Considering getting Wanikani. Would like some insight

Japanese
#41

I agree with the sentiment but just anecdotally the way wanikani is designed and it’s approach leads many people to remain perpetual beginners and to not seriously engage with the language until as late as possible. Obviously a savvy user with time in their hands could probably use it to their advantage but for the average learner, on balance, I wouldn’t recommend it. I can see it being useful for some people though and at the end of the day the best tool is the one you stick with but I’d probably suggest trying something else before wanikani, if I were asked.

(This is also without mentioning their attitude towards development which from the outside seems pretty dire and unresponsive)

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#42

In defense of people speed running kanji on anki:

So RTK style anki decks (according to wanikani) “the meaning of a kanji is only around 20% of what you eventually need to be able to do”.

That means 10 lessons in wanikani would be equivalent of 50 cards in anki or 40 days.

If you do 20 kanji a day, that would be 100 days, or 3 months to learn 2000 wanikani kanji, totally do able. In RTK you DONT learn their different readings. You readings through using any other method of learning vocab, of which there are many.

#43

Yeah, as someone who’s been using WK and liked it, I don’t personally think it’s for you. It was very helpful to me as a new learner, but it takes a long time to start running into kanji that are less common, and there’s no way to skip levels or kanji, so it’ll probably be months of grinding before you get to a level where you’re learning anything productive, which is time that could be better spent elsewhere if you’re already at a certain level.

The real benefit of WK is the mnemonics and the SRS. Solution: make up your own mnemonics for radicals and kanji (making your own mnemonics is more effective anyway), and then stick them in Anki or whatever else you use. It’ll take less time, be equally as or more effective, and it’s free. Either way will be quite grind-y (either grinding through WK levels or manually inputting every kanji, radical and mnemonic, which, ngl, does sound pretty painful) but at least if you do it on your own you’ll be learning new things.

Edit: if you do decide to do this, I do recommend you take a page out of WK’s book and study various in-word examples for each kanji, so you can get a taste of the sound changes in compound words, the different possible readings and general meanings, and so on.

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#44

Here’s a cynical take. there is incentive for wanikani to not really teach you japanese at a decent rate. the artificial slowing and frankly absurd pricing (you could get both a lifetime of renshuu (which has kanji, particle, vocabulary, and reading help) and a lifetime of Bunpro (I sure hope you know what Bunpro offers.) for the same price) show this is the plan.
If you spend 5 months then upgrade to annual, they’ve already gotten over 100 bucks from you, and going at maximum speed you’d barely be able to finish. and with how their systems work, there is a 99.9% chance you will not be going at max speed. After that, the sunk cost fallacy kicks in and you would be less inclined to buy lifetime because “you can finish in a year” and it creates a cycle.

As far as learning goes, wanikani is pretty bad if you know even 80 kanji or more. I would say you’re genuinely better off learnin all the 訓読み for kanji then learn the 音読み through vocabulary. meanings come from elsewhere, and aren’t exactly needed in terms of memorazation in order to fully understand the kanji. You will pick up kanji meanings from learning te vocab anyway.

(I used wanikani until level 13, then i realized how slow it really was and determined my time is better spent at renshuu when it come to kanji.)

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#45

I used it as my primary way to learn Japanese! It was very useful. That being said you will and should implement other ways to utilise the Kanji that you have learned through reading and such.

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#46

Giving my 2 cents: everyone has their best way of learning.

TLDNR: Good tool (with the appropriate userscripts), unlocked the kanji learning path for me (like Bunpro did for grammar) but you have to go through some material you have already learned. And it all depends on what works best for you at the end.

In my case I learned kanas, some particles and vocab but when it came to kanji I was hitting a wall 'cause there was no indication on how to proceed in a granular / incremental way to learn them.

That was 20+ years ago and thanks to WK I was able to get into kanji easily thanks to the progressive way they teach you. Like what Bunpro is currently doing for me with the next wall called grammar! And these are now my 2 main tools (I’m still trying to escape from reading but I know I can’t!).

BUT!

Yes a lot of mnemonics at later levels (I’m at 39) don’t make sense or are just plain stupid imo, better make yours.

Yes the “phonetic semantic” userscript is amazing and help you understand better or simply learn faster that there is a reading that is more recurent in vocabs for a lot of kanjis.

No unfortunately WK doesn’t tell you that for a lot of kanji with multiple meanings and double ON readings there’s one reading that mean something while the other mean something else (sorry I don’t have an example in mind right now).

Yes thanks to WK I understood that you can’t separate kanji learning from vocab.

Also the order in which they teach you the radical, kanji and vocab isn’t too bad but some are quite weird indeed: like why learn a radical then a couple of kanji based on it in a level but then you have to wait several levels to learn a new kanji that has the same radical and structure.

And finally I don’t agree with their “fake radicals” or misnamed kangxi radicals since it slows down the understanding and acquisition of some new same radical based kanji (at least in my case).

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#47

You can get through the first few levels of WK for free, so I definitely suggest giving those a shot and seeing how it works.

Speaking personally, I went in reverse order from you. I started with WK back in late 2020 then started using BunPro in early 2022. Having knowledge of the kanji beforehand helped with the grammar on BP in that I didn’t need to spend time looking up each kanji I saw.

I believe it can be beneficial to have a kanji memorization service that you like to use, even if you have to pay for it.

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#48

After faffing about for over a year self learning Japanese as a hobby when time permits, I bought the lifetime subs for both WaniKani and Bunpro to give me structure on how I like to learn. I use WK at a pace I am happy with, every morning before work I do my grammar reviews, vocab reviews of words I’ve encountered and add to BP vocab deck. Then WK. The rest of the day I’ll consume in other ways, the short books in BP or reading in Satori. I particular like how all these systems have API calls to each other and can blend. The mnemonics in WK for me has been a god send, I have auditory processing disorder and it really helps, but don’t need for all words.

I don’t get up on missing days or not doing all the reviews. I am still a beginner, but since I settled into this routine things are starting to click. But key for me is not getting hung up on min/max and just enjoying the content.

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#49

I will very likely end up getting a 1 year sub to Wanikani. I just noticed a 50 percent off coupon in my e-mail for a year sub so it’ll come out to under $50. If I still feel I need it in a year I may sign up for a lifetime.

After grappling with so many other programs, I feel like it’s something that can help me keep Kanji on track. In the past I’ve spent so much more on other books, apps, classes, etc that I thought would help me solidify Kanji, but nothing seemed to work. We’ll see if this does. I’ll be using it along with Bunpro, Anki for vocab, Immersion Kit, and daily input. (So tired of the word immersion)

I might check in next year to see if I made the right choice. Thanks to everybody for the very spicy, very salty, very informative responses.

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#50

There are a lot of opinions here, and I agree with most and disagree with a few, but “forced mnemonics” is a false fact, not an opinion. WK does not in any way force you to use their mnemonics. They provide mnemonics for each lesson, which you can use it, or you can use your own (and even add it in the lesson), or you don’t even need to use any mnemonics. It’s 100% up to you. After level 30, I find that I’m using the provided mnemonics less than half of the time. Sometimes I come up with my own, and sometimes I look at the item and realize that I don’t need any mnemonics to remember it and don’t even read the WK mnemonics, e.g. I see the phonetic component for the reading or I see the meaning based on a previously known kanji and radical.

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#51

Wanikani for me is a double edged sword. It has all the drawbacks mentioned in this thread, and I don’t bother with the mnemonics out of laziness so they’re not exactly a plus.

However, it has provided a structure for me. I wasn’t learning kanji reliably or diligently before I went with WK. WK honestly stops me from going too fast and then burning out, so don’t underestimate the value of a structure like this if you particularly need it.

If needing a particular structure in order to be able to study is not a thing for you, then WK is probably trumped by a variety of other cheaper or free methods of learning kanji.

This thread actually made me reconsider if I wanted to continue with WK, but after some thought on how consistent I am able to be with it versus other methods, it won out.

The best tool is the tool that works for you.

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#52

There’s a lot of disdain for WaniKani here, it seems. Some of the points are valid, however, I don’t believe that Tofugu claims WaniKani to be an all-in-one Japanese learning tool but rather a kanji learning tool with some bonus vocabulary, which helps to further reinforce what you learn.

As someone who has spent more time trying to find the ‘most efficient way to learn’ rather than actually learning, I still feel that WaniKani is a great tool for people who have trouble remembering kanji.

People complain about the pace which can be frustrating, but Tofugu has a very good understanding of SRS and in my humble opinion the scheduling forces you to be honest about what you really know (with the exception of typos which can’t be corrected).

Just as another user said, you are not forced to use the mnemonics in WaniKani, but can instead add your own. Personally, I ignore mnemonics until it is apparent that a kanji really isn’t sticking with me, and then I’ll try them out.

One thing you can do to sort of tailor your WaniKani experience is use userscripts, which can order your lessons and reviews (by srs level, type, date learned, etc.). While this can be dangerous if you abuse it, I have found it helpful for clearing out backlogs and for getting troublesome vocabulary and kanji to stick. (The New And Improved List Of API and Third Party Apps - API And Third-Party Apps - WaniKani Community)

WaniKani, like Bunpro and others, is just one of the many available tools, none of them perfect. It is okay, and even a good idea, to try out different methods and see what works. I don’t think Tofugu as a company is trying to force extra money out of people by intentionally hindering progress, but I do think they could improve the platform and I believe that they are working to do so.

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#53

As someone who has completed all 60 levels of Wanikani, I’d answer this post with it depends on what your long term goals are.

Another poster already mentioned this but, my focus on Wanikani had the unintended side effect of having weaknesses in more important areas. With the benefit of hindsight, I would advocate that the most important/useful element of Japanese are ones that enable you to effectively communicate with native speakers. For me, I feel like I have this super power to read Kanji quickly, but nobody cares because I’m not using those skills to be productive or actively communicate with native speakers in a meaningful way. My 2 cents anyway…

If you plan on continuing your studies long term 5-10+ years with the intent of reading the language quickly than I would say it’s absolutely worth it. But you’ll spend 100’s if not thousands of hours focusing on just ONE aspect of a language that has so many difficult points. Wanikani is only good for Kanji recognition, it is not necessarily a good tool for vocabulary building.

Also, for what it’s worth, mostly all of the kanji past about level 45-ish for me was for the most part forgotten after I finished it. The kanji with these words are far less frequently used and more academic in nature. For the most part, I frequently use/see kanji up to about this point in Wanikani.

Good luck with whatever you choose!

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#54

At a fairly casual 10 lessons/day pace it would take you about 2 and a half years to go over the entirety of WK (9226 items right now).

It is “YMMV” situation, yes. When I started WK, I had had lots of energy to do 20 lessons a day, sure. But with adult life, full-time job and hobbies, after reaching level 25 or so, I can only do 4-8 lessons a day on WK, as kanji and mnemonics get more difficult, but also because I have BunPro, reading and speaking practice. And if anything, I consider it a good pace. I know someone who finished WK in a year and can’t read Japanese; I am still level 28, but I can chat to friends in Japanese and read stuff.

I generally consider WaniKani more useful than Anki, but maybe it’s just because I paid for WK and it’ll be my loss if I stopped doing it, so I stick to it. :smiley:

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#55

Yeah that’s absolutely fine, my comment was more directed towards the people who just don’t do enough. Taking a long time to finish WaniKani because you focus on other areas of the language is absolutely fine and probably even a good idea past a certain point. I slowed down heavily around level 40 myself (although lately I’ve decided to rush to level 60 to get it over with, only 8 levels to go…)

But there are certainly people who overdo it IMO. For instance earlier today I read a post on the WaniKani forum by somebody who was still level 10 (so about ~300 kanji known) after almost two years on the platform, and they wanted to “unburn” some level 1 stuff. I think some people just refuse to push themselves outside of their comfort zone.

The problem is that with a language like Japanese you have to learn so much stuff that if two years into your studies you’re still reviewing 大 and 子 3 times a day it’ll take you decades to get anywhere (or more likely you’ll eventually grow frustrated with the lack of result and give up).

Some people seem to get stuck in an endless loop of resets and unburning on wanikani. That seems like a really bad idea to me.

But maybe I’m too judgemental.

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#56

I think I know who you’re referring to, and if it’s the person I’m thinking of (user name ‘alygator’, I believe), then the reason they are currently at level 10 is that they had previously gotten to level 21, but ended up taking a 9 month break, found they were forgetting a bunch of items, and thus reset down to level 7 (and already back up to level 9 or 10).

The idea of ‘unburning’ level 1 items comes from the general idea of ‘reviewing burnt items’, but specifically in the context of, “Well, I could have reset all the way down to level 1, and I’d kinda like to review all those items, but I don’t want to do a hard reset all the way back and lose my progress on levels 2 through 7 (and now 8 and 9)”.

So, this is a user who’s specifically reviewing old items, in a similar way to someone who would have done a full reset back to level 1 on WK. This is not a typical WK user, led astray by WK’s system; it’s someone intentionally working around the WK system to have their cake (do a ‘reset’ of early levels) and eat it too (without losing all progress, as hard-resets do on WK).

Some people reset all the way back to level 1, for a variety of different reasons. This is the same as that, except it’s working around the negative side-effects of doing a hard-reset.

For context, I’ve done this method of doing a ‘soft-reset’ (I call it a ‘rolling reset’) for quite a while now, and I’ve thus re-reviewed everything from levels 1 through 26 to the point where I’ve already re-burned most items on levels 1 through 20.

For levels 1 through 18, I’ve re-burned all but 354 out of 3074 total items. In other words, I only have about 11% of items not-yet-re-burned from levels 1-18; i.e. I’ve already re-burned about 89% of levels 1-18.

All this was done while still progressing steadily along the WK track, and I’m currently on level 37. I just sprinkled in ‘unburns’ along the way, and I’ve been doing that for approx. 2 years now. (I go into depth explaining why I did this in the main comment where I posted about this idea in October of 2022: Rolling Reset )

Just saying that it’s not a crazy idea, though it’s definitely not for everyone (or even most people!). It’s just a specific way of accomplishing a specific goal.

Indeed, rather than making me want to give up, it has actually helped me to maintain motivation and keep a nice moderate, steady pace, to the point of enjoying re-reviewing these ‘old friends’ as I continue to progress meeting ‘new friends’.

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#57

Did a year a Duo and then transitioned to WaniKani and Bunpro, and even though I haven’t spent nearly as much time, I’m already noticing what you are mentioning here. With vocab I’ve reviewed a bunch on WaniKani, I still have to slowly parse it together, both meaning and probable reading, but I can recognize and know what the individual Kanji are immediately. Whereas with Duo previously and now Bunpro, vocab that I’m not even actively studying but just happen to see here and there while progressing, I pick up and can read and understand instantly (even if I haven’t fully pieced together the individual kanji meanings of that vocab yet).

I’m probably still going to go through it, bc Kanji is one of my favorite aspects of the language and I love learning what they all mean, but it did give me some hesitation on how effective Wanikani is for me personally, vocab-wise.

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#58

I’m of mixed feelings about WaniKani. I still use it almost every day, even though I’ve only got about 100 items left to max out. I started using it during summer 2020. It’s possible that I stuck with WaniKani because I’m a college professor and summer 2020 left me with a lot of free time.

On the one hand, WaniKani broke me out of a plateau that I’d been on ever since I minored in Japanese in college.* There really does come a point for everyone looking to acquire written Japanese where they just need to hit kanji really hard. That site got the job done for me. Besides, I have ADHD and the structure was a tremendous help. I’ve even been building my own Anki deck of non-WaniKani kanji for several years now, extrapolating from their radicals.

At the same time, I get the gut feeling that WaniKani is on the brink of obsolescence. The forums there are rife with users who feel ignored and feel that recent updates have been perfunctory and not reflective of their feedback. You certainly can cobble together everything WaniKani does using a combination of Heisig, JPDB, Anki, and/or japanese.io, if you have the executive functioning for it (I don’t; I tried).

The most important thing is to keep up the immersion practice that you’re already doing in parallel with whatever you use. That’s what has made all the difference for me.

* Not a humblebrag; those classes weren’t as useful as you’d think.

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#59

I agree to a great extent with this but at the same time the core of Wanikani doesn’t particularly need updating. Kanji learning is kanji learning, what worked in 2014 still works in 2024. They absolutely should work on having a mobile app however IMO (I love Smouldering Durtle but it’s a third party app). What frustrated many users (myself included) is not so much the lack of progress but the breakage and removal of features. They broke all scripts and handled the situation poorly (IMO), they removed the summary page, they removed the review API that broke many third party tools. That just sucks when the product you paid for gets worse after the fact.

That’s not to say that there’s not things that WK could improve of course, but then it quickly becomes very subjective. I think they should put a lot more emphasis on phonosemantic composition for instance, but maybe others don’t care about this and prefer the silly English mnemonics.

They also have added a handful of useful kanji and vocab last year, as well as reordered many items in a way that, in my opinion, makes a lot of sense.

Absolutely, but I have to confess something shamefully: the WaniKani level system really works on me. It gives you some objective measure of progress that merely trudging through an Anki deck doesn’t do for me. It’s really dumb, and I wish I wasn’t as easily swayed by gamified systems, but frankly this alone was worth it for me. I’m sure I wouldn’t have pushed as hard with an Anki-style deck.

Yeah absolutely. I think WaniKani is accessible and really easy to get into so it attracts many users who maybe don’t have the right mindset early on, or underestimate how difficult it will be. So they end up dropping out and resetting and whatnot. But that does not invalidate WaniKani’s system IMO, it’s just the harsh reality of language learning, the vast majority of hobby learners will give up early on.

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#60

I think this is the sticking point for me. I’ve got ADHD too and stuff like Bunpro and WaniKani, where things are broken down into more discrete levels, are absolutely essential. When I just have a huge load and no levelling etc. I tend to get overwhelmed and stop. I suppose this is true of many people, not just ADHDers, but when you run with this kind of disorder you need every leg up you can get.

While I’m a bit unhappy with WK at the moment, it’s still fulfilling it’s purpose (for now).

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