It took me way too long (lots of extended breaks due to burnout), but here are my thoughts on it as a resource.
If you want something that does all the thinking for you (this isn't meant to sound judgy, I think that's actually super valid) in terms of it giving you a reasonable order to study kanji and it feeding you useful vocab that uses only kanji you know, it might be worth it.
And I like that it gives the most common one or two readings to learn for each kanji. A lot of people seem to do okay learning just an English keyword and no readings, but I think learning a reading with them is incredibly helpful.
But if I were starting my kanji journey right now, I wouldn't choose it again (and I only kept going with it because I had a lifetime subscription). I don't like not being able to choose the pace, and quite frankly, I think there's something to blasting through all the jōyō kanji as fast as possible to get them into your short term memory right away while you're still in the N5ish level of learning, and then continuing to study them (with vocab to reinforce them). I think that would have made my studying go a lot more smoothly, personally.
I also had to use a third party app to heavily customize my experience with WaniKani in order to motivate myself to get through those last 20 or so levels, which I think speaks to the weaknesses of the service.
At the end of the day, it's expensive and slow compared to other options. Jpdb has better keywords, Anki with FSRS enabled has much more effective SRS, Kanji Study by Chase Colburn is a one time purchase rather than a years long subscription, MaruMori (which teaches kanji and vocab the same way WK does) is similar in cost to WK while also teaching grammar (spectacularly) and providing reading exercises. WaniKani is fine, and it works, but its age is showing. It's not even close to being the best kanji learning resource anymore, and I can't in good conscience recommend it when all those other resources exist and do the job better.
by the_other_jojo
10 comments
How long have you been learning? Would you recommend quitting it then? I’m at like lvl 7
I feel you, and I feel the same about it. I’ve loved WK (and especially their forums) dearly when I used it, but there are better resources around these days. For me the main “annoyance” with WK has always been the time gating. Thanks for sharing your experience (and congrats on completing all 60 levels 🙂 a great accomplishment either way!)
Congratulations for finishing wanikani that’s actually a huge achievement:) ironically I just cancelled my subscription yesterday because I feel wanikani way of forcing you to type kanji daily is unpleasant and tiresome process , I think I will stick to anki and some immersion resources like vedio games and manga .
I bought a lifetime subscription in 2018, had got up to level 45 when I quit it in January 2023, (along with all my other SRS as I wanted to just focus on enjoying Japanese for a bit). Picked it up again this year when I decided I wanted to take N2 next summer, re-started it from scratch and I’m currently speed running it with the intention of finishing in a year. Coming back to it as an intermediate learner I’m painfully aware of all the things it doesn’t teach you and I’ve realised that where there are gaps in my kanji knowledge it’s mostly due to learning from wanikani. The flip-flopping back and forth between the onyomi and kunyomi is starting to really annoy me. For some kanji, like 寝, it basically just ignores the on reading entirely. Also constantly moving the kanji up and down levels just suggests that their system isn’t as foolproof as they claim it is. I’ve been using kanji study app as well and since it introduced SRS that would now be my number one recommendation.
As someone with a lifetime subscription that abandoned Wanikani around level 14, I pretty much agree. It helped me get started with kanji and get enough confidence to dive into manga, and then sentence mining _completely_ blew it out of the water in terms of effectiveness.
I don’t remember where I read it but someone said “You don’t need to learn kanji, you need to learn _words_, and you’ll learn kanji as a side effect.” And that’s been so massively true for me.
I have Lifetime, and I quit around level 40 something. My main complaint is that the spoonfeeding gets annoying at higher levels, you can’t choose the kanji that are important to you, you can’t choose the vocab that you have read elsewhere, and the kanji get more complicated, the mnemonics aren’t working so well anymore.
Wanikani helped me tremendously to get my kanji to a high level so that I barely need to learn new ones anymore (I do about 2 new ones a day). But it made me neglect other things.
With the hindsight, I would definitely focus more on vocab (I don’t use Anki but you can use that or I recommend Renshuu which also has an import feature, and user-made mnemonics and you can do stuff like create a deck with JLPT/core vocab from your known kanji. And it is free).
I should have also started reading earlier though I have to say when I was like level 20 it was still too overwhelming (maybe because I was missing the grammar and vocab).
So yeah my general take away is, it’s a great resource especially at the lower levels but it gets a bit stale after a while and definitely complement it with lots of other study. Nowadays, my vocab plus kanji study is 30 min max so that I concentrate on other stuff.
In terms of grammar do you think MaruMori is better than Bunpro?
I feel the same way after “finishing” the Heisig method using Anki. Glad I did it, wouldn’t do it again.
I really like the idea of studying primarily kanji and a couple readings with them but Kanji Study does this pretty well. You can either favorite your preferred readings or send them to AnkiDroid. It does take a bit more effort but it works pretty well.
I like this approach because if you already recognize the words then you can easily add 5+ words since you only need to memorize how you write them whereas if it’s entirely new then you can limit yourself to 1-2. You can also handpick which words you want to learn for the kanji depending on your interests.
Mining entirely for yourself might be better but so far I find that really complicated to do. (My main reading material is only available in picture or DRM protected format so automatic mining tools don’t really work. Though even if they did, I am not sure I’d like to interrupt my reading to mine.)
It works for me particularly well since I started using these modern tools way too late so I already recognized quite a few kanji and knew most of the example words’ meaning and usage so I don’t really need context clues for my kanji study.
Personally I credit WaniKani with teaching me to read Japanese, and that “does all the thinking for you” part is precisely why. If I had to make my own Anki cards and come up with mnemonics I never would’ve gotten there lol (and trust me, I tried.)
That said, I finished it (all 60 levels) something like 6-7 years ago, and those other resources didn’t exist back then. MaruMori in particular looks very promising.