As title, I know it’s a pretty basilar question but I’m feeling overwhelmed by the amount of sources there are.
I’m studying genki and I’m loving it, but for the kanji part what would you suggest to me? I tried wanikani, I learned a lot with just level 3 but genki + wanikani require tons of time to do at the same time… And unfortunately im working. I have bought a book for kanji called kanji challenge n5 but I don’t want to spend time in something when I could have spent it in something more efficient.
What do you think about kanji? Wanikani or a book?
Thank you!
7 comments
I am also studying with Genki, Anki and Wanikani.
Wanikani can get overwhelming if you do to many lessons per day. I work fulltime, so I usually do one per day and 3x the reviews which is slow but steady for me.
The answer to your question depends a bit on your learning goals. Do you want to be able to just read Kanji, write them or learn a lot of vocab and meanings? Wanikani is great for learning vocabulary in addition to the kanji meanings but you can’t pick and choose what to learn.
If you just want to practice the Kanji from Genki then an Anki deck would be best (and cheapest) or the Kanji Look and Learn Series.
Any system has its own strengths and weaknesses:
Genki provides 317 kanji in its two volumes. There’s also the Kanji Look & Learn books by the same authors which gives and additional 200 or so kanji (512 characters total). It’s not fully integrated into Genki. In other words, a character introduced in a certain chapter of Genki doesn’t necessarily appear in the same chapter in KLL.
Wanikani, AFAIK, follows it’s own progression. If you’re doing both you may wind up studying more or less advanced kanji which may or may not synch with Genki in a way which makes them relevant and useful.
My personal recommendations, Basic Kanji 1 and 2 and intermediate Kanji 1 and 2, but also don’t follow any particular textbook series.
If we’re looking for the most effective method, studying kanji from the Genki textbook itself is more likely to have an integrated system for learning.
Next best might be Genki + KLL as it keeps pace pretty well. Just disregard the kanji each lesson and rely on KLL. Things might be slightly off kilter to start, but they’ll catch up. And you’ll have the vocabulary for each chapter available anyway.
Third would be using another non-Genki product/system.
I have not used the former, but am using the latter.
I find the wanikani works very well. I was impressed that after having a massive work load increase at my job, and abandoning it for about 2 months, when I came back I had retained most of the Kanji I had learned through it.
I will happily sing its praises. I have been combining it eith duolingo to good effect. In a bit under 2 years I can read quite a bit of text, and I can normally work out what is going on in a conversation of I pay close attention.
I think the main drawback to WK is just how intense the workload gets like you said, especially down the road, and if you don’t adhere to its intense schedule and curriculum, it feels like you’re being punished with how fast things just snowball out of control. That being said, after trying many Kanji resources, for me it is remarkable how efficiently WK has made me learn Kanji. The beginning 5/6 levels feel slow because of the way it’s structured, but that slowness quickly dissipates and my retention rate was MUCH higher than it was before, so I like to recommend it if a person has the time available to do it or if they can force a way to make time for it.
Note: I do put all of WKs stuff into Anki as well, so that likely has some impact on retention, however I used Anki with the other resources as well so I feel it’s a valid comparison.
Genki is much more of a complete resource. Wanikani can be thought of as a supplement
I’ve historically been very bad about ignoring my wanikani reviews when I get busy. I made it a goal recently to be more consistent with wanikani though and I think I found a system to keep things manageable.
First I do all my reviews. If I have more than ~120 reviews, then I only do 100 a day. If I don’t finish all my reviews, I don’t do lessons. If my reviews are finished, I check how many apprentice cards I have. I make sure to always keep my apprentice cards under 100. If I have under 90 apprentice cards, I do 10 lessons. I never do more than 10 lessons a day.
Using this approach I’ve been able to stay on the wanikani wagon for about 3 months now, which is pretty good. I usually have under 120 reviews per day (some days it’s only like 50) and I can usually knock out my daily reviews in about 20 minutes
I’ve been using Genki and Wanikani for 6 months and also have an instructor via Italki. I have to say that I like Wanikani a lot, especially in that you learn *a lot* of vocabulary as well, not just the Kanji. However it’s big weakness is that it’s designed to learn to read kanji, not to reproduce the words you learn from English. In other words I can’t tell you the number of times I needed to say or write something and I KNOW the kanji, but since I’m not seeing it, I can’t bring the word or kanji to mind. Anki allows you to go both directions (though I actually hate Anki for it’s complex user interface). You can also use Kaniwani or Kamesame at the same time to go both ways. Personally if I did it again, I’d use Wanikani and Kamesame (the latter is free) at the same time and force myself to slow WAY down and work much harder on grammar and Japanese production. (Of course my goal is to speak and understand spoken Japanese. I know a lot of you are in it to read manga….)