Wanikani

9 comments

1. There’s no skipping as far as I know. I also started late and having to learn vocab like “ホテル” and “アメリカ人”` and all the basic kanji was absolutely a chore. Now Im at level 9 and while its still lots of kanji I’d already learned, I am starting to see new vocab and I can use their mnemonics and radicals to help remember and distinguish kanji much better. A pro tip, for the stuff you already know, you can add your own synonym, so I just add the synonym “1” to easy stuff. It speeds up the process a lot. 

2. The first few levels of Wanikani are free; the paid subscription gives you access to the rest.

   If you have studied kanji elsewhere, it is extremely unlikely that the order of learning in Wanikani will match up with what you have done.

   But as a direct answer to your question, no there is no way to force-‘burn’ kanji (or components or vocab) to treat them as ‘known’. You just have to keep blasting through the ones you know.

3. I highly recommend finding the Anki deck version of Wanikani for free online. Wanikani ultimate 3: Tokyo drift

4. Imo it sounds like what you want is MaruMori.io, which has the srs and mnemonic system that Wanikani does but lets you customize your experience and skip things you already know.

   MaruMori lets you set what number of kanji and vocab you want to learn every day, what N level you want (currently they’re releasing N3 content and have N5 and N4 content already out), and can mark vocab and kanji as learned so it won’t show up anymore.

   The other difference between MaruMori and Wanikani is that MaruMori has grammar while Wanikani doesn’t.

5. I did all 60 levels of it and think it worked pretty well! I fell off for a couple of years and didn’t study much aside from what I just passively absorbed, but I retained it pretty well, I think. Can still read a significant amount of Japanese I come across in the wild. It’s only advanced kanji and difficult words that escape me.

   A while back I took them up on a special deal for a lifetime membership if you’d gotten to level 60, and now I’m going back and finding it really useful as a review tool while I try to get myself back to where I used to be.

   I definitely don’t think there’s a way to force burn things you already know. You can reset kanji you want to un-burn, but you can’t just force burn your way through levels. If you’re already advanced enough that this is a big problem beyond level 10 or so, then you might be too advanced to get that much out of it.

   Or you could just take them as freebies until you get to WK a level that corresponds to your level of expertise? Your choice. If you do all your reviews as soon as they become available, a level only takes about a week to get through. Was perfect for somebody coming up starting from scratch, but maybe that won’t do for someone who already knows a lot.

6. It’s been a few years since I used it, but it’s worth it, imo.

   I wouldn’t even skip the levels you are familiar with. Six isn’t that many. Just stick to the process because it works pretty well.

   Anki decks never worked for me because I took too many liberties with the self-marking system. Studying a language is obviously quite time consuming, so I didn’t want to redo things that only momentarily slipped my mind. This was not an ideal way to learn.

7. There’s wanikani deck available for Anki.

8. I think your question has been answered by others.

   For anyone who doesn’t know though, a lifetime subscription usually goes down to $200 around Christmas/New Years. It’s a pretty decent deal if you’re anything like me and stopped learning for a year or two and wanted to get back into it later. It’s just always there when I need it without having to cancel or resubscribe.

9. Best tool I have for keeping me learning kanji and new vocab. That being said if you already have 6 levels of proficiency and study (im assuming that’s C2), the pros of using a substitute deck on anki where you can mark things as known, likely outweighs the simplicity of the actual product.