6 ms·

WaniKani, a Kanji Learning Application

79 points by notpushkin 4y ago

kensai 4y ago
I would like to see an efficiency comparison of similar applications, because I have come across several in the past. Also for Chinese or Korean.
- zaik 4y ago
  Do you have to learn kanji for Korean? If I remember correctly, Hangul is pretty straightforward and does not require you to memorize hundreds of characters.
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure Korean doesn't use kanji at all, no.
    - pilaf 4y ago
      While it's true modern-day South Koreans don't use Chinese characters (hanja [1]) at all in their day-to-day life, there are still a few places where they show up, as it was the most common writing system in Korean up to the late 19th century. Most notably, most Korean names can be written in hanja and almost all Koreans know how to write their own name that way at least. South Korean kids also study hanja at high school to some extent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
  - creakingstairs 4y ago
    You don’t _need_ it but I think it’s nice to know kanji (or hanja as we say in Korean) to understand deeper cultural meanings in the language. To give an example, I’ve just watched episode 12 of “Strange attorney Woo”, and one of the character talks about the two different hanja that make up 사 in 변호사 and 검사. A lot of the older generations still use this kind of comparison to make a point about nuance/history of a word. But if you talk to younger generations, they talk predominantly in internet slangs and have no clues about hanja.
    - iopq 4y ago
      That would be 病護士 and 檢査 I guess
      - creakingstairs 4y ago
        검사 is 檢事. 検査 has the same pronunciation but means “to inspect”. Not sure if you can read Korean but here is the link that talks about differences between the two hanjas: https://m.ch.yes24.com/article/view/33205 https://m.ch.yes24.com/article/view/33205
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > Also for Chinese or Korean. I thought modern Korean just used Hangul, which is trivial - https://ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ https://ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ ?
zaik 4y ago
I learned my kanjis with this. It will not nearly be enough to understanding Japanese (Now I would recommend lots of example sentences in Anki for this), but not having to manually lookup every kanji in my reading material sure helped me a lot. Maybe I would have given up on learning Japanese without WaniKani, so thank you WaniKani, even if I probably would not use you anymore if I had to start over.
diob 4y ago
This + Bunpro for grammar! It'll take you far longer than 2 years unless you're super disciplined or have a lot of free time, but I can't imagine a better way outside of moving to Japan for immersion.
wodenokoto 4y ago
WaniKani is becoming one of the oldies in Japanese language learning. It's an app for learning Kanji, Japanese characters, by way of decomposing them into smaller elements, giving each element a name and meaning (sometimes a historical correct one, sometimes one that is commonly referred in everyday usage, sometimes completely made up for the purpose. It's not an etymology tool, it's a tool for making remembering easier) and composing a "story" or mnemonic for each character, by way of consistent usage of the elements. Learning of characters follow a custom order that tries to balance usage with not introducing too many new elements at a time. Reviews of characters are ordered by spaced repetition and vocabulary (and I believe sentences too) are interspersed with kanji training. It's parent company Tofogu, started out as an oldschool blog on Japan and language learning and has grown into a whole online magazine with staff and everything. WaniKani was a quite ambiguous project at the time it was announced. They basically reimagined all the stories and elements in a similar vein to Remembering The Kanji, but instead of another book, they made it an online course, heavily inspired by how one would study using Anki.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  Tofugu have also published TextFugu, which was a full-fledged Japanese grammar textbook. They have discontinued it, though. https://www.textfugu.com/ https://www.textfugu.com/
porkbrain 4y ago
They have a few sentences about each kanji as a mnemonic which helps you remember the pronunciation and meaning. Perhaps this could be somehow plugged into DALL•E. Create an image for each kanji for yet another data point which helps memorize it.
- majewsky 4y ago
  As a WaniKani user, I don't think I'd want AI-generated content in there. The entire value proposition is that all the content is 100% hand-crafted by people who know Japanese way better than me.
- pm215 4y ago
  There's a thread on the user forums with an example of doing that, with some images from various of these AI image generators. I think the most obvious flaw with the idea is that you can feed in a prompt like "a prawn and a horse are waiting in the railway station", and the image generator will happily produce an image missing at least one of the keywords, or weird things like a horse coloured like a prawn... So the images look cool but fail as cues to remember all the keywords that are supposed to be prompting you to remember the pieces of the character.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
I love WaniKani. It takes a very specific problem, the need for English speakers to memorize kanji as part of learning Japanese, and it makes an entire product out of it. Sure, you can do the same thing yourself using Anki, but they add in a bunch of convenience layers. They think out memorable and ridiculous mnemonics for each character and each bit of vocabulary. They organize it as a big DAG of dependencies for what you learn that's loosely based around the order you'd learn it in school, but adjusted for adults. They put it all behind a really nice website that understands that most of their users just have an American keyboard and want to write things with English letters. There's a big community, regular "you're doing it!" positive update emails, and more. Really great example of taking one incredibly specific problem and just knocking it out of the park. If I had one complaint, it's that people do frequently fall off the wagon, and once you do, Wanikani can make getting back on the wagon really intimidating. "Oh, you've been gone for three weeks? No problem, no problem, welcome back, let's se....you have 2,473 terms to review today." I recognize that you don't HAVE to do all of those thousands of things right away, but some sort of "I'd like to ramp back up slowly, please make the large scary number go away" button would be really, really great.
- fenomas 4y ago
  I only tried WK briefly, but I found it mystifying - the whole system where reading a word gets decomposed into a multi-step process (kanji -> radicals -> names for radicals -> mnemonic linking radical names into character meaning -> character meanings -> word meaning). I mean - if one's goal is to reach fluency, then eventually one will need to discard all those intermediate steps, right? But the app didn't feel to me like it was headed in that direction. To be honest it felt less like an app for memorizing Japanese words, and more like an app for memorizing radical names and mnemonics linking those names to character meanings (i.e. stuff that the WK authors made up). I am way off?
  - lyall 4y ago
    The radicals and mnemonics are useful for bridging the gap between learning a word and truly acquiring it. Think of it like learning how to read in English: when starting out you have to sound out every letter, recall the weird rules about how sometimes "ough" can make an "oo" sound (or was it an "off" sound?), use your finger so you don't loose your place etc. But eventually with enough repetition your brain sees the jumble of letters that is the word "throughout" and immediately knows what it says. Everything that WaniKani does is just to help you get from seeing "日本語" and it meaning absolutely nothing to you, to seeing it and immediately knowing what it means. The radicals and mnemonics are all secondary, and don't need to be remembered.
agd 4y ago
I can recommend WaniKani (I'm on level 17). However, some caveats: Firstly, you'll see lots of forum posts about hitting level 60 in 1-2 years, this is very difficult unless you want to dedicate a substantial amount of time (hours) every day. A more realistic pace might be 4 years or so. Many of these speed runners skip the vocab, and/or use scripts (e.g. to allow undoing mistakes etc). Secondly, it can be draining to know your reviews are always increasing. I recommend using vacation mode (which pauses everything) when things become too much. Thirdly, I think you need to complement kanji learning with reading real-world material to make it properly stick. It's feels different recalling individual vocab/kanji compared to reading sentences.
- lmiller1990 4y ago
  Is 4 years even possible? I’m nearly 15 years in and probably know about 1500 kanji (not using WaniKani). I feel like all these stories really sensastionalize how much people really know.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    Yes? It's probably normal to learn and retain more than 1 per day.
  - teraku 4y ago
    I think with WK getting to 1.5k - 2k is possible in 1-2 years if, as OP said, you invest a lot of time every day. I noticed that if I could keep my usual pace every day I would complete it in ~2years. But since I do take breaks, have better and worse days, I am at a 4-5 year pace. I am at level 32 and about 2.5 years in.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    The more extreme stories claim to pass JLPT1 in 6-8 months investing 6 hours or so average a day. That's about what, 1-2 new kanji an hour at about 1k-1.3k hour investment? That's 1 hour a day consistently over 4 years. Obviously that includes grammar and other things too, but grammar isn't that big of a deal when the sheer volume of characters required to know and contextualize takes care of most.
suction 4y ago
Honest question: What would be a good reason to learn Japanese nowadays, with all economical factors having run dry, over languages like Chinese or Korean? The only reason I can think of is to read Manga / watch Anime in the original language and get the subtleties lost in translation, but that hardly is a good motivator compared to the other two I mentioned in terms of business use.
- NhanH 4y ago
  For practical purpose, Chinese is a class on its own that I don't think any language besides English can be compared with in the next 50 years. Japanese and Korean should roughly have the same utilities, which mostly depends on your local living area. In Vietnam, Japanese should be more beneficial. But really, if you want to be practical, just learn English + Chinese.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Apologies if I'm mistaken, but I take it you are Vietnamese? I'm curious as to why you say Japanese would be more helpful in Vietnam. Is there a large Japanese minority in Vietnam, compared to Koreans and Chinese? Asian languages always fascinated me, though I never learned them past some feeble attempts and learning Japanese, and later Korean, years ago. It's interesting to contrast with the situation in European where most languages ultimately have a common(Indo-European or Uralic, with some isolates like Basque) origin, and a lot of languages are mutually intelligible with eachother. In Asia the situation is very different. There are lots of different families. Thai(Kra-Dai), Chinese(Sino-Tibetan), Korean(Koreanic), Japanese(Japonic), Vietnamese(Austroasiatic) and Mongolian(Mongolic) seem to live in their own families, with any possible common origin between two or more these families being unclear and highly controversial in linguistics. Chinese has played a role similar to Latin historically, used for writing by the intellectual elites, and having major influences in terms of writing and vocabulary.Evolving into the kana+kanji writing system in Japanese, but being mostly replaced by Hangul in Korean and completely(afaik) by the latin alphabet in Vietnamese.
    - NhanH 4y ago
epgui 4y ago
I'd like to know how much this costs, before signing up. Edit: here's the answer, why not link to it from the webpage? This looks like a great product, have the confidence to be transparent and up front. https://knowledge.wanikani.com/account-and-membership/payment-and-billing/subscription-plans/ https://knowledge.wanikani.com/account-and-membership/paymen...
- majewsky 4y ago
  There is also usually a new year's deal where you get lifetime membership for 200$ instead of 300$, which gets announced through the community forum.
autophagian 4y ago
WaniKani is a great tool. If you're using it, I can also recommend KaniWani (http://www.kaniwani.com/ http://www.kaniwani.com/) - it's inverse. It hooks into your WaniKani using your API key and shows English variations of the words you just learned, and expects you to input the Hirigana for the vocab word. I found it really useful for re-enforcing vocab I learned on WaniKani.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Check out KameSame (https://www.kamesame.com/ https://www.kamesame.com/) instead. It's able to handle synonyms better and has a better UX.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sanitycheck 4y ago
I wanted to like WaniKani. I spent nearly a year trying to use it but my memory appears to be incompatible with their way of doing spaced repetition, which is extremely simplistic. There's no attempt to set intervals based on the user's settings, the user's previous performance or the vast accumulation of data they must have regarding which ones tend to be easier or harder, let alone some sort of ML approach. Anki handles the first two of those fine, WK should be in a position to push that aspect further but they haven't bothered. The overall feeling is actually somewhat adversarial - as if it's a challenge, rather than a way to help. I ended up spending 2+ hours a day just doing reviews to stay in one place - not even attempting to study any new material. I even wrote a couple of tools to let me review recent failures, but in the end it was clear it just wasn't working. The subscription pricing approach is also wrong, in my opinion. Yes it's technically a web service but there are very rarely any updates and although they heavily advertise the potential to learn all the kanji in a couple of years, in reality it'll take a lot longer. So the spend is going to be $300+ even if it works for you, and the incentive to get through it quickly to save $$ is misaligned with a better goal of learning in a thorough and sustainable way. Anki is better in most ways, really.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  We just got the lifetime accounts.
  - sanitycheck 4y ago
    Yeah, I was considering it around the time of the yearly(?) sale but in my case it seemed like a way to pour good money after bad. For people for whom it works I'd definitely suggest switching to lifetime in the sale.
0dayz 4y ago
I tried to like wanikani but it got quite frustrating when you only learn the very basic off a kanji and not the 'whole' kanji. But if I were to shill for what I today use it's kanji study for Android (one time cost around 20$). It has two crucial features: Learning how to write Learning what the kanji consist of and what the radicals are actually is for.
endemic 4y ago
Just paid for a year of this service. As others have mentioned, it's not perfect, but it fits into my life right now -- it selects kanji/vocab for me, and feeds me a steady drip based on how much time I can invest. I feel better about myself if I burn through a few flashcards every day; at least I'm making progress in one area of my life.
totetsu 4y ago
If anyone is looking for something with a bit more freedom to choose your own mnemonics and path. kanji.koohii.com is very good. It has maintained by one patreon backed developer for the last 10+ years high. It has accumulated many many people's shared kanji mnemonic stories that you can browse also to use or for guidance when thinking of your own.

79 points by notpushkin 4y ago

I would like to see an efficiency comparison of similar applications, because I have come across several in the past. Also for Chinese or Korean.

zaik 4y ago
Do you have to learn kanji for Korean? If I remember correctly, Hangul is pretty straightforward and does not require you to memorize hundreds of characters.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure Korean doesn't use kanji at all, no.
  - pilaf 4y ago
    While it's true modern-day South Koreans don't use Chinese characters (hanja [1]) at all in their day-to-day life, there are still a few places where they show up, as it was the most common writing system in Korean up to the late 19th century. Most notably, most Korean names can be written in hanja and almost all Koreans know how to write their own name that way at least. South Korean kids also study hanja at high school to some extent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  You don’t _need_ it but I think it’s nice to know kanji (or hanja as we say in Korean) to understand deeper cultural meanings in the language. To give an example, I’ve just watched episode 12 of “Strange attorney Woo”, and one of the character talks about the two different hanja that make up 사 in 변호사 and 검사. A lot of the older generations still use this kind of comparison to make a point about nuance/history of a word. But if you talk to younger generations, they talk predominantly in internet slangs and have no clues about hanja.
  - iopq 4y ago
    That would be 病護士 and 檢査 I guess
    - creakingstairs 4y ago
      검사 is 檢事. 検査 has the same pronunciation but means “to inspect”. Not sure if you can read Korean but here is the link that talks about differences between the two hanjas: https://m.ch.yes24.com/article/view/33205 https://m.ch.yes24.com/article/view/33205
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> Also for Chinese or Korean. I thought modern Korean just used Hangul, which is trivial - https://ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ https://ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ ?

zaik 4y ago

I learned my kanjis with this. It will not nearly be enough to understanding Japanese (Now I would recommend lots of example sentences in Anki for this), but not having to manually lookup every kanji in my reading material sure helped me a lot. Maybe I would have given up on learning Japanese without WaniKani, so thank you WaniKani, even if I probably would not use you anymore if I had to start over.

diob 4y ago

This + Bunpro for grammar! It'll take you far longer than 2 years unless you're super disciplined or have a lot of free time, but I can't imagine a better way outside of moving to Japan for immersion.

wodenokoto 4y ago

WaniKani is becoming one of the oldies in Japanese language learning. It's an app for learning Kanji, Japanese characters, by way of decomposing them into smaller elements, giving each element a name and meaning (sometimes a historical correct one, sometimes one that is commonly referred in everyday usage, sometimes completely made up for the purpose. It's not an etymology tool, it's a tool for making remembering easier) and composing a "story" or mnemonic for each character, by way of consistent usage of the elements. Learning of characters follow a custom order that tries to balance usage with not introducing too many new elements at a time. Reviews of characters are ordered by spaced repetition and vocabulary (and I believe sentences too) are interspersed with kanji training. It's parent company Tofogu, started out as an oldschool blog on Japan and language learning and has grown into a whole online magazine with staff and everything. WaniKani was a quite ambiguous project at the time it was announced. They basically reimagined all the stories and elements in a similar vein to Remembering The Kanji, but instead of another book, they made it an online course, heavily inspired by how one would study using Anki.

notpushkin 4y ago
Tofugu have also published TextFugu, which was a full-fledged Japanese grammar textbook. They have discontinued it, though. https://www.textfugu.com/ https://www.textfugu.com/

porkbrain 4y ago

They have a few sentences about each kanji as a mnemonic which helps you remember the pronunciation and meaning. Perhaps this could be somehow plugged into DALL•E. Create an image for each kanji for yet another data point which helps memorize it.

majewsky 4y ago
As a WaniKani user, I don't think I'd want AI-generated content in there. The entire value proposition is that all the content is 100% hand-crafted by people who know Japanese way better than me.
pm215 4y ago
There's a thread on the user forums with an example of doing that, with some images from various of these AI image generators. I think the most obvious flaw with the idea is that you can feed in a prompt like "a prawn and a horse are waiting in the railway station", and the image generator will happily produce an image missing at least one of the keywords, or weird things like a horse coloured like a prawn... So the images look cool but fail as cues to remember all the keywords that are supposed to be prompting you to remember the pieces of the character.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

I love WaniKani. It takes a very specific problem, the need for English speakers to memorize kanji as part of learning Japanese, and it makes an entire product out of it. Sure, you can do the same thing yourself using Anki, but they add in a bunch of convenience layers. They think out memorable and ridiculous mnemonics for each character and each bit of vocabulary. They organize it as a big DAG of dependencies for what you learn that's loosely based around the order you'd learn it in school, but adjusted for adults. They put it all behind a really nice website that understands that most of their users just have an American keyboard and want to write things with English letters. There's a big community, regular "you're doing it!" positive update emails, and more. Really great example of taking one incredibly specific problem and just knocking it out of the park. If I had one complaint, it's that people do frequently fall off the wagon, and once you do, Wanikani can make getting back on the wagon really intimidating. "Oh, you've been gone for three weeks? No problem, no problem, welcome back, let's se....you have 2,473 terms to review today." I recognize that you don't HAVE to do all of those thousands of things right away, but some sort of "I'd like to ramp back up slowly, please make the large scary number go away" button would be really, really great.

fenomas 4y ago
I only tried WK briefly, but I found it mystifying - the whole system where reading a word gets decomposed into a multi-step process (kanji -> radicals -> names for radicals -> mnemonic linking radical names into character meaning -> character meanings -> word meaning). I mean - if one's goal is to reach fluency, then eventually one will need to discard all those intermediate steps, right? But the app didn't feel to me like it was headed in that direction. To be honest it felt less like an app for memorizing Japanese words, and more like an app for memorizing radical names and mnemonics linking those names to character meanings (i.e. stuff that the WK authors made up). I am way off?
- lyall 4y ago
  The radicals and mnemonics are useful for bridging the gap between learning a word and truly acquiring it. Think of it like learning how to read in English: when starting out you have to sound out every letter, recall the weird rules about how sometimes "ough" can make an "oo" sound (or was it an "off" sound?), use your finger so you don't loose your place etc. But eventually with enough repetition your brain sees the jumble of letters that is the word "throughout" and immediately knows what it says. Everything that WaniKani does is just to help you get from seeing "日本語" and it meaning absolutely nothing to you, to seeing it and immediately knowing what it means. The radicals and mnemonics are all secondary, and don't need to be remembered.

agd 4y ago

I can recommend WaniKani (I'm on level 17). However, some caveats: Firstly, you'll see lots of forum posts about hitting level 60 in 1-2 years, this is very difficult unless you want to dedicate a substantial amount of time (hours) every day. A more realistic pace might be 4 years or so. Many of these speed runners skip the vocab, and/or use scripts (e.g. to allow undoing mistakes etc). Secondly, it can be draining to know your reviews are always increasing. I recommend using vacation mode (which pauses everything) when things become too much. Thirdly, I think you need to complement kanji learning with reading real-world material to make it properly stick. It's feels different recalling individual vocab/kanji compared to reading sentences.

lmiller1990 4y ago
Is 4 years even possible? I’m nearly 15 years in and probably know about 1500 kanji (not using WaniKani). I feel like all these stories really sensastionalize how much people really know.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  Yes? It's probably normal to learn and retain more than 1 per day.
- teraku 4y ago
  I think with WK getting to 1.5k - 2k is possible in 1-2 years if, as OP said, you invest a lot of time every day. I noticed that if I could keep my usual pace every day I would complete it in ~2years. But since I do take breaks, have better and worse days, I am at a 4-5 year pace. I am at level 32 and about 2.5 years in.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  The more extreme stories claim to pass JLPT1 in 6-8 months investing 6 hours or so average a day. That's about what, 1-2 new kanji an hour at about 1k-1.3k hour investment? That's 1 hour a day consistently over 4 years. Obviously that includes grammar and other things too, but grammar isn't that big of a deal when the sheer volume of characters required to know and contextualize takes care of most.

suction 4y ago

Honest question: What would be a good reason to learn Japanese nowadays, with all economical factors having run dry, over languages like Chinese or Korean? The only reason I can think of is to read Manga / watch Anime in the original language and get the subtleties lost in translation, but that hardly is a good motivator compared to the other two I mentioned in terms of business use.

NhanH 4y ago
For practical purpose, Chinese is a class on its own that I don't think any language besides English can be compared with in the next 50 years. Japanese and Korean should roughly have the same utilities, which mostly depends on your local living area. In Vietnam, Japanese should be more beneficial. But really, if you want to be practical, just learn English + Chinese.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Apologies if I'm mistaken, but I take it you are Vietnamese? I'm curious as to why you say Japanese would be more helpful in Vietnam. Is there a large Japanese minority in Vietnam, compared to Koreans and Chinese? Asian languages always fascinated me, though I never learned them past some feeble attempts and learning Japanese, and later Korean, years ago. It's interesting to contrast with the situation in European where most languages ultimately have a common(Indo-European or Uralic, with some isolates like Basque) origin, and a lot of languages are mutually intelligible with eachother. In Asia the situation is very different. There are lots of different families. Thai(Kra-Dai), Chinese(Sino-Tibetan), Korean(Koreanic), Japanese(Japonic), Vietnamese(Austroasiatic) and Mongolian(Mongolic) seem to live in their own families, with any possible common origin between two or more these families being unclear and highly controversial in linguistics. Chinese has played a role similar to Latin historically, used for writing by the intellectual elites, and having major influences in terms of writing and vocabulary.Evolving into the kana+kanji writing system in Japanese, but being mostly replaced by Hangul in Korean and completely(afaik) by the latin alphabet in Vietnamese.
  - NhanH 4y ago

epgui 4y ago

I'd like to know how much this costs, before signing up. Edit: here's the answer, why not link to it from the webpage? This looks like a great product, have the confidence to be transparent and up front. https://knowledge.wanikani.com/account-and-membership/payment-and-billing/subscription-plans/ https://knowledge.wanikani.com/account-and-membership/paymen...

majewsky 4y ago
There is also usually a new year's deal where you get lifetime membership for 200$ instead of 300$, which gets announced through the community forum.

autophagian 4y ago

WaniKani is a great tool. If you're using it, I can also recommend KaniWani (http://www.kaniwani.com/ http://www.kaniwani.com/) - it's inverse. It hooks into your WaniKani using your API key and shows English variations of the words you just learned, and expects you to input the Hirigana for the vocab word. I found it really useful for re-enforcing vocab I learned on WaniKani.

charcircuit 4y ago
Check out KameSame (https://www.kamesame.com/ https://www.kamesame.com/) instead. It's able to handle synonyms better and has a better UX.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sanitycheck 4y ago

I wanted to like WaniKani. I spent nearly a year trying to use it but my memory appears to be incompatible with their way of doing spaced repetition, which is extremely simplistic. There's no attempt to set intervals based on the user's settings, the user's previous performance or the vast accumulation of data they must have regarding which ones tend to be easier or harder, let alone some sort of ML approach. Anki handles the first two of those fine, WK should be in a position to push that aspect further but they haven't bothered. The overall feeling is actually somewhat adversarial - as if it's a challenge, rather than a way to help. I ended up spending 2+ hours a day just doing reviews to stay in one place - not even attempting to study any new material. I even wrote a couple of tools to let me review recent failures, but in the end it was clear it just wasn't working. The subscription pricing approach is also wrong, in my opinion. Yes it's technically a web service but there are very rarely any updates and although they heavily advertise the potential to learn all the kanji in a couple of years, in reality it'll take a lot longer. So the spend is going to be $300+ even if it works for you, and the incentive to get through it quickly to save $$ is misaligned with a better goal of learning in a thorough and sustainable way. Anki is better in most ways, really.

anonymoushn 4y ago
We just got the lifetime accounts.
- sanitycheck 4y ago
  Yeah, I was considering it around the time of the yearly(?) sale but in my case it seemed like a way to pour good money after bad. For people for whom it works I'd definitely suggest switching to lifetime in the sale.

0dayz 4y ago

I tried to like wanikani but it got quite frustrating when you only learn the very basic off a kanji and not the 'whole' kanji. But if I were to shill for what I today use it's kanji study for Android (one time cost around 20$). It has two crucial features: Learning how to write Learning what the kanji consist of and what the radicals are actually is for.

endemic 4y ago

Just paid for a year of this service. As others have mentioned, it's not perfect, but it fits into my life right now -- it selects kanji/vocab for me, and feeds me a steady drip based on how much time I can invest. I feel better about myself if I burn through a few flashcards every day; at least I'm making progress in one area of my life.

totetsu 4y ago

If anyone is looking for something with a bit more freedom to choose your own mnemonics and path. kanji.koohii.com is very good. It has maintained by one patreon backed developer for the last 10+ years high. It has accumulated many many people's shared kanji mnemonic stories that you can browse also to use or for guidance when thinking of your own.