What's your learning method?

Japanese Language Kanji
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How do you go about studying the new kanji/vocabs you learn through WK ?
Do you have a pre quiz prep like writing down the meanings and the kanji on a notebook etc or do you just go for it?
I personally just repeat it a couple times before pressing the button and learn through mistakes, but i always feel a bit like i’m probably doing it wrong. :dotted_line_face:

It is a bit of a relief when I find some that I already know at least the sound or vague meaning of, but becomes incredibly frustrating when they turn out to be actually different from what i know them as.
I’ve thought of maybe writing it down and maybe separate them by sound or category , radicals etc, but honestly I kind of feel like it’s a waste of time and it would just bore me in the long run, I’m just not that kind of person. :face_in_clouds:

I find it the most helpful when they introduce a new Kanji + vocab using it, it helps me give it more of a context. :closed_umbrella: :sun_behind_rain_cloud: :rainbow:
WK does pretty ok in the way they divide the kanji batches, but i do wish they were a bit more themed sometimes. And by theme I don’t mean like learning ALL the numbers at once, (that sounds dreadful, I really hate learning numbers, it’s atually the thing that makes me stop learning a language the more traditional way cause they aaaalways have an entire unit of just number /time learning in like the first quarter of a book and it’s sooo annoying, i don’t careee, i’ll just tell people to meet me when the sun it’s out.) …but to create some sort of little world. for example you could introduce number 4, April, Spring, Flower, School etc and have vocabs that tie them together.
Idk i’m sure there’s a reason that it’s the way it is though, and maybe it becomes more like that in the future, I’m still on level 3! :baby:

I don’t know how to close this so you can answer with your method and thougthts or whatever byeeeeeee :cherry_blossom: :ribbon:
:cherry_blossom:

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That’s because SRS-learning is different from traditional learning used in school. In school, you’re taught to do repetition on your own, then later you do a test that somehow proves you know stuff. In reality, as most of use know, we don’t really retain knowledge, just because we passed a test. It’s just a metric for performance used in school.

Well, SRS-is about learn by trial. You do “lessons”, which is just explanations, then you quickly move onto the test. Then you test, and test and test. Each time you test you reinforce the right answer. Answers gone wrong you have to do over until you start reinforcing the correct answers.

There is only one path, answering correctly!

There are both upsides and downsides here. If you, like me move fast, there is the possibility of answering wrong and then unintentionally reinforcing wrong answers before the right ones are given, complicating your progression through the SRS.

The big upside is that you’ve now become vastly more efficient in the amount of time devoted to actual studying - no longer doing repetition practice, but rather just answering questions. You can just put extra work on the few items you fail. They need your extra care, but not the wast majority.

There’s more nuancing needed for sure, like the reason you need to do immersion as well, not just SRS. But this is the gist of it. :slight_smile:

What I’m saying is that your approach is absolutely right. It’s the tried and used method. But, it’s worth also thinking about why the original way of learning was popular - it also works.

So any amount of repetition you do, is defo going to pay off. It’s all about how much time you have to devote to each item, and in this case, there being thousands of them. :eyes:

Use your studying time wisely as I’m sure you have IRL stuff going on like all of us, which i always most important! :slight_smile:

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To be honest I just go with how WaniKani says. So I go through the lesson informations and read everything mindfully so that I will be able to get the quiz at the end of lesson correct. After I just do my reviews. And so far it works quite well. Sure some times I do forget a thing but WK will give it to me more often then.

But keep in mind that WK is not for learning vocab. Thus I study vocab now with Kitsun testwise to get my needed vocab.

Hope this helps!

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@Sevamizu

Putting it in less words, but yeah, just let WK do its thing is defo a viable option. Not overthinking it. Start making adjustments as you go though, when it comes to the pace of doing lessons/amount of lessons per day, is probably necessary. Most do that. :slight_smile: That’s all really!

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I let SRS do its own thing, don’t even mind doing something else for learning kanji at the moment.

I prefer to retain a little bit than overwhelming with hours and hours of studying, I also know myself and I was never a good student, I get bored easily :laughing:

Looking at my stats on that other alternative to wkstats I spend average 45min on WK daily.

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My SRS routine is WaniKani, Bunpro, japanese.io, and several Anki decks. Aside from that, I consume as many Japanese books, TV shows, movies, and video games as I have time for, either with Japanese subtitles or none at all. I do an italki lesson once every few weeks.

When I have extra time, I like to transcribe Japanese sentences by hand that contain words that I struggle with. Weblio and SpaceALC are great places to search for example sentences. If I have trouble with kanji, I study them the old-fashioned way: repeated handwriting on a grid. I’m more hardcore about handwriting than a lot of other folks here, but when I’m writing, I’m stopping and thinking. Mindfulness and shit.

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Yeah but i feel like vocabs help with learning the kanji itself because you relate it with other things!

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I can see your point. For me it is the other way around, Kanji helps me understanding and learning the WK vocab. But I am not quite sure what you want exactly. WK throws like 1 to 4 vocabs for every Kanji at you. Do you want more vocab to learn the Kanji? You could look up more vocab with Jisho then and create a flashcard deck maybe.

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As you’re going through WaniKani, I strongly recommend making an extra vocab deck for yourself with words that you encounter in the wild. I’m really happy with my WaniKani experience but the app is missing a lot of common words.

What worked for me was to add words to my own Anki deck if I was at at least Guru level in the corresponding kanji. That greatly enhanced my WaniKani scores and kept me from overwhelming myself.

EDIT: By extension, I also strongly recommend reading as much native content as you can get your hands on, even if you have to rely on DeepL or Google Translate at first. You will forget what you learn here if you don’t!

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Honestly, for numbers and other basic vocabularies, it’s a mix between listening to vocabulary audios auto-play, and watching anime with EN sub. Of course knowing a little of grammar will be needed too.

I also write and revise mnemonics, if I feel that might be needed. Weak and fast mnemonics over complicated ones. Nonetheless, I am a relatively fast reader and remember Wanikani’s too (useful or not).

An opinionated way I saw here, is back-to-back mode, that is, Reading followed by Meaning. I haven’t tried this myself, but that should be very good in theory. In any case, remember each vocabulary as a unit, with reading attached.

I went by a different way, but not in early levels – handwriting after seeing a list of English meanings. Handwriting is slow enough to think through, and I tried to recall Reading as well, then.

Nowadays I do differently, handwriting after doing vocabulary and sentence audio, but I use a much small deck than Wanikani’s.

About Kana vocabularies, or non-Wanikani, vocabulary lists from a textbook works just fine, and you would also learn to read / listen along with grammar and comprehension.

After the textbook, there would still be vocabularies in context, but they loses much of the meaning fast after removing the context. I use my intuition to tell what might be important, and try to remember only those; the rest are left for guessing in the future contexts.

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Wanikani SRS, seeing them through anki studying, when reading I see some pop up as well as when watching shows.

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All through WaniKani. My daily routine is as follows:

  1. Reviews (All)
  2. Recent Lessons (All)
  3. Recent Mistakes (All)
  4. Burned Items (25)
  5. Lessons (5)
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