Considering getting Wanikani. Would like some insight

Japanese
#75

If you’ve finished a light novel and know thousands of words, I personally wouldn’t call your grasp of kanji “weak.” Gaps in your knowledge are more or less inevitable unless you’ve been learning the language for a decade or more, and if you’re this far in, WK study time will just leave the gaps in different places imo.

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#76

I would strongly endorse simias and Thousand JP’s comments. Wanikani is based on the paired-associate learning of sets of semantically unrelated lexical items. Context is everything in language learning and use and Wanikani requires you to go elsewhere to use the items in context. Hence the encouragement of reading, etc, on the Wanikani community pages. The return on time investment is indeed low for genuine learning. I just finished all 60 WK lessons as a means of both review and extension of vocab knowledge. I have been battling kanji for four decades and found the review of learned material, roughly through Lesson 45 - to be an enjoyable exercise. But the last 15 lessons involving mostly new material was a largely empty exercise, with the previous material soon forgotten. This was partly due to my age, I am sure, but the experience reinforced my view that flash card approach embodied in WK is of very limited use for beginning or advanced learners. I think Bunpro is a far superior for beginning and continuing learners. It is an excellent learning resource.

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#77

KanjiStudy is totally fantastic. Kanji Study is easy to make time for and I really enjoy the paleolinguistic content.

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#78

Hey I was reading that!
I didn’t know what any of it meant but I will still trying to read it! >:(

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#79

It’s ok I kept the good parts

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#80

I see, there have already been made a lot of posts about is, but I won’t read through all of them, so it might be possible that I say something that has already been mentioned. Since I am a WaniKanian myself, I will try to answer this question as objectively as I can.

WaniKani can be a great tool for learning Kanji, especially if learning with mnemonics is your style of learning. If you go at the fastest speed (like me), you can complete it in about one year, if you go at a more reasonable pace (like many others), it should take you two years. Regardless of how you choose to pace it, if you go through every single item, you’ll end up knowing about 2100 kanji and 6700 vocab (I’m not sure about the exact numbers, feel free to correct me if you know them).

However, there is one thing you should be aware: WaniKani alone won’t help you to learn Japanese. Sure, it gives you quite a few vocab, but you also have to practice reading, listening and/or production, depending on what you expect from the language. Since you use Anki for vocab, WaniKani would most likely mainly help you at learning Kanji, but, it does a great job at what it does if it suits you.

I’ve heard many people complaining, however, that WaniKani subscriptions are rather expensive, and I see what they mean, as the prices are about double the prices on Bunpro, but on Bunpro, you learn grammar and also have the possibility to learn vocab. This means with WaniKani teaching kanji and vocab, and Bunpro teaching grammar and vocab, I’d say both of them roughly teach you the same amount of items - I know that 1000 grammar points are way less than 2100 kanji, but if we’re talking about the total amount of items you can learn, which is for both above 7000 to 8000, I think, it is indeed not really justified by WaniKani to make you pay double the price that you pay for Bunpro.

Another aspect you have to be aware of is that WaniKani can easily end up taking most of your time that you use for studying Japanese if you don’t pace yourself carefully. I’ve read many posts of folks that achieved level 60 in one year saying that their general Japanese skills are somewhere around N4 to N3 (and I hope that I won’t end up in the same situation lol), while others who went a bit slower with WaniKani had passed the N2 around the time they got to level 60, for example.

This is a bit unrelated, but might perhaps be interesting, especially regarding the pacing. I haven’t “officially” stated it yet, but my goal is to get to N1 level in one year after I initally started learning Japanese. My background with Japanese back then was zero, the only thing I knew where two words, these two being こんにちは and ありがとう. I do not plan on taking an exam, as I am doing this for myself, but in one year, I will try to find N1 test material somewhere to test me myself if I am that level. Now, this might seem to be a contradiction with what I said earlier, but I have a lot of time to study Japanese every single day, in general, I usually do four hours of studying and practicing every single day, from Monday to Sunday, but I could basically also just do five or six hours a day, I don’t really have a limit of how long I am able to study (except for the natural rotation of the Earth that causes night and day, of course). But, I still try to keep it at around four hours so that it doesn’t take over my life. So, this is how much I study to be able to maintain my pace, and I’m currently at N4 grammar wise (already finished). While I currently don’t have an active subscription, I plan to buy one for one year during February (the reason I don’t wanted to renew it right after my free trial is because I wanted to practice N5 and N4 a bit before moving on).

Now, having WaniKani and Bunpro together appears to be a dream team, and it is… if you pace yourself correctly. In the last week before my trial expired, I had to do more than 100 reviews every single day, additionally to the ones on WaniKani. So, if you go too fast, it will end up consuming most of your time that you use for studying Japanese, and why the heck am I talking about pacing right now if the topic is if you should use WaniKani???

Back to the topic :sweat_smile:: Is it worth buying WaniKani? This can’t be answered with a simple yes or no, since it has its pros and cons. In general, I would say if you think that the learning style that WaniKani uses suits you, you could try it for a month or two and then see if you still like it. After that, you can still change your mind. But if you choose to use WaniKani, you should always keep in mind to pace yourself correctly so that it doesn’t end up taking away too much time from your Japanese studies.

(This post didn’t end up quite as I’ve imagined, as 50% of the post is about me lol)

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#81

Perhaps I should make a thread here on Bunpro about the progression of my goal etc. but I’m not sure if I should do that, since I already have such a thread on the WK forums. Perhaps if anyone who’s not on the WK forums would be interested, then I might make one? :thinking:

#82

You could add the forum link to your profile description perhaps. Sometimes I lose that thread and have to search for it somewhere.

1 Like
#83

Yeah, I think that’s a better idea :slight_smile:

#84

I would say it’s the best idea to start WaniKani as soon as possible.
I was in a similar situation with N2 level Japanese, and a fairly good overall proficiency, but kanji were challenging for me. Before, I always used Memrise decks of 日本語総まとめ漢字, but no matter how many times I repeated these decks, I eventually forgot the kanji readings.

So, I decided to try WaniKani about half a year ago, and my only regret is not doing it earlier.

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#85

The problem with most of the Anki decks is they are based on the Last.fm saga. Basically a website that let users create the “2000 words” flashcards to become fluent in multiple languages for free, then they did a rug pull and made it a paid service. Imaginably, the people took their content and made most of those 2000/10000 word anki decks. The problem? The words chosen are based on statistics, i.e. frequency of use in newspapers/online; not how actually useful they are when learning Japanese (or the other languages). I cannot emphasize enough how bad these decks are for learning Japanese. If you already have half the kanji down, maybe buying the kanji master series and making your own Anki decks is a better solution than wasting months getting to the halfway point of Wanikani.

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#86

UPDATE: I am currently using Wanikani and like it so far. I hate that there does not seem to be a dark mode, but that was solved with the Tsurukame app.

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#87

Userscrpits make the experience much better.

Waikani open framework
Double check
Wanikani Show context sentence
Jitai for random fonts

You can use tampermonkey for a desktop
I use the Stay safari extension userscript manager for my iPad, but it takes some effort to get the scripts in the. Correct order

Looks like there’s a dark mode script but I haven’t used it.

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#88

Thanks, I’m so spoiled with everything else having a dark mode.

#89

wanikani is great, but as many have commented, to improve your experience third-party scripts are highly recommended.

#90

What are some scripts you would recommend? Is there one to move the Kanji in reviews to the middle of the screen? It’s so annoying that it’s up so high.

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#91

I have it quite customized, but the most important ones would be Confusion guesser and Review Summary.

#92

For moving the kanji bar I just zoom the review page in until I feel its comfortable.
For dark mode well, I have an extension on my browser to turn every page on the internet to dark mode, can’t live without it.

#93

If you’re interested, there is a list of all the scripts that I use:

Maybe you can find some scripts here that you like :slight_smile: Here is a list of most of the userscripts that WaniKani has. AFAIK, it doesn’t contain all of them, but a lot.

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#94

Many of those are not crucial but extremely satisfying, I use them too;
Golden burn, Burn bell, Ultimate timeline, Overall progress bars.
Great ones :+1:

Are there any user scripts for bunpro?

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