentences pretty short. It is a LOT of words you are not going to know, and from pausing constantly to look things up, you will start to hear, do^do^do do-do, in your dreams. But at level 40 you could ~survive~, and it teaches a good mix of politeness from the くそ in every sentence kid, to school announcements.
I’m personally finding that Harry Potter is a good challenge at level 60, where I have to work to understand the grammar but the words I truly don’t know are only 2-3 a page. Which feels to me like I’m learning but not struggling.
The thing I want people to know is that even WaniKani level 60 is not going to prepare you for reading native novels, and some point you are going to have to slog through a novel, and it won’t be fun, Harry Potter has a audiobook that helps read it to you. But the first one isn’t going to be easy, the second isn’t going to be easy, the third will start to feel bearable, and then sometime around the forth you’ll turn around and think, this isn’t so bad…
You could become a beta tester for Wagotabi and be able to get into reading immediately.