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.
I fell off the WaniKani wagon pretty hard. Made it to level 28 (out of 60) going about as fast as it'll let you then took a break during a trip to Japan, of all places. Long story short, almost three years later my review queue still contains 2140 items.
However, I don't think falling off the wagon ended up being a bad thing for me really. I was very early on in my Japanese learning journey when I started, and at level 28 I was far better at kanji recognition than I was at any other relevant language skill—I couldn't really speak or understand anything yet I was learning how to read "攻撃". Stopping WaniKani then let me focus more on listening practice and led to my skills balancing out a bit.
Overall I believe WaniKani is a great tool, and well worth the money. But it covers just a small slice of what it takes to learn Japanese.
As a coda, I'm only now getting back into dedicated Kanji study again. However this time I'm following the book "Kanji in Context"[1] and using Anki to ensure recall. From a slightly more advanced perspective, it's all the more rewarding when you get to a character you know you've seen many times but never really got to know explicitly.
Kanji in Context targets intermediate/advanced students that already know at least a few hundred kanji, and it doesn't provide mnemonics or radicals or anything. It's fundamentally just a list of words to memorize, which through doing so teaches you the most common/jōyō readings. There's a bit more to it than that with the workbooks, etc. but overall it's much more streamlined that WaniKani.
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?
Learning the radicals is one of the most useful things you can do when learning kanji. With just knowing the radicals, you can sometimes at least know what a kanji represents, even if you've never seen the kanji. For instance, if a kanji has a fish radical in it, it's very likely a kanji for a fish. If there's a clam radical, it could be a clam, or related to money. If there's an animal radical, it's very likely an animal kanji.
Similarly, knowing the individual kanji and readings helps learning combination words, and guess at how to read them, when can be helpful sometimes when a word is written in kanji, when it's usually not. You know the word, and one of the kanji in the word and can use the radicals to guess the readings and know the meanings and realize the word.
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.
When you think about how you read English text, or text in any language really, you don't decompose all that much during normal reading. For example, if you look at the word "house", you don't read it like "H-O-U-S-E-house" like a child learning to read would, because you have learned to recognize "house" immediately.
But even then, it's still useful to learn how the different bits and pieces of language fit together (etymology, root words, and such) in order to parse new words that you encounter for the first time. Even if you have never encountered the word "quizzacious" before, you can see the root word "quiz" and can make an educated guess about its meaning.
That's true for English roots, but for the WK radical names we're talking about here, many of them are just arbitrarily chosen words. E.g. they call 歹 "yakuza" and 各 "kiss", etc. There's not necessarily any connection between the mnemonic words and the radicals they represent.
(And even for the remaining cases, a kanji's radicals don't generally tell you much about the character's meaning the way English roots do. At least not outside of a few cases, like 言 or 魚, which don't need to be memorized because the radicals are already basic kanji.)
> "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."
My wife has been using WaniKani for a few years, and she uses Account => Vacation mode for planned time away from it. It's essentially a pause feature for reviews (but not for your subscription).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After that, I only did Bunpro (I had neglected grammar too much, but did have a good N5 I'd estimate).
After about a year of that I started reading. First book was a slog at the beginning, so much dictionary look up (thanks kindle). But, now I'm happily reading to my heart's content.
That said, I have forgotten some kanji that aren't as common. It's not typically a big issue though because context! (and they're just not common) But I'm planning to go back through Wanikani focusing on what I've forgotten soon.
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.
It's really not sensationalizing. I'm level 50 on WaniKani at 2 years in, and had a couple 2-3 month lapses (with 2000+ review queues - I'm currently working one of those off). If I wouldn't have had the lapses I'd have finished a few months ago at my normal pace.
WaniKani works because of the spaced repetition. I think it's easier to learn through level 60 in 2 years, rather than 4+ years because it's paced for that, and that helps you actually memorize them.
Note that I also went to a language school full time for a year, which helped with vocabulary, which obviously makes memorizing the vocab kanji easier. I also moved to Japan when I started learning, so I'm forced to read Japanese all the time.
Also worth noting that I do 200-300 reviews per day. If I'm on-top of my reviews, it's possible to do 300 reviews in about an hour and a half. When I stopped for a couple months, it would take me 3+ hours to do 300 reviews, because my correct percentage is 20-30% rather than being 85-95%. That alone shows me that keeping a proper review cycle helps me memorize.
Sure? I did WK in 1.5 years and then just started reading stuff. Now I'm about 4 years into studying and read about 30-40 books. Wanikani is just the tip of the iceberg, as it doesn't give you nearly enough vocabulary to be comfortable with texts. Of course I did spend a lot of time listening, too, which helped. I'm just now starting to not have to really lookup stuff when reading Murakami or Higashino Keigo. Still see new words every day, though.
Although I'd say there's not really a point in saying one 'knows' kanji, the bulk of your understanding comes from knowing words. There's so many of them reading is going to be a struggle anyway, but it slowly gets easier.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
WaniKani is a great tool. If you're using it, I can also recommend KaniWani (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you’re learning a language only for money, your studying efforts are probably going to burn out fast.
Most people I know who learned a second language on their own volition did it because they were interested in the country or some cultural element. Or, frankly, had a fetish for the people in that area—that’s an absolutely massive motivator that most people won’t openly state.
One language I learned was motivated simply because I liked the food there. I like traveling in that country, eating new stuff, and looking up recipes in that language to make those dishes authentically at home. Money would be nice. But I have zero plans to get a job speaking that language.
Japanese have terrible English, even relative to other Asians. Even managers often struggle with it. If you’re working in product development from overseas, you will often need to talk to those managers because the product people don’t speak English at all. Being able to speak Japanese allows you to break this barrier and dramatically increase efficiency.
As a Japanese speaking programmer I basically don’t have any competition in the job market.
Recruiters don’t think that non-Japanese people who know how to program AND speak the language well exist.
So I basically show up for positions that ask for a native Japanese that’s willing to work abroad. I then promote myself based on technical and cultural skills.
I’ve legitimately unstuck projects that were stuck for years and getting nowhere within few months because I improved communication and information retrieval.
In Germany we have many companies that have a large amount of Japanese customers, but they get nowhere with English. Meanwhile Japanese send some engineers over as sales support instead of establishing a proper local subsidiary that is not just a proxy for sales.
They'll never accept your Japanese though unless you get the Keigo perfect. You might not notice it but foreigners who speak Japanese too well are thought of as losers by most Japanese ("why does he have to work in another country?"), and people who aren't perfect but pretty good will still be seen as lesser, and treated like children.
Of course your mileage might differ if you're in a pure tech environment full of younger freak types, but Japanese at any level in any other industry (like trade) is a boon more than anything. It's actually a better life in Japan to pretend you're a bumbling gaijin than an expert in all things Japanese. The women interested in real foreigners are also way more fun than those who want a weeaboo foreigner.
1. I do know how to speak Keigo. I'd say most Japanese struggle more with it than I do (it's not something every Japanese person actually learns properly)
2. The worst reaction I get is that my intonation and pronunciation is off-putting, because it sounds too native and doesn't fit my white face. People just aren't used to it.
3. Nobody thinks of me as a loser for having invested years into Japanese and gained proficiency in it. The reaction is usually more like "why did you learn Japanese although you don't need it? It's only spoken on this little island in the sea". Since I have engineering skills people know that I would not be a loser even without this language skill. People are also very humbled to know that I have a sincere interest in their culture. It seems your acquaintances suffer from severe self-loathing to consider somebody who has interest in their culture a loser.
4. Calling people (in the tech sector) who are interested in Japan/Japanese freaks is downright racist. Imagine you were talking about "younger freak types" who move to Spain and learn Spanish.
5. if you think being a bumbling gaijin will make you happy I don't think you should stay in Japan. Of course you will be treated as a baby and not treated seriously. You'll be one of those losers at the local HUB pub that spout racist remarks about the Japanese.
6. "Real foreigners" vs "weeaboo foreigners" - do you listen to yourself? Because somebody doesn't act like a bumbling gaijin and actually learns how to be a functioning adult speaking, reading and writing the language they're a weeaboo?
Either you've never been to Japan and don't know the language, or you hung out with the wrong crowd, or most likely, the wrong attitude and blamed others for the self-fulfilling prophecy you found yourself in.
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.
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.
I need to clarify that when I said "more beneficial", I was comparing Japanese with Korean. Chinese should beat them both very handily. When I was started learning Japanese more than 10 years ago, my tutor actually said she regretted learning Japanese instead of Chinese. Even back then, Chinese provides you with alot more opportunity.
Japan has a lot more investment into Vietnam than Korea (both officially from government, see (0), as well as Japanese companies either utilizing Vietnamese labor or making investment into Vietnam. So Japanese has an edge if you want to learn a second foreign language.
Latin alphabet completely replaced Chinese in Vietnamese language. We still have loan word that is phonetically from Cantonese with similar meaning to the Chinese counterpart. They are being spelled entirely in Latin alphabet. They are called Han-Viet (hán-việt).
For me, during my life this far:
1) read manga / watch anime as you said
2) traveling in Japan (it's an awesome country for travel)
3) communicating with my Japanese friends
4) studying here
5) living and working here
The economical factors have never meant much for me, the emotional/attachment/interest factors are the possible the only ones that could have kept me motivated to learn a language to a high level.
1.) You'll be exposed to a very different grammar, one that can change your way of thinking. I believe Chinese won't do that nearly as much if you are native English speaker. Not sure about Korea.
2.) You'll learn Kanji, which will give you an advantage when you want to learn Chinese. You will even be able to grasp quite a chunk of written text when you know Kanji in and out and travel to China.
Another good option for a very different grammar that can change your thinking: American Sign Language (or another sign language if you're not American). It's topic-oriented like Japanese, but it's also a spatial language, which is bonkers. For example, if you're setting up a story about two characters, you basically indicate a point or direction to represent the various parties, and then you periodically shift the perspective you're speaking from.
In the same way learning a new programming language with a very different/unique paradigm will make you view/perceive problems in a different way, so does learning a new natural language, given that it is different.
For instance, English, French, Spanish, German all share a very similar concept of "subject verb object" but Japanese has a very different concept of conveying information. I can't explain how, because that's exactly what you only get by learning the language.
>will make you view/perceive problems in a different way, so does learning a new natural language, given that it is different.
This as well as the initial statement you've made is controversial and generally frowned up by linguists.
We do not have any evidence that people perceive the world differently nor that it bears any relevance to how they view it. There were attempts at it, but the results are either not very convincing or are based upon farfetched conclusions.
>I can't explain how
Well yes, because it's a broad and unquantifiable claim as well as one that's not really supported by evidence.
As such I don't think it's fair and justifiable to say that learning Japanese changes the way you think. You're just adding additional unnecessary mystique to it.
I mean, this is my personal opinion and experience. Also, if you claim this is "frowned up by linguists" then a source would be appreciated.
> Well yes, because it's a broad and unquantifiable claim as well as one that's not really supported by evidence.
No. Imagine you never tasted ananas (pineapple) before in your life and now you taste it for the first time. Can you describe the flavour to someone who never tasted it, so that he can imagine the taste? Mind that I'm not taking about sweetness and acidity, just the distinct aroma.
I don't think you can. Does that mean it's just an "unquantifiable claim" that ananas has a distinct aroma? If so, even an "unquantifiable claim" can be helpful for others to understand.
Oh, and don't come with something like chemical analysis or so, since we can't really do that with the brain quite yet.
I guess this depends on where you're coming from. Japanese salaries for software engineering tend to be quite low, and companies do not offer equity. The highest paying software engineering jobs in Japan are for foreign, english-speaking companies.
If you're aiming to work for a Japanese company, and you're N1 in Japanese, and native-level english, you'll probably be worth more, but I doubt it would compare to working for Google, Facebook, or Stripe in Japan.
I know of people who are making 30% more than FAANG in finance and medical. But it should also be said that FAANG comp in Japan isn't particularly high.
Software Engineering salaries at Japanese companies range between $100-200k (with a normal exchange rate, right now it's closer to $80-160k), with no equity, for senior (10+ YOE) engineers. Most companies also include a yearly bonus that's equivalent to 1 month salary.
The highest paying Japanese companies tend to pay less than 1/2 of the total comp you can expect in the bay area, but may be closer to competitive to a comp package in somewhere like Atlanta or Austin.
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.