Have I screwed myself?

Japanese
#1

Hey! This is gonna be a weird post. I’m really just looking for reassurance, here.
I’ve been using WaniKani for a few months now, and have really only been putting my Japanese learning time exclusively into that. The plan was to finish WaniKani, collect as many words and kanji as I could, then start textbook learning, then listening, then trying to communicate with other people online. I asked the forum over on WK if they thought this was optimal, and they told me that I should’ve been implementing more vocab from the start. One user recommended this site, and I figured I’d take a look at it. I saw that there was a WK integration feature, and decided to link my accounts, against the little warning at the bottom saying I’d get an awful lot of reviews if I did so. Now I’ve got 600 to do! Aiyaiyai.

That’s not that big of a problem, though. I’m the most stubborn person I know, and I’m passionate about learning this language and want to see it through to the end. But when I did start my reviews, I felt like I’d learned nothing spending all that time on WK. 雨が上げる means “it will stop raining?” The only meanings I had learned associated with 上げる is “to lift something” or “to go up.” Then, to my horror, I click on the “info” tab, and 上げる has like twenty different meanings! Jeez louise!

EDIT: I got confused about agaru and ageru
I feel like the past few months I’ve only been learning how to be a parrot. “Oh, I can read this, and this is the meaning of this phrase in this context.” But now I’ve got all these reviews to do on BunPro and I’ve got the feeling they’re all gonna be a lot like 雨が上げる. Does it get easier? If I crack open Genki, will I be able to figure it all out? I assume I’ve dug myself quite the hole, here, but I’m just looking for reassurance. I just need somebody to tell me to trust the process and keep putting my time in, and that eventually it’ll all make sense. I know that comes off as really needy and a little pathetic, but I am discouraged at the moment. Is something like this common for newer learners? Does everyone fall into the same trap and get filtered?

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#2

I don’t understand what hole you are talking about. You spent some time on WK, maybe suboptimally, but it was spent learning the language. At this point, it is sunk costs – readjust your learning journey and keep going, don’t stress too much about what you did in the past.

You can always delete the words you imported from WK, although it might take some time, or completely reset your account, if you didn’t do much work besides it. When I moved to Bunpro I simply activated WaraKani deck and was studying like 10-15 words per day. Since most of them you know by now, this workload isn’t too bad. You can also adjust the SRS level at which you add the words from that deck, to make the workload even lighter.

I am sure you can do it! Don’t give up and occasionally try to reevaluate your studying journey (which is what you are doing right now).

5 Likes
#3

By no means have you dug yourself into a hole, you just need to spread out your learning more. WK typically takes years to hit the highest level, waiting until you finish it before diving into grammar and learning how the language works is not something I’d recommend.

Ideally you should start doing all those other things now and use WK as another tool in your learning, not the staple of it.

It’s cool to be able to recognize many words and kanji but if you’re not studying the language itself you’re not going to get very far. Japanese is very different from English, it’s going to take a time for your brain to grow accustomed to feel of it. You’ll be in a much better spot if you got started on that now.

For what its worth, I did something similar to you and memorized all the content of Remembering the Kanji before cracking open a Japanese textbook. Years later I can confidently say that was not a good approach.

Good luck on your learning journey! Most important thing is to have fun with it

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#4

I faced the same when joining Bunpro. Although WK does give you different examples for each vocab showing their usage, you are not really tested on it. You will find many more examples of words that have a range of use based on different contexts. But you will also learn those usages much more easily coming from WK.

I’d recomend practicing those vocab on Bunpro even though you already “know” them from WK. It shouldn’t be very stressful and you will learn much more how to actually use the vocab you learned on WK.

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#5

Also to add something… when I joined Bunpro coming from WK was the most rewarding period of my japanese learning experience so far. Everything started to connect and I could actually use what I had learned on WK for something!

So yeah… no reason to be discouraged

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#6

You haven’t done irreparable damage so don’t worry.

I have been using Wanikani for years and am only level 14, I did a reset last year after a prolonged break due to health issues, but my point is, Wanikani is a slow burner.

I don’t do my Wanikani cards here, I linked my accounts and burnt all Wanikani cards, it’s just too overwhelming to do them all in 2 places.
I highly recommend grabbing a textbook - if you use Genki, pair it with Tokini Andy’s YouTube videos, they are amazing and adding nuance and helping you get things down.

You can also do your Genki textbook and workbook exercises for free via Seth Clydesdale’s git hub - a Google should bring that up but let me know if you can’t find it.

What you might want to consider is bringing each area of language up to a similar point.

What I mean by this is self evaluate your speaking, listening, reading, writing, kanji studies, grammar individually. If you notice that your kanji is N4 (or whatever you use to rank it by) but your grammar is N6, do a focus study in grammar, keep each area at a similar level - you will naturally be better and worse in areas so don’t get too meta about this.

Would be great to see how you get on in a month or so, be sure to keep us all updated and if you get stuck on any grammar points, study techniques etc etc just drop in forum and we will do our best to help out :tiger:

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#7

I made a similar leap from WK to Bunpro (grammar). Hard to screw up too badly in the beginning as long as you’re learning at a reasonable rate. You’re supposed to make adjustments as you go along, depending on what works for you. I realized early on while using Anki that the example sentences didn’t make much sense outside of the vocab (which also were altered in various ways when used in a sentence). That’s when I knew I couldn’t ignore grammar so I looked for something to fill that gap. Started with renshuu, moved over to Bunpro. The plan afterwards is to do more Yomitan-assisted reading and finish the 10k core deck. I still run WK (it’s like Anki with more handholding) as a passive way to push/measure progress, but reading is the main goal right now.

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#8

I would not recommend learning a bunch of kanji before focusing on vocab and grammar, but it’s not the end of the world. Just try to study grammar alongside Wanikani from now on. Knowing kanji meanings and reading are important, too!

As for messing up your learning… The thing is, language learning is difficult! I don’t know if you have ever learned another language before but in the beginning, you are not going to understand a lot. You wrote that you were just “parroting” but that’s how you learn when just starting out. Yeah, some words and kanji have a lot of meanings and readings associated with them, but you don’t have to learn and memorize ALL of them: some are more important than others.

So, yeah, don’t stress too much. Just study kanji, vocab, and grammar all together and just keep at it!

#9

They are not. 75% of the time the basic meaning you learned in wanikani will be enough.

If asked ‘how would you say will it stop raining’ I would guess 雨が止まりますかbecause stop = 止まる. but given 雨が上がる, the Rain lifted does mean the rain stopped.

Since you are intrested in a textbook - use that to set the pace.

Do chapter 1 in genki 私は学生です。妹は十七才です。
While Keeping up your reviews

Once you finish a chapter, work on the genki deck to add vocab and grammar from lesson 1 to bunpro.

#10

The main goal of WaniKani is to teach you kanji, not vocab. The latter is used to teaches you different readings, but they still tech you the primary meaning of the word and give a lot of example sentences (it’s a good idea to look a them from time to time during the reviews).

I suggest resetting all vocab decks on Bunpro and learning them again here. Your knowledge from WaniKani would speed up the process, but you would also learn some other nuances via the context sentences. You can use the WK integration to hide furigana for the words you’ve studied.

#11

I thought the same, did WK exclusively for 6 months, got to lvl 25, started getting the later stages of SRS on some of the earlier level kanji, couldn’t remember them, the review pile got bigger and bigger everyday, started doing multiple hours multiple times a day of just WK reviews, eventually burnt out and quit ‘Japanese’ (well quitting using WK really).

Took a break for 3 months, realised it was WK grinding I was sick off, not Japanese, started again on a different path (including using BP this time, along with textbook learning, classes etc)

I wouldn’t wait to know lots of vocab/kanji before starting anything else, Genki for example, assumes no prior knowledge.

I was in this weird place when I restarted my learning, I knew some stuff but couldn’t really use it for anything useful.

#12

I don’t think you have a problem at all. In fact, I did exactly what you did. My WaniKani level is much higher than my grammar level.
Now, I actually like Kanji because I feel that I’m actually good at them. (Good in terms of knowing more than what my JLPT level requires).

#13

I think what you’re experiencing is a dawning realization of just how much studying you will have to do over the course of your entire lifetime to see any kind of rewards and results.

Right there with you, buddy. It’s an enormous black hole of a time investment, and it takes so long before you can have dialogs, read even children’s books, and honestly, fluency might never be accomplished in a lifetime.

That’s the path we are walking.

So no, I don’t think you wasted your time on WaniKani. You’ve extracted 2 eyedrops worth of water from the ocean of how much studying you’ll need to do to learn this language. But it has to be done, that’s the only tool we get for moving water around.