I just started learning Japanese recently and I’m at the point where I should start learning kanji. I am currently trying out WaniKani and it seems great but expensive since I’m in a tight spot financially. I have also heard a lot about anki but it seems a bit overwhelming to set up and I have no idea what decks are good.
Is WaniKani worth the money or is finding a good deck for anki just as good? Does anyone have recommendations for anki decks that can teach me the same things as WaniKani?
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Kanshudo is a cheaper alternative to Wanikani. It’s $6 a month and you can get like a month or two free from gaining enough points from enough study or doing their feedback form. You could try that one. I have a friend who used the wanikani anki deck for a while but got bored, then moved to Kanshudo.
While WaniKani advertises that it teaches you to read 2000 Kanji within 2 years, you could learn to read + write them with way less time investment (~20 minutes daily) through Anki by learning to write 3 new Kanji a day. For free.
Anki is one of those things where if someone tells you how to use it, there’s going to be someone else jumping into the conversation to tell you that person is wrong. You just have to use it a while and figure out what works for you. There’s a lot of different ways to use and configure it.
As for decks Core2K and Tango N5 are probably gonna be the most commonly recommended at beginner level. Between the two I prefer the latter since it’s in a sentence format so you pick up grammar in addition to vocabulary. However sentences cards are slower to do than word cards so over time it can be very easy to get overwhelmed by reviews if you don’t pace yourself
I personally prefer Anki. There’s no pressure to “get my money’s worth” out of it. It has really worked for learning words and their meanings.
Do note there’s a big caveat to using flashcards to learn a language though: they’re great for developing comprehension, but they often fail to teach you how words are used. Some words are self-explanatory and can be deduced on the spot, but in other cases you need to go out of your way to learn the differences between words with similar meanings (測る, 計る, 量る, 測定, etc. for measurement).
Try the free options available to you first, including the first three levels of WK. When January 2023 rolls around, take stock of your situation, and consider whether or not WK would be worth it for a lifetime account. It will likely be on sale for the new year at 200 USD instead of 300. I’m happy I went for it. It’s been better for me than any other method.
I’ve used both, I made far more progress with Wanikani than Anki – I learned more in 6 months with WK than in 2 years with Anki. I found the fact that I was paying for WK was a motivator to stick with it for longer and more consistently. That it was web-based and accessible across all my devices made it easier to use too. I had some issues with how it taught individual radicals and kanji, but there are user scripts to work around that. It’s really a preference thing though.
Wanikani does have the first few levels free, and a monthly payment option that you can cancel at any time, so you could try it for both free and a small sum to see if it works for you. You can also see if a Wanikani-inspired deck in Anki works for you, it didn’t for me, but once again, your mileage may vary.
Just use whatever clicks for you, because in language learning, consistency is king. So use the one you’ll be most comfortable with using consistently.
Personally, I’ve tried to hop on Anki 3 or 4 different times now, but every time I always get “lost” in what’s “best;” do I use someone’s premade deck, or make my own? Can I improve the SRS settings to make it more efficient? How should I format my answers? No matter what I try, I always get a nagging feeling that it’s somehow “not good enough,” or could be better, or I burn out from having to make all my own cards, etc.
So, Wanikani really clicked with me. I loved the fact that it’s an entirely complete, curated and maintained platform where all I had to do was show up consistently for long enough and boom, I became literate in Japanese without any of the overhead maintenance burdening me like it did every time I tried Anki. My kanji literacy is very strong now, and it’s all thanks to WK. Unknown kanji have become rare enough that it feels “easy” to pick up new ones when I see them.
I really enjoy the jp1k deck by Refold. It’s a onetime purchase for $19, and I think it’s totally worth it. It’s the only deck that really works for me at least. I’ve tried Tango and Core decks, but something just doesn’t click for me when using them.
The deck is made up by the 1000 most commonly used words in anime, if I’m not mistaken.
[https://refold.la/japanese/deck/](https://refold.la/japanese/deck/)
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EDIT: I use it in Anki. You can also get it and use in Quantized: https://quantized.co/