A year ago, after seeing a lot of posts about whether Wanikani is worth it or not, [I wrote a post regarding my journey learning japanese and...
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The original was posted on /r/learnjapanese by /u/realgoodkind on 2024-12-19 19:38:06+00:00.

A year ago, after seeing a lot of posts about whether Wanikani is worth it or not, I wrote a post regarding my journey learning japanese and reaching level 60 in WK. In that post I mentioned how my experience was learning the language using Wanikani as a Kanji learning App, what other tools I used, and what my goals were. To summarise that post:

  • Personal Goal: Reading books
  • Apps used and experience using them:
    • Wanikani: Highly recommend it, but use Anki Mode (through 3rd party tools)
    • Anki: Was pretty useful, I still use it
    • Jalup / Nihongo Lessons: I did around 3000 cards in total, I’m still not sure how effective that was. It did help me get pretty good at Katakana though
    • Bunpro: Not a fan, too overwhelming. I did Tae Kim instead, and Cure Dolly
    • Ringotan: Was a cute app to learn writing Kanji, I did around 300 characters
  • I did around 30 minutes to 2 hours per day just grinding SRS, and didn’t use any textbooks

I also posted a level 60 celebration post on the Wanikani forums

In this post I’ll talk about how I continued learning the language over the past year, what mistakes I did, what tools I used, and what I learned. You can jump around the sections to find what sounds interesting for you, or you can read the whole thing. In the end I also have a Q&A section for some general stuff as well that you can check.

Reading Books: A Bad Start

My goal over the last year was to read books, specifically “The City and Its Uncertain Walls“ by Haruki Murakami. I took it as a challenge to read the book before the english release comes out. I knew it wasn’t an easy task, but I wanted to have a clear goal so that I can have a clear road and a destination.

As the year began, I slowly started getting into reading books. I had some novels I ordered last year, Murakami’s book and some Bleach Light Novels. The first novel I read was "BLEACH: Spirits are Forever With You”, and started with its first volume. I read it physically, and it was tough. There were a lot of words that I didn’t know and a lot of grammatical constructs that made the sentences incomprehensible. I pushed through and tried mining the words using the Nihongo Dictionary on iOS, and reviewed them, but somehow it didn’t feel like I was learning anything. As for the book, I think I understood around 40% of it, I got the gist of it, and I needed to read a summary alongside it to comprehend the story. But it didn’t feel as a disappointment, especially because I liked the story. It’s a book I wanted to read.

The next book I tried reading was one that many recommended as a beginner book, “Kiki’s Delivery Service“. And it was much worse. It still is the toughest book I’ve read so far. It used a lot of hiragana and lots and lots of onomatopoeia. I did finish it, but it was a struggle and it was not fun. My comprehension was around 20-30%, and I don’t remember much from it.

For each of these books, it took me around a month. It was a very draining process, and SRS was not really helping much. Apparently my strategy wasn’t working, and I had a lot of stress in my life so I took a break from learning japanese.

Reading What I Want to Read

While reading Kiki I had very low motivation to continue reading, so I slowly stopped doing Wanikani, SRS and any japanese at all. It wasn’t fun, it was a children’s book that I didn’t care about, it was just something that someone recommended and I followed what that someone did. I also tried reading other kid’s light novels, like Crayon Shin-Chan (lots of butt jokes), but i couldn’t really find anything interesting in them, even if I understood them and their butt jokes better.

Since I was really not enjoying Kiki, I decided to start another Bleach novel, “Letters from the Other Side”, a summary the first arc of the manga. I knew the original Manga story, so I was able get the gist and compare with the manga, but I noticed it’s fun.

After that I started trying to only read the stuff that I wanted to read, not what others recommended. I continued reading Bleach Light Novels, some Sakamoto Days LN, and some manga volumes, and I was noticing some improvement, and most importantly I was having fun.

Ttsu Reader / Immersion Reader

One thing that added to the fun was a tool a friend recommended called Ttsu Reader. I knew about it from before, it’s a web tool you open in the browser, that has a yomitan integration. Still, a web tool, very bothersome…

… until I learned that there’s a wrapper app for it called Immersion Reader (which I realised also exists on Android). In it you can use add books, install yomitan to lookup and mark words you want to learn, and all the words you marked are saved and can be exported as an Anki Deck. Its greatest feature.

After that Immersion Reader and Anki were the only tools I was using. If I’m reading something physical I would use Nihongo Dictionary, but without the SRS functionality.

Main Goal Reached, Slowly

After reading a couple of books on Immersion Reader, I thought that maybe I can start reading the book I wanted to read since I started learning japanese 2.5 years ago. Murakami’s new book.

Because at that point I already read around 3-4 books, I gathered a lot of grammatical constructs and vocabulary, and all of them helped me, with Immersion Reader, to ease into the book. I was trying to read 1% a day, with some breaks in between and a grind near the end. It took 4 months.

According Immersion Reader, in the first 50-60%, I mined around 1400 words, before I stopped mining and started just reading. My reading speed overall was 125 characters per minute. An average japanese person reads at a 400-600 characters/m so I still have a long way to go, but doing a bit every day helped me reach the goal.

My comprehension here was higher because I was looking up more in Immersion Reader. Murakami also repeats a lot of dialogue in his books so it was helpful, even if he writes in hiragana a lot.

Reading, A Year Later: How far have I reached?

In the last months I’ve been noticing that my comrehension has improved a lot. After finishing Murakami’s book I started using a japanese amazon account to buy kindle books and manga. I can understand a good chunk of the dialogue, sometimes I have to OCR using Nihongo Dictionary, and I’m thinking about going back to Immersion Reader. But overall I’m more comfortable with reading manga, novels and light novels than a year ago. I can also open a physical book and comrehend a good chunk of what’s written.

It’s still not easy or fluid as reading in English for example, but compared to a year ago, there’s definitely a huge improvement, and there’s still a long way to go.

Should you use a Kanji Learning tool? Or just learn vocab?

Over the last couple months I saw a lot of people who’re advocating for learning Kanji through context and through vocabulary ONLY. In my opinion those people are speaking from a point of view where they’re already comfortable with Kanji, but when I remember how it was when I started learning Japanese, Kanji were just scribbles on paper that I couldn’t distinguish and learn. It was impossible to learn kanji through seeing them in words.

When you learn Kanji separately, you understand a lot of nuances and can break up a kanji sometimes even if you don’t know it. A kanji with the hand radical on its left, has something to do with hands. Kanjis with a moon / flesh is most likely a body part, kanjis with foot are about movement… and so on.

The kanji world is very complicated, and it being broken down to its basic elements and learning it over a couple of years was a huge benefit that I can feel whenever I’m reading nowadays, especially when encountering new kanjis I never saw before.

Sometimes I think of Japanese as a building in Lego: You start by learning the most basic building blocks, radicals, then learn them by combining them to build Kanjis, and then learn those kanjis by building vocabulary, and to learn vocabulary, you have to learn them as part of sentences. You start with smaller building blocks, then slowly put them together to build a sentence or a paragraph, and in each step, you’re learning the previous part.

To learn kanji, you have to learn them in context. In a way, the people who say you have to learn kanji through vocab are correct, you should do that. But you should also learn them individually. Learn kanji separately and within vocab, and that’s why Wanikani was very helpful, because it did both and more.

I had my criticisms for Wanikani that I think I mentioned in my previous post, and in my summary above shortly, but it’s still among the better tools out there to learn such a complicated system. Japanese is a very complicated langauge and you should get into it with that mind, and learn each parts on its own, all at the same time. It requires a lot of time and structured learning.

My weak points, and how they’re not a bad thing ================…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1hi14j5/one_year_after_finishing_wanikani_my_japanese/