What's WaniKani actually good for?

First let me start from some personal experience.

I’ve tried learning kanji using WaniKani at several occasions, every time without any significant improvement in my ability to read even simple Japanese. After deciding to abandon it completely, giving Remembering the Kanji a spin, and finally spending a couple of months with KanjiDamage Anki deck while simultaneously reading a ton of graded readers I’ve finally got to a point of being able to visually recognize enough characters to become substantially more comfortable with immersion content.

Recently I’ve decided to give WaniKani another shot, and it made me realize that I don’t see a purpose of using WaniKani, at all. This ultimately leads to the question in the subject. To make an argument why I don’t believe WaniKani to be useful, let’s consider two separate cases.

Is WaniKani useful for a learner who is not immersing in Japanese content and uses WaniKani as a tool to prepare for that?

It is indeed useful to learn some vocabulary in order to prepare for immersion in order to make more content partially comprehensible. However, the order with which you learn vocabulary on WaniKani is not aligned with the frequency distribution, which makes it necessary to go through a lot of levels in order to get a decent coverage. And if you want to get that coverage through WaniKani, you’re essentially forced by the system to cram a ton of random vocabulary that you have to learn mostly through mnemonics.

What’s even worse, while cramming that random vocabulary you’ll probably get extremely annoyed by similar words (anyone else has fond memories raging after getting wrong 上がる / 上げる for umpteenth time?) whose distinction are substantially easier to remember by doing immersion.

After 17 levels of WaniKani I’ve tried Refold’s frequency-based Anki deck, and the good majority of it had new words. (But hey, at least on WaniKani I’ve learned 地中海, which will come in handy. Probably. At some point.)

So no, I don’t believe that WaniKani is a good tool to prepare for immersion.

Is WaniKani useful for someone already doing immersion?

It is indeed useful to do spaced repetition of vocabulary from the content that you’re immersing into. But let’s say you’re struggling to remember something fairly frequent, say, 散歩. Since it’s on level 31, your options are:

  1. Do WaniKani for a year to finally get the desired word into rotation. In which case no, WaniKani is not a useful tool for you now. It might becoume useful when you’ll finally get to that level 31 in a year.

  2. Use separate spaced repetition tool for relevant vocabulary. In which case why would you want to use WaniKani? True, you’ll probably learn some useful vocabulary via WaniKani in the meantime, but is the time reviewing all the irrelevant stuff going to be well-spent? Instead, you can do sentence mining to learn only the vocabulary relevant to material that you’re immersing into.

So no, I don’t believe that WaniKani is a good supplement for learning via immersion.

Last point I want to make is about the abundance of third-party browser extensions for WaniKani. I fail to see them as “improvements”. They are rather, workarounds, to make a stiff tool more bearable. And I don’t think that hundreds of mnemonics about Koichi, unvoiced example sentences without furigana, and level-up banners are worth it.

While I don’t think that I will change my opinion, WaniKani seems to be a product that clearly is made with substantial effort, so I will be genuinely interested to see the responses to the question.

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no offense but this question seems to be asked at least once or twice every month. if it doesn’t work for you it doesn’t work for you. no need for it to be deeper than that.

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Sounds like you’re looking for a debate. I did a fair bit of immersion and book learning before starting WaniKani. I had trouble figuring out when to apply onyomi readings versus kunyomi in the wild and WaniKani has helped with that. I would rather have it than not, certainly beats making my own anki decks.

At level 16 I’m starting to a spend more time in immersion and less time on lessons.

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Basically this right. For me it doesn’t matter what kanji learning thing I’m using, the thing that changed is that you started doing some reading practice alongside your kanji study.

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I have way more qualms about WK losing its purpose now with pointless kana vocab and wish you didn’t need add ons to add basic functionality, but for me the answer is clear: it’s guide rails to learning kanji. I’m less likely to recommend WK for other reasons now, but I’m also evidence the system definitely works, and the way I used to do it was always recommend it to people who are basically day 1 learners only. The value to WK is that it breaks apart kanji nicely for you and holds your hand through them, demystifying the process of learning them. You come out with lots of pieces of knowledge on general glosses for some words and kanji, but more than anything, you know how to break them down and learn them for yourself. Learning kanji in a vacuum is about the least useful thing to do in Japanese, but you do need to not be daunted by kanji words, so it has value but must not be done alone, and WK’s creators themselves tell you that.

Is it necessary? For everyone, absolutely not. Is it the perfectly optimal return for time? I dunno, probably not. But its usefulness is pretty self-evident in success stories. It teaches you some kanji, some words, but most crucially it teaches you a framework to learn kanji and makes it feel easier, if you want that. I did in parallel with learning Genki’s grammar and vocab, then moved on to immersion while keeping it up to a high level (but not 60). Quitting early when you feel you’re well served is also an option that a lot of people prefer. By the time I switched to immersion, those super frequent words at later levels were just freebies to pick up outside WK both because they are so frequent and because they didn’t look like just a mass of lines to me anymore.

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Came for the kanji and SRS.
Stayed for the community (and SRS)

Anki is just a hassle and I don’t know other tools that I would use.

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Same! I stopped wanikani around level 30, but I’m still here chatting in the forum.

I’m also way too lazy to make my own Anki flashcards, and I’ve found premade Anki vocab decks to be much more useless than wanikani. These days for new words I may write something if I feel like it but otherwise I rely on eventually remembering it. Is it efficient? No. Does it keep me from flashcards induced breakdown? Yes.

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For me it is actually, that I studies Japanese for several years in uni and also did some studies in Japan. I was actually good at studying Kanji, but I never really was taught was onyomi/kunyomi or even radicals are. I only remembered Kanji through vocabulary and the moment I stopped learning in Uni, my Japanese skills disappeared so fast, that I am now left with a weird mixture of missing basic knowledge and knowing more elaborated kanji because i encountered them so often.
I am happy with WaniKani so far, because I have the feeling that now I am actually taught how to use Kanji and which reading should be applied. Also I like that I don’t have to go through the hassle of making my own flashcards and that I cannot betray myself by just saying “ah yes I know that”.
For me Anki never worked (I tried it several times).

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  • Found WaniKani with doubt (I probably didn’t see Tofugu’s complete guide then…)
  • A few years later, started WaniKani (because I decided that I have time to focus)
  • Anki to supplement WaniKani, and modeled Anki after WaniKani
    • Reduced new cards per day, and shorter intervals
    • Typing and handwriting in Anki
    • Anki didn’t really work before doing WK
  • Stopped both WaniKani and Anki, because of life (actually I can’t really remember why)
  • Back to Anki, but eventually back to reset WaniKani (to Level 2, in part because of script testing)
  • Stopped all Japanese SRS, stayed for the community (forum)

I think WaniKani is good for structure, teaching radical build-up for Kanji, and disambiguating vocabularies (partly though – manual work to find out confusing with what). Pinning reading is good. Teaching meaning isn’t very good, rigidness backfires.

Level build-up, and radicals stack up, but eventually loses thoroughness after tens of levels.

I don’t take WaniKani mnemonics seriously, but I was here before the mnemonics overhaul (no offensive mnemonics). And I learned to make mnemonics if I need one.

I wouldn’t really recommend WaniKani, but if this app works for you, it works.

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Could I use other tools to learn what WK teaches, and possibly go faster? Sure.

But Anki takes too much time to set up, and as a mom of a toddler and an infant, time is something I don’t have much of.

So the purpose of WK is for people who need an on rails experience.

As far as the immersion aspect, I read books and I have found on several times that a word I’ve learned or reviewed recently was in a book and that helped. Now sure some words I won’t see in WK for months but this is not a sprint.

I tried using JPDB for its intended purpose - to learn vocab that will actually be used in the book I’m reading. What I found is that it was overwhelming. Learning 1000 words was too much. It was honesty not helpful (to me). I ended up dropping it and then picking it back up as an WK extra practice tool instead, which is much more useful.

However, learning at WK’s pace, means I get to look out for those words when I’m reading. And for the kanji/words not covered (yet) I use the dictionary - maybe they’ll stick, maybe they won’t, but I don’t focus on them. And that works for me, I see loads of WK words when I’m reading, and loads of words for vocab I don’t know but I can guess the reading or meaning somewhat correctly.

Of course WK isn’t the only thing I do, but I’ve felt improvements since doing it. :woman_shrugging:

It’s ok if it doesn’t work for you. No tool has to work for everyone.

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This has been debated to death: Wanikani is just not useful enough, but could be

For reference: Koichi’s reply

I think the bottom line is, if WK doesn’t work for you, don’t use it. Personally, I like it, but I’m also aware it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

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Using currently WK, JPDB and Jisho for Kanjis.

Each system has (for me) an aspect that works better than the others.

Sync whatever radicals, concepts and mnemonics you need between them (it’s additional free practice !), learn only what you want on each and move on.

No system in a vacuum is feature complete.

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If WK works for you, or supposedly works for you, use it. If it doesn’t, fight or flight is after considering alternatives.

Adapt (or cheat?) all you want. Don’t worry too much that different radicals or mnemonics would clash with each other. Vocabularies don’t contribute to level up, but I don’t want to comment on that part. You still need a good deal of vocab for reading at the end of the day.

A big part, imo, is what you feel about learning Kanji. Dedicated Kanji studying? Which Kanji first? Distinguishing similar Kanji matters?

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WaniKani is good for structure. You get a program (starting with the visually simplest kanji) and go through it, level by level. The tradeoff is speed and flexibility. You don’t get to skip levels or suspend leeches.

@Naphthalene is one example of someone who started using WK with a lot of JP knowledge already, went through all the levels and wrote a Level 60 post where they recommended using WK. [Review] Making it to level 60 as an advanced Japanese learner

Meanwhile, @Vanilla the speed demon he is, did not possess as much JP knowledge went through WK and seems to regret it for how slow it was. My Complete Journey, Reflection, and Advice for Achieving a High Reading Level in Japanese

So people are very different in what they consider the benefits and whether that makes it worth it to use WK.

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It is important to put in perspective what your goal is. If you expect to go through X levels of WK and be able to read, than you are in for an awakening. WK is a tool that keeps throwing kanji and vocabulary at you in a controlled manner, easy and hard. And if you supplement it with other tools (as you should with every tool anyway), you will eventually get there. Remember that it is a marathon. Word frequency doesn’t matter that much if the goal is to understand it all anyway.

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Where did WaniKani say it teaches you reading texts?
When I signed up for the first free 3 levels, I had the understanding from their webpage that WaniKani will teach me how to read Kanji, not texts. And that it will give me some vocabs to see different readings of the same Kanji. They never advertised to teach how to read articles, books, whatever. Didn’t see anything like that.

So from my understanding, you made an assumption and run with it instead of paying attention what’s advertised, and now are frustrated that the reality doesn’t match your assumption. Maybe the fact you bought lifetime plays a roll in that, too.

If you want to learn to read texts, you not only need to recognize Kanji and have some vocabs under the belt, but you also need to understand the grammar, etc.

Maybe Bunpro is a better fit for you. There’s grammar, with voiced example sentences by native voice actors, and also a bunch more vocab. And there’s an undo-function included plus some stats.
But they don’t help with learning kanji and don’t sort the vocab from “simpler kanji to total scribble mess”, if that’s needed. Also no mnemonics (at least not in the grammar section, what I only use currently).

I’m not trying to be rude, it’s just how I understand your portrayed situation and I may be totally missunderstanding.
However, WaniKani might not fit your needs or what you thought it would be, and your personal conclusion therefore is absolutely valid. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s just that: Your personal conclusion that concerns only you (again, which is totally fine!).
It does not make WaniKani a bad or useless tool for other learners, though. Everyone has to decide that for only themselves if this, or any other learning tool, fits their needs, situations, and goals.

Again, your personal conclusion is totally valid - but only for you. Therefore it’s kind of irrelevant for others, precisely because it is only concerning you.
It doesn’t give any real room for a debate - which already was made here and on other places in the internet so many times and always comes back to the result: it depends on the individual and their goals, preferences, and so on. (like debating about tastes…)
That’s why i wonder why you felt the need to post it online instead of talk about that with your family/friends for advice or simply in a diary, blog, whatever.

Again, not trying to be rude and I don’t want to forbid you your own opinion! Your thoughts are valid.
I just don’t get the need to post a completely personal conclusion that’s not objectively enough to give space for an actual debate and looks more like something for a diary to get something out of the head or funny rant with friends and a cold beer.

Wether or not you are actually reading and responding here or are just another user who uses the forum as their personal blog, I wish you fun and success in your learning journey and hope you find the tools that better fit you needs and expectations! :slightly_smiling_face:

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idk i mean, it works fine for me. i guess some things just don’t work for everyone.

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Wanikani is a tool to learn a large number of common kanji and their most common readings. It introduces vocabulary to help you learn the various readings of the kanji, not to “prepare you for immersion,” and certainly not as a replacement for immersion. You can debate the efficacy of WK as a kanji-learning tool, but judging it as a vocabulary-learning tool is like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

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Japanese has:

Kana
Kanji
Vocabulary
Grammar
Listening/Reading Comprehension
Output

Wanikani helps you with Kanji only. It helps you learn its readings and meanings. You learn some vocab in the process, but it’s not a vocab learning tool. You’re not supposed to be able to know the other stuff by using wanikani. You have to find other resources for the rest.

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