What should I use besides WaniKani?

Halfway through level 2. I’ve heard the WaniKani is really only for Kanji and Vocabulary, so you can’t use it for everything.

What would you recommend for someone literally just starting?

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Starting grammar early is always a good tip and BunPro.jp is pretty good for that, it’s an SRS system with levels, like WaniKani, so fits into your routine in the same kind of way. If you’re more down for reading, the Genki books are also a good all-round resource.

While I’m here, since this is your post, and because the links may help:

\textcolor{Salmon}{\huge \textsf{WELCOME! ^-^}}

welcome gif - crabigator

Take the time to check out the FAQ and GUIDE if you haven’t already.

There’s also a lot of good stuff on the forum to help you, like:

The Ultimate Guide for WK
The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resource List
The New and Improved List of API and Third-Party Apps

I hope your Japanese learning journey goes well and that you enjoy your time with us on the forums.

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Genki. There’s some good info on the LearnJapanese subreddit.

GLHF.

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Hi and welcome to WaniKani Mr. Wilven,
i know many people are using the Genki books but i prefer another fun way to learn grammar.
There is a japanese teacher out there who has started to make workbooks called “japanese from zero”. He also runs a youtube channel with the same name. He made videos for every topic so it feels like to have a real teacher whos explaining everything. You can even ask him questions if you want to. Just check his yt channel to see if it works for you. If you decide to buy the books too, its not expensive at all and you get a lot of practice. Just keep in mind, he starts literaly from zero. So if you dont know hiragana and katakana yet, its also a great way to practice progressively with the book.

For me it works very well and i had a lot of these “ooohhh thats why…” moments.

Wanikani and japanese from zero are my main sources. Besides this i try to get into japanese books and mangas. I also found a short little netflix serie called “midnight diner”.

Just check out everything you can find in japanese. Maybe you want to change your pc system or smartphone to japanese. Hello talk is also a great way to speak to japanese people. And you should definitely check out japanese music (Babymetal or Band Maid if you like rock and Metal)

That should be everything i do currently but there is much more to discover.

Extra: Check out KaniWani. It uses the API from Wanikani and is the same system just the other way arround. You have to translate english into japanese. Really good to train your brain to find the words when you need them.

And allways keep in mind, just do things you have fun with and take it as slow as you need it (=
Hope i could help (=

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FTFY

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Not sure why you struck out “and vocabulary.” Over the past 161 days, I’d say WK has taught me 1,668 various vocab:

Start Date: 2020-05-27 (161 days ago)
Items Learned (Guru+): 296部首 580漢字 1668単語

Because a lot of the vocab you learn in WK is only to help you with kun’yomi reading practice and are not commonly used in Japanese.

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I think thats not right. Its very good to know a lot of vocab since the japanese will use very diffrent kanjis and vocab for special occasions. Ofc if your goal is to speak and read simple things you should be fine with less vocab and kanji. And if you want to only speak the language, you dont really need kanjis at all.
But as i mentioned, it depends on your language goal. For me its important to understant almost everything in the future. And if i want to come close to a native speaker, its very important to constantly learn new vocab. You know, they earn it in their daily life. Unlike us, we have to study for it.

So my result, the vocab Wanikani is teaching us is much more useful then you think it would be. But ofc thats just my opinion (=

Im not saying skip vocab but the wanikani vocab is not chosen for most common use, it is chosen to help to better understand the kanji. So sometimes you have vocab that a Japanese person would say you will never see.

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Yeah well thats something i can agree to. In daily conversations, alot of the vocab isnt used at all. But you will probably need them at some point.

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The way I’d put it is that wanikani is a great boost for your vocabulary, especially in reading contexts… but it’s not an exhaustive source and you’ll definitely need to learn more vocab from other sources. Before I started wanikani I knew a lot of common conversational words, but my vocab was lacking in a lot of areas and wanikani helped give me a foundation for more literary and sino-japanese words. After I started reading, I encountered tons of words that wanikani doesn’t cover and I had to learn those too.

To put it briefly, wanikani teaches you a decent amount of vocabulary but you shouldn’t rely on it as your sole source for learning new words.

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Ah, it’s really only a handful that aren’t commonly used, but even the greater majority that are commonly used in Japanese are still only there for kanji reading practice. :stuck_out_tongue:

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