Hello, I’ve been learning Japanese for 3 months and currently on chapter 7 of Genki 1. I’ve been using only Genki so far to learn, and recently I’ve started to wonder if it would be better to just drop learning the vocab and kanji that is taught in the book and just use Anki/WaniKani/anything more efficient to grind vocab and just use the book to learn grammar. Learning grammar + vocab + kanji with Genki has been somewhat stressful for me as I’ve found it makes my learning slower, since I take too long to memorize the kanji from the back of the book and the vocabulary list without context. Meanwhile with grammar I find it less time consuming and simpler and if I don’t understand something I just complement it with DOJG and other resources
has this worked for anyone else? should I change my approach?
also would anki or wanikani be better to learn kanji? i’ve got no issues with paying, I just wanna use the most efficient method.
3 comments
I did/doing it this way and quite liked it. Basically I used anki to run through vocab for JLPT N5 for a few months. Then when I got to learning grammar it was easier as I just concentrate on putting words together and creating sentences. There will be a few words you’ll likely miss but they’re much easier to learn as its just a few.
I liked WaniKani for Kanji, but learning for the JLPT N5 I don’t have too much trouble with the kanji using Anki only. You’ll learn a lot more from WaniKani but Anki you’ll only need the ones you need (like 100 for JLPTN5 and most are the numbers and weeks and obvious ones).
Learning vocab first is also helpful if you work full time (like me) as you just have to ensure you do your anki every day and then it means you’re learning towards your goal. So you can spend time on grammer when you actually have more free time.
Also personal opinion, it sounds like you’re spending a lot of time on vocab/Kanji in Genki? If you want to continue doing both, I’d recommend just sticking that vocab into Anki, get a cursory learning of the words, but don’t spend too much time memorising it, just let Anki do its thing. Otherwise you’ll spend a week learning 15 words well instead of 50 words fairly good. As those words will come up again in the future anyway and you’ll remember them well at some point anyway.
Overall I liked it but one of the things I didn’t like about genki was that it didn’t even use so much of the vocab that it just had lists for.
Like all of these words or phrases out of context. Tobira doesn’t do this at all. It seems to use 100% of the words it gives you. So you have that to look forward to.
If you’re just using Genki for the grammar, I’d highly recommend using **Japanese the Manga Way** instead. It’s much more readable and usefully detailed imo, since it focuses *only* on grammar. I’ve been using it for grammar and srs for vocab and it’s been working great for me