#Ikanji app versus wanikani how to#
#Ikanji app versus wanikani update#

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. 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. The subscription pricing approach is also wrong, in my opinion. 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. I ended up spending 2+ hours a day just doing reviews to stay in one place - not even attempting to study any new material. The overall feeling is actually somewhat adversarial - as if it's a challenge, rather than a way to help. Anki handles the first two of those fine, WK should be in a position to push that aspect further but they haven't bothered. 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. 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. 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. However this time I'm following the book 'Kanji in Context' and using Anki to ensure recall. But it covers just a small slice of what it takes to learn Japanese.Īs a coda, I'm only now getting back into dedicated Kanji study again. Overall I believe WaniKani is a great tool, and well worth the money. Stopping WaniKani then let me focus more on listening practice and led to my skills balancing out a bit.

#Ikanji app versus wanikani how to#

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'. However, I don't think falling off the wagon ended up being a bad thing for me really. Long story short, almost three years later my review queue still contains 2140 items. 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. I fell off the WaniKani wagon pretty hard. '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.

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. Really great example of taking one incredibly specific problem and just knocking it out of the park.

#Ikanji app versus wanikani update#

There's a big community, regular 'you're doing it!' positive update emails, and more. 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. 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 think out memorable and ridiculous mnemonics for each character and each bit of vocabulary. Sure, you can do the same thing yourself using Anki, but they add in a bunch of convenience layers. 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.