What level does Wanikani start being less useful at?

I am swedish, so my language is fairly small so I understand the whole aspect of roots. But there is a difference between roots and if I’m actually going to use the language every day. There is also a difference between wanting to know a language and have the ability to actually maintain it to a sufficient degree. Mattvsjapan talks about learning two languages at once here: The Fastest Way to Learn 2 Languages - YouTube and it’s insufficient. Chances are that he/she will end up with insufficiency in both languages and quit both.

But schools are infamous for their inability to learn languages. I learned english almost solely from consuming content.

Sure, but I wouldn’t trade learning a bit of a language for not learning at all, is what I mean. Like, I don’t think one would conclude from that “… so schools should stop having any language classes at all.”
The tiny bits of Spanish or French or Swedish I do still remember from when I was a teen all still broadened my perspective on languages.

Assuming the only possible goal as being well-maintained fluency seems far more discouraging to me than trying to progress in two different languages at once with great reasons to learn them.

My own metric with Japanese has always just been “I’ll stop when it stops being interesting,” it just turned out that that never happened and I’ve accumulated enough reading material it may never.
I think going with an open-ended goal like that vs. a lofty one is completely fine.
And to bring it back around to the topic – I didn’t find any Wanikani levels useless or uninteresting, but I could see the level (kanji-wise) of “pretty good with gaps” as being somewhere before the end of Wanikani, and “pretty good” without that qualifier being some level past wanikani.

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Fair enough, I just assumed anglophone because I often encounter those kind of sentiments with monolingual anglophones. My bad.

I don’t think it should be all or nothing type of situation. What is a sufficient degree? That’s something that everybody has to decide for themselves. For one person, that may indeed be just talking about the weather. For others it will be to read literature or conduct business, or reaching near native fluency.

I don’t regret any of the time I took studying Russian as a late teen, even if I’ve never used any of it. It was interesting, I had fun. If I decide to learn more later on, I will. If not, that’s fine. Same thing with the two semesters of Spanish I took in high school. Or the Italian I learnt during a 6 week stay in the country. I don’t actively maintain those language, and I’m fine with that. I still think it was time well spent.

Anyway, I think this conversations has run it’s course - If the OP wants to learn a Bengali alongside Japanese, then it’s their personal decision. I think we can leave it at that with no hard feelings for anyone :slight_smile:

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Okay first of all I’m male but dude ‘they’ exists for a reason

And second, fluency in Japanese is a lifetime goal. Frankly, Japan has a culture and language that are both mind-blowingly interesting.

But

It’s not the only one.

Yes, there’s a lot of Japanese media, but Japanese isn’t useful, not even to those who religiously binge anime. It’s just fun.

And yes, it would be a waste to forget all of my Japanese progress in order to learn a different language.

But. I started learning Japanese two years ago because I wanted to understand a Japanese account on Twitter that I followed without Google translate.

I’m not following them anymore. I’m not going to stop learning Japanese, as I’ve mentioned multiple times now. And, even if I were, I’ve reached a lower/middle intermediate level with both grammar and vocabulary. Somewhere in-between N3 and N2. If I left for two years and came back, my Japanese would come back too.

On the other hand, my reasons for learning Bengali are because my mother would love to speak Bengali with someone other than her parents in her life.

I’m sure that you have noble intentions, @Kanamana66, but I’m not sure why you’d try to convince me to continue learning Japanese full time (again, as opposed to part time, because I’d still be learning it), by questioning the importance of half of my cultural heritage. It seems like a fairly weak way of doing so.

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No need to get emotional. I just give you the other side of the coin. You do what you gotta do, I’ve said multiple times that I don’t know your personal situation, I just know what I would do if I was in your situation which is all one can do on a forum, because, we don’t have the full context and your preferences.

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You accused the OP of learning Bengali for vanity, so I think you forfeited the option to tell them how they should feel about what you’re saying.

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I think in cases like this, it’s important to remember what the OP was asking: when does Wanikani stop being useful.

They didn’t ask for opinions on whether they should quit learning one language or another.

It seems like you saw their question and started projecting your own feelings about learning multiple languages. That’s not an evil thing to do! But it has had an impact on SisterSunny, and it might help to own up to that.

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I forgot I made this. Zoomed into level 45. At level 45 you’ll have enough to read 95% of the kanji used for news/Twitter/Wikipedia and 90% of kanji used on Azora books. The last 15 levels will only get you to 98-99% of news/Twitter/Wikipedia and 93% of books. So yes, there’s a real drop off after 45.

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This is really interesting, and from my point of view highly motivating, because I am on the steepest part of that graph, and looking just now at NHK Easy, I do feel I recognise appreciably more of the Kanji there than I did last time I looked. I am on a very slow journey with Japanese, but this means I can see how even plodding through these early levels makes progress (assuming I can progress my non-kanji vocab and grammar at an even pace…).

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頑張って下さいね(笑)

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after reaching level 50 or even finishing WK, my intention is to focus on the 10k common words to get a better vocabulary

what platform srs would you recommend for this 10k words? Anki web?

I wouldn’t recommend doing the core10k if you care about using your time efficiently, but personally I used anki and houhou. Houhou is pretty similar to wk so if you like the layout then that’s something you can use.

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Just for reference, here’s what the various levels of comprehension feel like: What 80% Comprehension Feels Like - Sinosplice

It might also be a good idea to consider that the “knowing X% of kanji by WK level Y” doesn’t work out all that well in actual practice. Aside from all the vocab and grammar you also need to know, you will not remember all the kanji you learned and even if you do know the kanji, you might not recognise it in that specific context or font. But this of course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start reading until you have learned a high percentage of kanji.

Basically, there’s a good argument to be made for not doing WK full time and starting reading practice early regardless of how “useful” WK levels are. You don’t really get a good grasp on kanji or vocabulary until you’ve seen them over and over again in different contexts and you will need quite a bit of practice in order to be able to simply recognise and read the characters at a reasonable speed. And, from my experience, it’s a completely different ball game when you can connect what you’re learning to concrete things you’ve come across in real life.

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On top of that, the known kanji percentage doesn’t really mean anything imo. Its a component of vocabulary, which does mean something. You can “know” all the kanji on the page but know none of the words they go into and be unable to actually comprehend anything. I could show you 一入 and you would be like heck yeah I know the kanji for that, but it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t actually amount to any level of comprehension (or even ability to sound the word out, probably).

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I don’t know if I would go as far as to say it doesn’t mean anything. You are able to at least make some educated guesses what a kanji could mean in a particular context. But yes, kanji really acquire their meaning when they form vocabulary, and that can be quite tricky indeed.

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I think I was a bit unclear. I said the percentage known doesn’t mean anything. Strictly looking at percentages of kanji on a page you have seen won’t give a good indication of your comprehension ability for whats gonna be on that page (especially if you just have gone through wk). There will be a general correlation, sure, but you can easily know all the kanji on a page and understand none of whats being said.

But yeah, knowing the kanji will help you. Its better than never having seen the kanji before.

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Theoretically, it’s certainly possible that there might be an entire page full of vocabulary made of kanji you know that you aren’t able to understand. But for every 一入 that’s out there, there’s also a lot of words like 火山.

I started reading more or less regularly after level 60 and I found the kanji knowledge helped quite a lot with unknown vocabulary, though of course knowing the kanji is only a start, generally speaking.

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But also there’s a ton of fast levels after 45 so it FEELS like you’re still making good progress because WK lets you learn the kanji quicker

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