LogFAQs > #954829304

Stalolin posted...

You guys ever heard of Wanikani? I had a book that tried to teach the kanji in a similar way, with mnemonics and wacky stories, but Wanikani is much more modern and engaging. I think the book I was using was pretty old and didnt have as much imagination to it, which is definitely not what you want when the whole point is about creating vivid memories and stories.

Would recommend.

I managed to find my old review of WaniKani.

It's not bad, it just has some issues that become more annoying the longer you use it. The first problem is it requires you to manually type in your answers. A lot of people say it's a good thing because it helps strengthen your memory and makes you avoid mistakes, but the few seconds extra time and effort it takes adds up, and once your Enlightened reps start coming in it becomes a pain, possibly even a physical one if you have wrist problems. Having to type in your answers also means you can't just lie back and relax while repping. It also opens up the possibility of typos screwing up a streak, which is something you can only fix with userscripts/addons.

The second problem, and this is a major one, is the inability to suspend cards or mark them as already known. If you have a troublesome word or kanji that you just can't remember no matter how many times you rep it you can't just skip it and learn it some other day. Instead you have to go through the grind of constantly failing it over and over and over again until you finally luck out and remember it, and then you have to repeat the process again the next time it comes up in your queue. This is demoralizing, and your queue fills up with more of these cards as time goes on. In Anki you would just suspend or delete such cards. Not being able to mark cards as known means if you already know a fair number of kanji, WaniKani forces you to waste time on repping cards that you already know (this is especially egregious when it comes to the radical cards), time you could be using to learn new words or immerse in native Japanese content.

This leads to the third problem; you can't skip ahead. If you already know a fair bit of kanji, you might have to waste months waiting for unknown content. You also can't learn words that you might need to know right now (because the word keeps popping up in a book/manga you're reading for instance) but is many WK levels above what you're currently learning.