You can organize it Chronologically. I did that for また同じ夢を見ていた and it made the new vocab appear in book order. I would put it as the first deck and do a session of new words then go read (or sometimes read first and then do a few to review what I had seen there).
I still found it overwhelming because it was a lot of words, so it didn’t suit me. But if that’s what you’re looking for it is possible.
I merge the “next-session” deck into my main work deck after the session.
So I have ‘Higurashi’, ‘Higurashi-next’ etc… It takes about ten minutes by hand ^^"
I see i though “Chronologically” was the date of adding the vocab in the deck.
The problem i see however is that i also have others deck to pre-learn WK levels / vocab and i’m not sure if the deck ordering is enough of a fined grain control to control which words are active at a given time.
Oho! There’s an export script. I wrote an explanation (tho for a different purpose/use-case) on how to use it here, the principles are the same.
AMAZING !!!
Edit:
I suddenly feel like a tiny tiny 虫。。。
I think the problem might be that you want it to go faster? Cause some basic words are in highter levels.
I started Wanikani a few months back. (I’m just at level 6, still a baby).
But I’m loving it so far. I use Wanikani for learning kanji ONLY. I haven’t started immersion yet (I think i’m not ready yet).
I have in-person Japanese lessons with a teacher and classmates. And have used a bit of Duolingo before that. Thats where I learn to form sentences.
I have been on a trip to Japan, and could actually say a few !very! basic sentences which helphed here and there. so thats cool.
I tried Anki, but found it to be quite difficult. And i’m to lazy to figure everything out and make my own decks. I know you can download pre-made decks. I tried it a few times, but it still doesn’t really work for me. I dislike the simple layout of it, and that I have to choose how difficult I found the word to be myself.
I’d rather test my knowledge by typing it and have the program judge me.
I usually keep track of new or interesting words on my phone. With both the on-yomi & kun-yomi readings.
I do understand that it can get a little frustrating that WK sometimes teaches words that you’d think you’d never use. And that it makes you repeat and review that word 20+ times when all you want is to continue and learn more relevant words.
these are just my thoughts. (english isn’t my native language either, sorry if I made some spelling errors. this is my first forum post here.)
Have you considered using ToriiSRS?
No I haven’t. Thanks for the tip.
It looks identical to wanikani’s layout. I’ll give it a try.
I haven’t read all the posts but I can see that there are many people that feel like me. I first started trying to learn kanji a few years back by using the book Remembering the Kanji which I found excellent at first until I found I was learning a whole lot of kanji that I was never likely to have to read or write (such as placenta - hardly ever use it in English). So, I found a card stack in AnkiApp which I was able to star the words I was finding useful to be able to read until Anki did a software update when I changed phones and my whole stack disappeared!! Then I met with someone who introduced me to WaniKani which they swore by and I certainly have found it has accelerated my reading and my understanding of the various readings enormously. However, as I have progressed through the levels (I am only at level 10) I feel I am again learning a whole lot of words I will never, or rarely come across, when reading Japanese (why on earth is Napoleon III even in there?!) and yet common, simple words are simply not there. I find it frustrating because my time is limited and I am forced to learn a whole lot of dross. What is the science behind the order in which words are introduced?
to be fair, i’d wager it’s less about napoleon and more about using 三世 as a suffix for a proper name. this would come up if you read history in japanese or some jrpgs that use that naming convention in them (more common than you might expect). many of the seemingly odd choices of vocab are also just to help reinforce specific readings of the kanji.
…or if you read the manga or anime ルパン三世 
But yeah, there’s a tension in kanji and vocab learning between “learn common words first”, “learn common kanji first”, and “learn words that reinforce kanji meanings and readings” (and other desirable properties!) that’s fundamentally unresolvable. All you can do when designing a system is pick what tradeoffs you prefer (and relatedly, how you want to trade off "give users flexibility to move along this series of tradeoffs for themselves " vs “avoid overwhelming users with a ton of options and choices they don’t have the context to make an informed choice about”).
Hi there,
While I’d love to give you a good answer, I think the issue is that, we’re all different individuals with different approaches and preferences for learning, to me, WaniKani has been a great way to memorize Kanji into my memory, and genuinely boosted my journey. I personally use it as a main tool, with grammar at the side and occasional immersion.
Pardon if this sounds a bit 失礼, but a tool doesn’t work for everyone (meaning, you might just hate the idea of having to remember Mrs. Chou, or Koichi, or whatnot.)
I won’t deny WaniKani isn’t a perfect tool at all, and there’s a lot of complaints about some UI and other functionalities that could be improved, but I think that, if your aim is to learn Kanji, it really does the work, at least, like I said, for me.
So I think the issue isn’t exactly a- ‘is it good’, more like, ‘is it good for me’.
I think a key part to learning japanese successfully, or learning anything really, is identifying what kind of a learner you are and what kind of strategies and tools work best for you.
It sounds to me like you have given this a lot of thought and it is great that you can find better alternatives that suit you much better.
It’s important to look at things from a bigger picture too. A tool like Wanikani isn’t going to be the only thing that you are going to be doing, and it absolutely shouldn’t be if your goal is fluency. So to place it in a vacuum and tear it apart for its flaws can potentially be a bit misleading too. You could pretty much take any tool on its own and do a similar critique of it. That’s not to say that the criticism isn’t valid ofcourse.
If you truly feel like this isn’t for you and you can’t apply it to your style of learning, there is nothing wrong with that at all. There’s no reason to force it on yourself. There are plenty of other resources out there that could be much more effective and successful for you. But, at the same time, it’s a bit of a stretch to go from thinking how something isn’t good for you to thinking how something isn’t good for anyone.
I think for a lot of people, Wanikani is about how it can fit into their life/schedule and how it can fit into what they are already doing or studying. Simply put, if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.
Either way, you brought up a lot of good points that others agree with, and you highlighted some drawbacks to Wanikani’s approach in general. It’s always important to consider these things along the language learning journey.
Whatever you decide to do, I’m sure you’ll find a great strategy for yourself. I wish you all the best on your journey!
People tend to ask this question between 15-20, which is around the time that wanikani stops feeling fun. In my experience wanikani feels exciting, like you are learning so much and then it starts to feel like work, and you start question is this vocab useful? blah blah.
Learning is laborious on way or another, but now a days we have tons of things trying to sell us short cuts. Wanikani isn’t “better” than anything else but I find that it is better than anki for me because of you can’t edit it. It is what it is, and the community helps me maintain momentum. Anki I always fall off because there isn’t urgency.
One thing that is unexpected about Wanikani that I think is missed when you are looking at learning in a linear mindset, is the way that the SRS manages to store things down in unconcious levels. There are time years later where I’ll be reading something new and my ability to guess kanji readings and meanings despite having no concious awareness of having studied something before. And I give the credit all to wanikani, but that isn’t something I can convince you is useful.
I think Wanikani could be much better. I will continue studying it, but the memonics can be super cringy. Some of them feel like the radicals were just lazily mashed together into a story without any connection to grip onto.
They should make some kind of voting system where users submit their own memonics and the most popular one stays pinned to the top. It would add a fun social element to it…
Just click to add note for meanings and/or readings! Then enter whatever you want for your own mnemonics.
Ooops, unless you meant to have WK select the most popular ones from EVERYONE’s submittals. In which case, I prefer just to modify mine as needed than to see what everyone else feels is most popular.
Ba-a-a-a I want to follow other people’s ideas because I’m lazy.
Have you seen the Feedback section of the forum?
Yeah but in the context of this thread I felt it wasn’t illegal to post my opinion here…
Don’t worry about, you’ll get used to it. It’s not like the goal is to complete all of them like on WK.
