I don’t have much time, but I just wanted to say that I’ve started really spending more time with each lesson and going through the context sentences one by one for each and it has tremendously helped me when encountering kanji while reading other resources.
That said, I believe Wanikani is a just a small piece of the overall huge puzzle that is Japanese language learning. It is required to do other things, such as reading (and so much more). Wanikani also helps at in holding people accountable on their consistency, which in itself is extremely important for the overall picture. I’ve got lifetime, which was a 200.00 investment for me, so for me now there is a monetary factor here and I must get my money’s worth by completing level 60.
Thanks for the links! I actually thought that WaniKani’s structure might be useful for someone fairly advanced in order to be able to read material printed on paper (where you don’t have easy access to Yomitan), but since I’m not at that level yet did not want to comment on that. Going to look into those case studies though.
That being said, it’s a fairly niche use case, for which WaniKani is still somewhat suboptimal (like having to waste your time on reviewing silly things like radical names and “kanji meanings”) and is not the case that WaniKani is marketed for.
I get the sentiment, but precisely this thing has backfired for me, multiple times. When I’ve been taking a break from learning Japanese and tried to get back to WaniKani for reviewing vocabulary, I had basically two options:
Reset to previous level
Carry on reviewing stuff that I’ve completely forgot about for hours and hours, with abysmal error rate
Both of these are awful and feel awful, and led me to giving up on studying Japanese again and again. And the sunk cost fallacy led me to thinking that since I already spent money on the tool, I should also try hard to make it work not to make that money go to waste.
Good luck with your studies and hopefully WaniKani will work well for you, but if you’ll find yourself in a similar situation later don’t feel pressured to have to make it work and explore other available options. The fact that you’ve wasted your money does not mean that you have to waste your time, too.
I learn better, so unbelievably better, when I can connect a new piece of information to something I already know.
The structure behind WaniKani is like a gold mine for me. Systematically building up from those tiny radicals is exactly the kind of thing I need.
I’ve learned more here, faster, and enjoyed it far more than anywhere else I’ve been.
Things like Anki are almost useless for me, or they are at least in the stage I’m in now where I don’t have an abundance of knowledge to build on yet.
WaniKani is good for brains that work like how my brain works. Whatever that may be.
If you’ve got a brain that clicks together better utilizing learning structures other than the kind WaniKani is using, then that might be all there is to it!
Yeah, same as what others have said above, I didn’t come to WaniKani to learn Japanese, I came to learn Kanji. I can currently recognise the meaning of about 800 kanji and the readings of most of them, plus all the associated vocab, and this has helped me advance my reading. But you absolutely must do the reading outside of WaniKani for it to be of any practical use.
One thing I do dislike about WaniKani is the learning of Radicals, especially the ones that are the same as Kanji and yet have different names. I’m sure these work for some people, but they don’t for me.
I loved it, helped me so much with understanding/breaking down kanji, building up a pretty solid vocab list for immersion. Level 50-60 were unnecessary to me ultimately but I wanted the badge
miss it every day but I have to build my own vocab decks now based on immersion but I would have never gotten to this point without wk because I hate Anki and mnemonics work for me
do what u want, don’t do what u don’t want ultimately
No problem! Maybe my use-case is more fitting of who WK is being marketed for. I can share my story. I was almost a complete beginner when I started using WK (knew hiragana/katakana + some vocab due to anime).
I needed to know kanji relatively fast due to studying JP in uni. We were being tested on our kanji knowledge several times per semester and thus using WK was a perfect way for me to drill kanji readings and meanings, along with some vocab.
Our curriculum the first semester was Genki 1, then Genki 2 in the second semester including all the kanji in those textbooks plus some. It was a race against the clock. I reached level 60 on WK after one year of intense studying. The WK workload was insane and still I wished leveling up could be faster. Thanks to WK I did well on the kanji tests, but I remember one mistake in particular where I didn’t know the reading for 焼酎 (lvl 41). I was level 40 at the time of the test. I could’ve gotten it right if only for unlocking one more level, but alas. So yeah.
And this is going to be controversal, but… Since I had to make sure I was going to level up, I made sure to guru radicals and kanji even if I was unsure of the answer. My strategy was to get them through the “level-up gate” and then let the items I was struggling with fall back to apprentice so they could then run their natural SRS course. If the system is slow and inflexible, I bend it to fit my needs so I get a faster program.
After 10 months since I started studying JP in uni, I started reading my first manga (I was around lvl 35). All the kanji knowledge made it easier to do look-ups in manga where tools like Yomitan weren’t applicable. So I don’t regret using WK, I’m very much happy I did. I don’t think I would’ve done as well on the tests and later while reading native content if not for drilling kanji with WK. It was just the structured program I needed
I do something similar. If I don’t remember a radical, I look up the answer if I know it’s part of this level. I don’t do that for the kanji, but I don’t want the 2nd batch of kanji to be slowed down by getting radicals wrong. I don’t think it’s wrong, because in theory if we don’t know them we’ll get them wrong when they show up for the next reviews!
Oh, I’ve alluded to that in the initial post, but let me elaborate on why I think that’s not the case. Specifically what has been extremely helpful for me was to regularly review in isolation kanji that appear in the frequent words.
An example I can think of is 結構, which is extremely frequent word that also looks like a jumble of lines if you don’t have a mental model of the constituent kanjis. For the words like that, I used to look up a definition, and then having to look it up again in the next sentence! It made reading practice mentally exhausting, which meant that I was giving up on it quite quickly.
Let’s say that someone will change my mind about WaniKani, and I’ll be able to stomach doing 1k reviews that I have. It would take me two months (estimating 1 week per level, not sure how accurate that is) to get to be able to review kanjis from that word, and I’m not going to be starting from zero. In two months, I’ve managed to get through entirety of KanjiDamage deck (although at some point I’ve completely removed production cards).
Obviously, the main thing that changed is that I’ve started actually reading every day. But my point is that WaniKani is not a good tool to support that kind of reading practice.
No offense, but if you know what questions are asked here on a regular basis, it might be better to you to spend less time on the forums and more time consuming content in Japanese. If your goal is to learn the language, that is.
You know that you do not have to add everything in the review or do all the lessons ?
If you wanna have a lean WK on the review angle just do the radicals and kanji with the lesson picker you and it’s up to you to remember them if that what you’re going for.
I would very much recommend that you use the WK kanji vocab to reinforce learning but I do also think that not being able to remove something from the review system is problematic for users that are on a time constraint.
So maybe add the vocab on a separate service and keep WK for what it does very well: teaching you (some) kanji in a structured manner.
WK is very customizable just use it like you need / want to.
What is your aim in Japanese ? You have to tailor your learning to that.
What about other common words like for example 意識, 説明, 無理 and 結果? They’re all level 17. And 喫茶店, 情報 and 種類? They’re level 18. Not far from where you are (though I know you mentioned having a pile of reviews waiting).
It’s normal to feel exhausted and like your head is going to explode when starting out reading. I remember getting headaches after 15-20 minutes of reading manga when I first started. Same when I got to light novels. The more you do it, the more tolerance you build for it.
If the goal is to be able to read native content, you will learn all common words eventually whether it is through lookups or reviews (WK / Anki / JPDB / Koohi). The more kanji and words you know, the less you’ll have to do lookups.
Thinking about it long term, why not pick up those kanji and vocab through WK even if not the most frequent ones appear first? As you progress through the levels while also doing reading practice, you get the best of both worlds. I’m not saying you have to reach lvl 60 as your first priority, even level 30 or 40 goes a long way. When you get to level 25 and do the lesson for 結構, maybe that word is already in guru or master stage in your mind from having encountered it in reading and you won’t have to spend as much time and energy having to remember it during reviews. (You probably know 結構 very well now since you mentioned it, but please think of it just as an example.)
Seconding this 100%.
I think you should work on other material and add the kanji encountered as you do.
I wouldn’t advise on JPDB default pre-built decks as they are too big and it gets overwhelming but adding the text of your next reading session in a custom deck is amazing to learn vocab / kanjis / radicals you’ll use right away.
You’ll also get a feeling of how many term you do not have yet and are able to adapt (personally 50 new terms per week is my limit more is too tiring)
WK has a lot of kanjis that are common in the early level and seeing on level up that you know half the kanjis already is a nice feeling.
There are a lot of strategies when it comes to JPDB. My strategy when I want to target a specific book is to sort by frequency either by within deck or across whole corpus (sometimes doing both in turn).
Then I scroll through the vocab list for a few pages, adding the vocab I want to first enter my lessons. I do this instead of reviewing the whole vocab list chronologically (because like you said, that would be overwhelming and will cause you a headache).
But you can’t add the vocab in the order of appearance within the book / corpus right ?
This is what I’m trying emulating by splitting into sessions-specific decks. Else there’s just too much stuff i don’t know for the current “window” of reading.
I’m sure the experience is somewhat different at higher levels because you know a lot more stuff. I do not know of a system where you can have a list of vocab in order, that also has the capacity to teach subcomponents and that would allow for a cutoff in new items number (because my 50 terms translate easily to 120 kanji / radicals / components / unique words)
Doesn’t that mean you end up with a lot of decks? I think 