Sounds like this is mostly converged but I thought I’d share a few thoughts.
First, it depends on your goals. If you want to be able to read novels or newspapers, knowing a lot of kanji is going to be a lot more critical than for listening comprehension and speaking.
That said, knowing kanji can give you a leg up on retaining spoken material too. At some point, the kanji function as their own mnemonic devices to connect sound to meaning. This is expanding on Asher’s point: while the clearest advantage from kanji in vocab acquisition comes from visual recall, there’s an element of auditory recall as well.
I found a similar dynamic at play with WK vocab. A great example is 自分 – “oneself”. WK alone was pretty useless at understanding what this actually means. However, once I saw it used a few times in native material, it was totally clear. Now, it’s hard to know exactly how it would have played out if I hadn’t been exposed to the WK content, but I’m pretty sure getting the same level of understanding would have taken a lot more exposure and trips to jisho without that foundation.
Summing up:
You’ll need to consume/produce native material aligned to your goals
Learning new vocab/grammar/kanji from native material requires sufficient context
Tools like WK and BP let you build up useful context deliberately and efficiently
so I’m kinda biased on this as someone who tried WK, found it actively dissuaded me from learning after a few months and provided me with comparatively inefficient tools for actually reading, and is now very firmly in the “learn words not kanji” camp - but for me personally, that sort of time ended up being far better spent on reading/listening to content in Japanese than going through flashcards. I do have a sizable personal vocab deck, but I like to add words that I actually encounter in-context, since that just… works better for me (though I also admit that hand-building a deck is its own timesink).
If you find that WK’s mnemonics work really well for you, or that its structure is sufficiently satisfying that it motivates you to continue, those are good enough reasons to use it, I don’t wanna say that WK is useless. It’s just not 100% necessary to have a Kanji-focused resource - especially when that resource will absolutely not help you read words like 行方.
I love Wani kani. It is helping me learn kanji and much better than Anki ever could. I think the reason is because of the build from radical, to Kanji, to Kanji compound.
I am pretty new to Bunpro as a subscriber and I am only using it for grammar. You could probably just skip all the vocab reviews in Bunpro if you have invested time learning vocab by other means, then the reviews won’t be so overwhelming.
There’s no shame in taking one’s time. Indeed, there’s a little thread-group on the WK forums for folks who (like me, for instance) prefer to take a ‘slow and steady wins the race’ approach to learning Japanese (and SRS in particular). You may be interested to check it out:
Sorry if this is derailing the thread, but this really, really strikes a chord. I’ve been using Wanikani for two years, Bunpro for probably around 1, and playing video games and making anki cards out of whatever I don’t know for a little over 6 months. I don’t feel completely amazing about my reading, but I can do okay and get by just fine playing some RPGs, especially if I have a dictionary around. However, I’m absolute garbage at listening and even reading where hiragana is preferred over kanji, I struggle a lot.
I tried a lesson on iTalki the other day, thinking “I’ve put a couple hours of study into every day for two years, I’ll be able to at least struggle through” and I was dead wrong. I couldn’t understand more than the absolute simplest words, and only if he stopped and said a word or simple phrase two or three times in a row. If my tutor spelled out words in the chat in hiragana, I struggled too. But if he typed a sentence using kanji, I could get everything no problem (and read it all out loud just fine).
It’s not just guessing the meaning from kanji, it’s truly recognizing and reading the word, but only because the kanji jogged my memory. I’ve sat through Cowboy Bebop with no subs all the way (it’s the only Anime I really dig), re-watched some episodes of Midnight Diner with Japanese subs instead of English, and put on podcasts for beginners on repeat, hoping I’ll somehow recognize and connect the words I know if I see the kanji to the sound-and-rhythm part of my brain, but it just doesn’t seem to happen. It sounds like you may have been in a similar—if not totally the same—place at one time. Do you have any advice for how to break out of this?
I always like to recommend Glossika. It’s a website designed solely for shadowing practice, so if you want to buff your speaking or listening chops, it’s a great choice. To give you an example of what the site is like, here is one of the ways you can review (there are several options):
Yeah I was in exactly the same position at one point. I realized that kanji basically giving me the answer to anything whenever I read was really stunting my ability to listen. After all, when you listen, everything is hiragana in a sense .
The way I personally overcame it was really… really focused listening. For me, this took the form of audiobooks, because when watching anime I found my attention was divided between watching and, listening, resulting in not being able to do either 100% effectively.
I started with the Japanese versions of English books that I already knew (Harry Potter etc), and played them at 80% speed (the app I used and still use is BlackPlayer EX on android). To start with, what I focused on more than anything is just latching on to whichever words I do understand, and then using the spare time to give myself a fraction of a second to try to process the ones I didn’t know by using any contextual information I had.
As an example of this, here’s a sentence from Harry Potter completely in hiragana, as that’s what listening feels like at first:
To transform this to something understandable, I pick out what I know -
フライパン - ‘Frypan’, not so bad.
に - I know it’s a particle of location by default since I would expect it to follow frypan.
たくさん - ‘Lots of’.
入っている - ‘In’. I can picture this being bacon or something even without more context.
わよ - Combination of particles わ for female speech, and よ for advising.
可愛い子ちゃん - ‘My adorable boy’. Seeing that I already know the story, this stands straight out.
ペチュニアおばさん - ‘Aunt Petunia’. Also obvious from already knowing the story.
は - Particle as expected after a name.
巨大な - ‘Giant’. Because the next word is ‘son’, even if I forgot きょだい, I know it’s an adjective because of な, and my memory is jogged that it is ‘giant’ because I already have a mental image of Dudley.
息子 - ‘Son’.
を - Object particle, so I know the mom is doing something to the son straight away. This lets me know what type of verb to expect.
うっとりと - Omomatopoeic word using と, I was a bit unsure of this at first.
眺めた - Past tense of 眺める, ‘to gaze at’. At this point remember that うっとり means ‘with rapt attention’, or ‘spellbound’, as ‘gaze’ is a good context reminder.
「フライパンにたくさん入っているわよ。かわいい子ちゃん」ペチュニアおばさんは巨大な息子をうっとりと眺めた。
Now I have a clearer picture of what I just heard.
For every sentence, I listen as closely as possible and do this. Pull in every word I know, separate the ones I don’t, then wrack my brain processing what I don’t know. I did this for many books, I never paused to try figure out every detail. If I couldn’t understand something, move on to the next sentence and try again just as hard, maybe the new sentence will give more context to the last one.
As you start to pick out more and more words, your brain gets more and more familiar with patterns and usual sentence order. From there you can up the speed to 90% to force you to work even harder mentally, then 100%. Then I moved to books that I don’t already know the story, but I am familiar with the genre. Then from there, start moving into more difficult genres.
It takes time, and it takes a lot of targeted focus, but it is very rewarding. Your plan of attack in regards to the problem will always dictate the result. Meeting it head on and pushing through the tough moments of ‘dammit I understand nothing’ will get you past it! I hope this was even slightly useful.
While we are at it, any chances implementing dictation mode on the Bunpro as depicted in the kelth’s message?
As far as I understand, Bunpro already have everything for it: audio and transcription.
I was actually just in the process of passing on this idea to the team. As you mentioned, all the tools are already there and it would certainly be a good way to practice.
Edit - We have access to a program called Voicepeak, which is a very natural (but not perfect) sounding text to speech tool for Japanese. A lot of content creators use it. While we have not used it in the past, something like this could potentially be a great use for it, as there are so many vocab sentences that getting an actual voice actor to do them would be a bit unrealistic.
I’d prefer to have an option to opt out auto-generated audio. There is a lot of already recorded grammar audio, it will be more than sufficient for at least an year of studying I guess
I personally loathe TTS for language learning. Even good TTS for general purpose is generally abysmal for language learning because it’s always flat, lacks intonation, and it’s always a bit off. If the idea is just to convey information that’s fine, but for prononciation practice it’s hard pass for me. I generally prefer no audio to TTS because in my experience those TTS samples are never vetted by native speaker to exclude the really weird/wrong ones (because why bother, it’s so quick and easy to just generate them on the fly!) so I don’t want to tune my hear to potentially broken or unnatural language.
A few years ago I was pretty active on the Duolingo forums and I spent quite a lot of time helping on the French-for-English-speakers category (I’m a native French speaker). It was very common for students to complain about weird or broken audio and while it was sometimes a skill issue on their part, I can vouch that quite often the audio was indeed broken, slurred or just plain unnatural due to weird intonation.
Now that was years ago, I can imagine that it’s improved since then and with the current AI boom I hope we’ll get native-level TTS in the not-so-far future, but we’re not there yet. I much prefer having a deck of 1,000 cards with high quality audio recordings than a 10k deck with TTS.
I realize that it’s not mutually exclusive, but I fear that going the TTS route is a slippery slope, it’s so much cheaper and faster than hiring natives to record the sentences.
That’s very useful! There’s so much conflicting advice floating around, including people in the never slow down audio camp, it’s nice to just hear that working your way up to full speed audio got you where you wanted to be. There’s a lot of good nuggets in your response, thank you so much. Even just dropping the name of the app you use is very appreciated. I definitely have some undiagnosed attention issues that have prevented me from making it more than 30 pages into a novel in 15 years and also why SRS is such a godsend (I’ve referred to it as “weaponizing my ADD” before), but maybe there’s some non fiction I can pull from. I’ll have to figure out how to wrangle myself for focused listening and not let my mind drift when I can’t understanding something, but I bet there’s a way. Maybe just volume is the answer.
In any case, I have to say I’m always impressed by the amount of passion that you have for helping people out and your level of detail in responses is so appreciated, dude. You really have a gift for taking in what people say and sharing your knowledge and experience with both clarity and abundance. The community here is definitely lucky to have you around, bro.
So focused listening is good but I found it exceptionally frustrating at the very beginner level unless I was using this specific resource: Comprehensible Japanese - YouTube
Comprehensible Japanese is really good because you have some visual aid to help but no Kanji, unless you turn on subs. The pace is very manageable if your listening level is beginner-ish, too.
That said. Your listening doesn’t have to be 100% focused, 100% of the time. http://nihongoconteppei.com/ (also on Spotify, just be sure you’re grabbing the beginner podcast) is very very good for listening just, while driving, going for a walk, cleaning, or any other activity that doesn’t use very much of your language brain. Ideally, you let your attention waver in and out, and then replay each episode a couple times and let your brain catch the things it missed on the first or second attempt. This and the above resource in concert worked exceptionally well for taking my listening from “bad” to like. “not good but not entirely awful, either,” which is about the level where focused listening becomes more manageable and less demotivating. You mentioned you had put some beginner podcasts on repeat before without much success, which sounds like you may be pushing yourself to focus and getting frustrated rather than just, letting the language in and engaging with it a little bit at a time? Dunno, I just think a semi-passive approach, allowing your attention to flit in and out with accessible content while you involve your body in some other action - can help with this early stage.
Also, do you read out loud at all when you read? 'Cause I find that that also helps me with grabbing words I know from reading/reviews when I hear them for the first time.
I’m on level 20 on WK but found I could only recall Vocab if I saw the kanji.
So I started using Kaniwani and Bunpo to reinforce it as it giving me the english and forcing me to remember the word. I think it’s really helping my recall.
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