Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

I love WaniKani. It takes a very specific problem, the need for English speakers to memorize kanji as part of learning Japanese, and it makes an entire product out of it. Sure, you can do the same thing yourself using Anki, but they add in a bunch of convenience layers. They think out memorable and ridiculous mnemonics for each character and each bit of vocabulary. They organize it as a big DAG of dependencies for what you learn that's loosely based around the order you'd learn it in school, but adjusted for adults. They put it all behind a really nice website that understands that most of their users just have an American keyboard and want to write things with English letters. There's a big community, regular "you're doing it!" positive update emails, and more. Really great example of taking one incredibly specific problem and just knocking it out of the park.

If I had one complaint, it's that people do frequently fall off the wagon, and once you do, Wanikani can make getting back on the wagon really intimidating. "Oh, you've been gone for three weeks? No problem, no problem, welcome back, let's se....you have 2,473 terms to review today." I recognize that you don't HAVE to do all of those thousands of things right away, but some sort of "I'd like to ramp back up slowly, please make the large scary number go away" button would be really, really great.

I fell off the WaniKani wagon pretty hard. Made it to level 28 (out of 60) going about as fast as it'll let you then took a break during a trip to Japan, of all places. Long story short, almost three years later my review queue still contains 2140 items.

However, I don't think falling off the wagon ended up being a bad thing for me really. I was very early on in my Japanese learning journey when I started, and at level 28 I was far better at kanji recognition than I was at any other relevant language skill—I couldn't really speak or understand anything yet I was learning how to read "攻撃". Stopping WaniKani then let me focus more on listening practice and led to my skills balancing out a bit.

Overall I believe WaniKani is a great tool, and well worth the money. But it covers just a small slice of what it takes to learn Japanese.

As a coda, I'm only now getting back into dedicated Kanji study again. However this time I'm following the book "Kanji in Context"[1] and using Anki to ensure recall. From a slightly more advanced perspective, it's all the more rewarding when you get to a character you know you've seen many times but never really got to know explicitly.

[1]: https://www.iucjapan.org/html/text_e.html

Isn’t it annoying to get all new mnemonics? And since you have to start over regardless why didn’t you start all over on wanikani?

> at level 28 I was far better at kanji recognition than I was at any other relevant language skill

Ironically that is what RTK recommends students. Learn all the meaning and readings of kanji and then start learning the language.

Kanji in Context targets intermediate/advanced students that already know at least a few hundred kanji, and it doesn't provide mnemonics or radicals or anything. It's fundamentally just a list of words to memorize, which through doing so teaches you the most common/jōyō readings. There's a bit more to it than that with the workbooks, etc. but overall it's much more streamlined that WaniKani.

I only tried WK briefly, but I found it mystifying - the whole system where reading a word gets decomposed into a multi-step process (kanji -> radicals -> names for radicals -> mnemonic linking radical names into character meaning -> character meanings -> word meaning).

I mean - if one's goal is to reach fluency, then eventually one will need to discard all those intermediate steps, right? But the app didn't feel to me like it was headed in that direction. To be honest it felt less like an app for memorizing Japanese words, and more like an app for memorizing radical names and mnemonics linking those names to character meanings (i.e. stuff that the WK authors made up). I am way off?

The radicals and mnemonics are useful for bridging the gap between learning a word and truly acquiring it. Think of it like learning how to read in English: when starting out you have to sound out every letter, recall the weird rules about how sometimes "ough" can make an "oo" sound (or was it an "off" sound?), use your finger so you don't loose your place etc. But eventually with enough repetition your brain sees the jumble of letters that is the word "throughout" and immediately knows what it says.

Everything that WaniKani does is just to help you get from seeing "日本語" and it meaning absolutely nothing to you, to seeing it and immediately knowing what it means. The radicals and mnemonics are all secondary, and don't need to be remembered.

When you think about how you read English text, or text in any language really, you don't decompose all that much during normal reading. For example, if you look at the word "house", you don't read it like "H-O-U-S-E-house" like a child learning to read would, because you have learned to recognize "house" immediately.

But even then, it's still useful to learn how the different bits and pieces of language fit together (etymology, root words, and such) in order to parse new words that you encounter for the first time. Even if you have never encountered the word "quizzacious" before, you can see the root word "quiz" and can make an educated guess about its meaning.

That's true for English roots, but for the WK radical names we're talking about here, many of them are just arbitrarily chosen words. E.g. they call 歹 "yakuza" and 各 "kiss", etc. There's not necessarily any connection between the mnemonic words and the radicals they represent.

(And even for the remaining cases, a kanji's radicals don't generally tell you much about the character's meaning the way English roots do. At least not outside of a few cases, like 言 or 魚, which don't need to be memorized because the radicals are already basic kanji.)

It would be helpful if the mnemonics for the radicals were just the meanings of the kanji. The other steps can't really be fixed.

Learning the radicals is one of the most useful things you can do when learning kanji. With just knowing the radicals, you can sometimes at least know what a kanji represents, even if you've never seen the kanji. For instance, if a kanji has a fish radical in it, it's very likely a kanji for a fish. If there's a clam radical, it could be a clam, or related to money. If there's an animal radical, it's very likely an animal kanji.

Similarly, knowing the individual kanji and readings helps learning combination words, and guess at how to read them, when can be helpful sometimes when a word is written in kanji, when it's usually not. You know the word, and one of the kanji in the word and can use the radicals to guess the readings and know the meanings and realize the word.

> "Oh, you've been gone for three weeks? No problem, no problem, welcome back, let's se....you have 2,473 terms to review today."

My wife has been using WaniKani for a few years, and she uses Account => Vacation mode for planned time away from it. It's essentially a pause feature for reviews (but not for your subscription).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com