Considering getting Wanikani. Would like some insight

Japanese
#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.

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#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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#95

Kumirei made some, but I’m not sure if others made any, especially since there’s no Bunpro section in the user script list :thinking: You can find Kumi’s BP scripts here, at the bottom of the OP.

#96

While I generally would recommend Wanikani, I think you would face a particular problem with Wanikani - it’s not suited for starting as an intermediate. You would face the problem of redoing a lot of kanji you know well, over and over, while not getting at the kanji you might not for a long time. You probably wouldn’t want to spend months doing that.

Other websites might offer registering your progress like Bunpro does. WK is good but rather rigid.

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#97

I’ve used Wanikani till the final level and it’s exactly like other people in this thread write - the pacing is forced upon you and it can be a pain if some stuff clicks quickly because it’s simple or you already know the kanji/vocabulary from other places. One other problem I had with Wanikani might be related to how I learn stuff but by using Wanikani and not practicing writing I had problems differentiating complex kanjis with small differences between them. Or not even small differences 職 and 織 could blend for me into the same thing because when I was only reading kanji I haven’t paid attention to smaller details and they are important when you reach complex characters. So at one point I started relearning all the kanji in Skritter because there you can:

  • Practice writing
  • Create your own list with vocabulary/kanji that interests you
  • Choose what you want to learn first

I practice writing on a tablet with a stylus and it really helped me with memorizing kanji and also not mistaking two similiar kanji. I suppose Skritter is not necessary for this but my general advice for learning kanji is to not rely only on reading practice but also practice writing.

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#98

YMMV - But I would avoid scripts that give you more insight into exactly what SRS level something is while you are doing the review or immediatly after your reviews. For me, one of the reasons I don’t miss the summary screens is that I find myself unintentionally building up a memory of when a “ghost” was coming back. This builds up too much contextual information that contributes to my thoughts when answering the item later. I prefer to go blind for the most part.

Font-randomizer
Phono-semantic information
pitch info
stroke order diagram

Those are the enhancements that I have used in the past that genuinely enrich the content you’re studying in meaningful ways. The ability to do ad-hoc quizzes for recent lessons and recent mistakes obviated the need for some of the self-study plugins that I found useful in the past.

I am a user that came back from hiatus last November, and in that time, I have just been rocking it in vanilla mode for the last three months. Why?

  1. I haven’t felt like going through the tedium of setting the stuff up.
  2. over-fixating on progress, accuracy, reordering, etc is part of what has contributed to burnout, or at the very least, focusing on the things that aren’t important to me
  3. I also supplement with Kanji Study (app). I study a smaller set of kanji and it tends be kanji I’ve studied on WK already. So in that round, I go deeper, stroke order, pitch accent, phonosemantic compounds, graded reading mix-ins, and more.
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#99

I finished WK in 368 days. I loved doing it, but to do it in that tempo you’re forced to do the reviews and especially the lessons as soon as they become available. I used a reorder script so the lessons for the Kanji came up first, so the SRS moved on as quickly as possible. The vocab doesn’t proceed the srs, only the Kanji does so therefore you want to do those first.

I started my day with WK, did it several times through the day and it was the last thing I did before going to sleep, for a whole year.

And that is also the part that I hated - not being able to set my own tempo. It was such a relief that I can decide my own amount of lessons with BunPro, change the srs stage per lesson if I want to, it feels way less stressfull than WK because of that.

But in the end it WK worked great for me, after finishing it I redid the SRS for all the Kanji with Kanji Study and still knew most of them. So if you really want to learn the Kanji in a short amount of time I can simply really recommend it.

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#100

??? You did set that tempo yourself. WK for sure didn’t force you to go at that speed. I went at a pace of 7 days per level until I hit level 31, then I slowed down to 14 days a level until now (level 38), and I might speed up a bit to 10 days a level. Some users take more than a month per level. The speed you can go through the lessons is completely up to you (except you can’t go faster than 7 days per level).

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