Surely, you are just exaggerating, right? Learning almost 600 kanji / week… finishing the ENTIRE Jōyō kanji in way less than a month seems impossible, even if you have already knew half of it…
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Yeah, the daily kanji would be the same amount as Japanese children learn in the first grade of elementary school. And this user did that everyday for three weeks?
Absurdly impressive if true.
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I’m not exaggerating, I have no previous experience with kanji but a pretty good memory and no life at all. The biggest help of all though is the way in which wanikani organizes the levels.
Edit: mind you, I was only studying the meanings and when I say that it took an extra month of reviews to recall them fairly easily I am still excluding the readings. The whole thing was pretty intense since I was spending 4-5 hours a day doing reviews and I would not do it again if I had to learn more kanji, I was simply fed up with the stupidity of wanikani and not being able to learn new words when I saw them because I lacked the kanji knowledge.
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Keep in mind that the japanese learn how to write them as well so there’s not really a fair comparison…
Ah, I see now I missed the part about you only doing the meanings.
So you basically did a homemade version of Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji, but with fewer kanji? If that’s the case you maybe should have just bought and followed his books, then you would have been primed and ready to learn the readings right after learning the meanings.
Other people may have a different opinion but I don’t think that spending time learning the readings is worth it. There are way too many exceptions to treat kanji like letters, if you find a new word made of three kanji and you know all their individual readings then there’s still a good chance you will mess up the word reading, so why bother learning the readings in the first place?
I’m really puzzled where this is coming from. Are you implying that I’ve expressed that opinion in this thread?
I would think that if you’ve learned 1700+ kanji that you would understand what I mean when I say “learn the readings”. I’m not saying to learn a kunyomi reading and stop there, that should be obvious to you.
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All good points, although I don’t think I’d ever recommend WK to a friend, even (especially?) for identifying components. IMO they aggressively sacrifice memory of useful components for their other goals:
- forcing the learner to remember WK names of not-components-at-all, with no way to skip/blacklist them
- bundling together different and unrelated components, without pointing out the distinction
- renaming recognized components to unrelated WK names
And don’t get me started on excessively long mnemonics full of red herrings and …ermm… let’s call them specific subculture references.
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I did wanikani before, but I found it tedious because you learn like 20-40 kanji, which is an okay speed, but you have to learn like 100 vocabulary, which is annoying. I know its to help you understand the kanji, but its too much. At this point, i am starting to increase my vocabulary. i used to do 20 but as i dont have my kanji anki deck anymore, i might do 30-40 a day My retention rate is okay around 64-70 percent Should I continue on the path or still do kanji? I am doing kaishi 1.5k deck and am like 400 words in
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I got WaniKani burnout around level 15… Using WK was my first step after learning kana. I think it was a great way to start learning vocabulary in a way that made sense (tied to kanji, that had meaning, and practicing their pronunciation). It made my jump to Bunpro feel really easy since I already knew most of the vocab used to form phrases for N5 content and most of the kanji that I had learned really stuck. So I too vouch for it!
I tried using some Anki decks for kanji before that, and it was way faster than WK. But I think that taking the time with WK makes kanji much more memorable and it really helps to tie them to vocab.
At one point I dramatically reduced my focus on WK as it felt that just learning kanji wasn’t taking me anywhere (of course). But I’ve kept up with my WK reviews, and I am slowly ramping up my kanji lessons again. I feel the most progress by working on Bunpro right now, so I am not focusing on kanji much. I hope that I can learn it side-by-side with “naturally acquired” kanji-containing vocab.
Not sure when you tried it, but they recently changed their website lessons algorithm to start giving you vocab for the level before you finish all of the kanji.
Now you normally get ~4 vocab for 1 kanji in a standard batch of lessons.
I also felt a bit unmotivated to go through the ~100 vocabulary before I could unlock new kanji, but I think their new system makes things feel more natural and you also start using the kanji for vocab earlier than in the past (when you would learn all kanji before any vocab)
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I agree about them forcing you to learn made up kanji components.
I think it is useful when learning the kanji, but to get the “fake” component wrong and have it keep coming up in reviews when I already know the real kanji that use it is indeed very annoying and sometimes confusing. I wish they were more forgiving like Bunpro, at least for the WK radicals.
I still get “viking” and “gladiator” radicals wrong all the time
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I would argue that both of those examples are actually clear examples where knowing the individual kanji helps greatly in understanding the words themselves.
言葉 is literally saying the things at the tips of the language tree. As if the language is the tree, then words are the leaves. It is an adjective noun relationship, language leaves.
生産 likewise is a just that. Life(raw ingredient) & to give birth. Bringing things into creation. I.e. Manufacturing or producing things. Sure it loses the general connotation of living things. But 生 has a nonliving connotation of raw ingredients. So it is an object verb relationship of birthing things from raw ingredients.
Here is a good video that explains the relationships of two kanji words. Which I agree is probably the most efficient way to familiarize yourself with kanji holistically.
The two good keys of RTK are this. One you create a slot in your English mind to place the Kanji as scaffolding to learning Japanese. Second you learn how to decompose kanji and learn to see them. You don’t learn how to read them. You use vocab for that.
so rtk is the best possible option for me?
The most efficient way of learning kanji is probably an anki radicals deck followed by an anki RRTK deck
If you put the effort in you can probably, bar a handful of leaches, learn all of the official kanji in 3-4 months. At this point there will probably only be one or two kanji per page that you don’t recognise…
Recognising kanji does help learn words, both as meaning elements, and as components in mnemonics. But just as in English you don’t sound a word out to read it, the end goal is to recognise the word not the kanji, and there is an opportunity cost.
So… Say in January you spent 4 months learning radicals & kanji, and then spent the rest of the year learning words, either by reading or by SRS. If you could compare yourself to another version of yourself who had just learned words with that time instead, they would probably know more.
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I also have this app! I bought mine for like $3 but it was 10 years ago. Anyway, it was great from the very beginning but adding the SRS feature brought the app to the completely next level 
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That book series is a polarizing topic. Some people love it, others (like me) don’t like it at all. If you’re leaning towards trying it I’d still encourage you to do so though. It might be the perfect resource for your individual learning style.
But I’d also really recommend you google something like “remembering the kanji errors” and read the articles / discussions before starting to use the books. Because there are several errors in the books that could steer you wrong if you’re unaware of them.