What WaniKani tips would you give to yourself if you could travel back in time?

Tips:

If you’re not also memorizing the part of speech of each vocab word, then your grammar should be improved.

If you can’t read most of the example sentences, then your grammar should be improved.

If you take a long break from Wanikani (months long), you’ll forget a lot and have a giant discouraging backlog (e.g. 2000 reviews, 100 lessons). Daily consistency is key.

If you’re not also practicing speaking when you do your reviews, you’re probably missing out.

If you’re not writing out the kanji you learn, you’ll probably have troubles truly internalizing them.

(I’ve disobeyed all of these tips before and had to drop from level 19 back to level 10 because I didn’t truly learn those levels and eventually forgot a lot of it after year-long break.)


Bonus Advanced Tip: Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so that you can write your own userscripts or customize existing ones to suit your specific learning needs.

4 Likes

I would go back to 1997 and tell myself “buy Apple stock” and then “oh, and when Wanikani comes out you should do it”

1 Like

I would’ve invented WaniKani myself. Muwahahhahahahaha :smiling_imp:

4 Likes

Fell into depression over a year ago and stopped doing my reviews. I would have liked to force myself up every day to do at least one bit.

wk drag

Right now I’m just trying to do small 20-30 item sets every five or six hours. Otherwise I’ll burn out.

4 Likes

Use a script like the reorder script and put the items ordered by level. This way, you can make sure that you’re doing the same reviews over time to consolidate them and not just doing x items so that you’ll only see them after 2 weeks just to forget them again.

1 Like

I would have used scripts earlier, paced myself a bit better on vocab lessons rather than just plowing through all of them as they unlocked, and really spent more time on the lessons so that I could focus on the differences between similar kanji. I took time off in November and December because of other projects and the holidays, so getting back into things has been incredibly hard. If I had paid better attention during my lessons, I might be having a little bit easier time now. I also think I split my focus too much at times between the various Japanese learning resources I’ve been using, and that time might have been better spent if I had used a more consistent study approach.

I was a Mudkip.
But now I like Quilava.
That’s all, go away

1 Like

I would have told myself to never start KaniWani. I used it for 2 levels, and it was a completely demotivating, and depressing experience. Power to those who it works for, but I nearly quit WK because of it, and one of those levels took me 42 freaking days! It made me want to not do new lessons, or even my reviews because of it. I started sometime in 10/2017, currently lvl 7, and I would be so much farther if I had just stuck with plain ol’ WaniKani.

Also, I would tell myself to stop being a baby, and get those lessons done. The vocab actually helps with remembering the kanji readings, not get in the way like I thought it would. Drawing things out just made me forget MORE things because I had less reinforcement, less often.

Don’t move on to the next level immediately w/o doing the vocab lessons. I have 1263 in my lesson pile (thanks also to vacation mode and skipping tons of stuff for weeks) and most of that is vocab.

I was focused on getting to the next level the fastest, so do the radicals and kanji, wham bam, off to the next level. See ya never vocab lessons!

Next thing I know 600+ lessons.

Also, try not to have any big life events or vacations in the first year, because they will stop you from WaniKani-ing. Thanks a lot wedding!

4 Likes

well I just started not too long ago. I’m only half way through level 3 so I haven’t really felt like I am doing anything wrong yet! Well, maybe I should have waited to buy my membership until I reached level 4.
I see a few people say they wish they started using userscripts earlier on. Is there a forum where I can find more info the kinds of userscripst people are using?

Here’s a massive list of scripts you can check out:

The WaniKani reorder script is a popular one (allows you to reorder radicals, kanji + vocab in any order and by level, helps prioritize lessons and reviews that matter in level up time) (this can be abused though and can cause a massive backlog of vocab lessons so use wisely ^^)

Also there’s the WaniKani override script, allows you to ignore incorrect answers (useful for typos and such)

Hmm… I don’t really use scripts, but I’m sure there are a bunch of other useful ones that can make your experience on WK efficient and tailored to your liking :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thanks! this looks really usefull

1 Like

I’m going to go in the opposite direction here and say pay more attention to the radicals. It’s easy to ignore them for the first 20 levels, but then you start getting those kanji that look really similar to the ones you already knew, so now you have to relearn the old along with the new so you can tell them apart.

4 Likes

Doing 200 lessons at once means that you’ll get a batch of 200 reviews EVERY TIME until you start spreading those out. This can take the drive to do reviews and tell it to go jump off a bridge and drown itself until you feel “motivated”, which makes burnout more likely to happen.

Here’s an example of what I mean, with actual numbers…
This is the progress of about a month:


On October 17th, there are 22 apprentice.
Then, 150 lessons are done, and now there are 175 apprentice.
This means that I’m going to have, say, 160 reviews the next day. If you’re not oriented to these numbers, then you’re going to be super demotivated, and that’s exactly what happened here - lessons sparsely being done, and the 175 apprentice number remaining for several days.
Then, on October 27th, the genius I am decides to do an additional 50 lessons, bringing the apprentice count to 222. This means that at this point, I’ll have 222 reviews (having neglected reviews for the previous two weeks), and because it’s been two weeks since most of the lessons were done, the material is not remembered at all.
So, this creates a fun grind that you can see between October 27th and November 18th, where the apprentice number is slowly whiddled down from 222 to 75. Note that no new material is being learned, and I’m stuck where I am because I’m bombarded by many of the same reviews that don’t stick in my head because of lack of motivation because I constantly have over 100 reviews or so.

I love WaniKani’s system, and the lesson bombardment was completely my fault - hence why I’m now staying away from it. You’re free to study how you want, but in my experience, doing all lessons at once may seem satisfying for the first hour, followed by days of regret afterwords when you have many, many reviews.
(To be frank, I probably would’ve been screwed had I decided to pull this off at a later level, due to the previous item batches from previous levels)

2 Likes

I would have told myself to stick with WK back in 2012. It’s a much better tool than what I used instead.

5 Likes

THANK YOU SO MUCH - I am finally able to get the userscripts on my tablet. Cheers! :smiley:

It’s ok to get things wrong. In fact it would be easier if you just learned to type slower so you never need the override script for typos and therefore you are not tempted to cheat!

2 Likes

Absolutely agree.

I rarely made mistakes on kanji in review through the first half of Wanikani, but since level 30 I feel like I passed the tipping point where they’re blurring together. I desperately need to take an afternoon, sit down and actively review what I’ve learned so far.

2 Likes
  1. I would have started sooner
  2. I would have taken the mnemonics more seriously early on. I kind of skimmed them and relied on rote memorisation when I started, because they just seemed really silly and far-fetched. It wasn’t until I hit maybe level 10 or so that I really started to struggle and taking them seriously, and I realised just how useful they are, even if they seem really stupid at first.
5 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.