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Thoughts on WaniKani?


Kyrne

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A few months ago, I gave WaniKani, a Japanese Kanji learning tool, a try - and progressed through the first few levels of study. It's similar to Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" in the way it uses mnemonics to aid with kanji recognition and recall. Each day, you get lessons and reviews to complete, and the reviews change depending on your performance. I liked it quite a bit myself, though I had to stop when my trial ran out; I wasn't ready to put money into an online learning tool just yet.

I'm curious, though: have any of you given WaniKani a try? If so, what are your thoughts on it? Is it viable for learning the core kanji effectively?

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I have never heard about it, but I gotta say that website looks amazing. Kinda like Duolingo :=)

I own Heisig's book and his approach is definitely an interesting one. If I can find some time I am going to check this WaniKani thing out.

bW

L

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've seen WaniKani and was wondering if anybody tried their service. From what I hear it's pretty good, but can be a little expensive. Personally, I like the "Remembering the Kanji" method which is what I'm using now. There's also an official app that you can get to help practice the lessons from Volume 1 of "Remembering the Kanji". I believe it was only $1 and it works very well for flash cards or writing practice.

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  • 1 month later...

I'm currently at level 4 of WaniKani, it works really well.
It's like KanjiDamage or Remembering the Kanji, but all automated.
And it's something I keep coming back to, something a very few language-related websites have actually accomplished so far.

But I can say it works.
For example, I never knew "才" was pronounced "sai" and meant "genious", combined with "人" (hito), it would be pronounced as "saijin", meaning "talented person".
Of course there were lots of kanji so far I already knew, but what do you expect from level 4 out of 60? :P

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I was thinking of signing up, but after reading your post, I'm having second thoughts about joining.  I'm pretty certain that they will have to charge me a certain amount.  But in any case, the site looks interesting.  It's great for those who want to focus on learning kanji, which is also one of my weaknesses.  The mnemonics make the site similar to Memrise, except it's for kanji.

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I decided to give this a shot since you're mentioned it, and so far I have to say it's the best tool I've found for Kanji. I was using primarily phone apps on the Play Store and they only focused on memorization. I really like this mnemonics thing. It makes it easier to associate Kanji with English, and that's helping me quite a bit. It's an interesting approach though. I feel like I'm being taught to understand, but not pronounce or speak, but maybe that's because I'm only on the first few lessons.

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  • 9 months later...

Now I'm level 38 and I still keep coming back to WaniKani.
It just works like magic. :P

Eventually I have changed my monthly subscription to a lifetime subscription, so I have paid a one time $ 300 USD and I don't need to pay any cent more to them.
It's convenient because I have more monthly subscriptions going on, now I have one thing less I need to invest in.

I am now on their Discord server, never seen a very popular place on the internet where there are only nice folks until now.

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