Wanikani
A post on something other than guitar for a change!
I first started trying to learn Japanese when Dad moved us to Japan in 1975.
[As an aside, I just discovered that Mark Hamill graduated from the same DoD high school in Yokosuka where I attended 8th grade. He came back for a visit in 1978 but it was after I returned to the US, sadly. I love the last]
I learned to at least read the phonetic characters (hiragana and katakana) as well as some very basic vocabulary while I was there.
About ten years later I graduated from Va Tech and went to work for Mitsubishi Semiconductor in Itami Japan. It still amazes me to realize how industrious I was when I was young, but for most of 1986 and 1987 I’d take an hour-long train ride after work twice a week to take private Japanese lessons from Tsujimoto-sensei in Osaka. (I’m sure she passed several years ago, but I’d love to know what happened to her.)
Despite marrying a Japanese girl after my third time living in Japan, having two kids currently living there, and literally countless business trips to Japan, my linguistic skills really haven’t improved much at all since those private lessons so many years ago.
Until recently.
Somehow I got the bug to start studying Kanji (Chinese characters) again. I’m a firm believer that the only way to truly learn a language is to read as much as possible in the native language. This is much easier when learning any of the romance languages because the phonetic alphabets and even the vocabulary and grammar are so similar.
For decades I’ve wished I could read Japanese magazines and novels.
While perusing the /r/LearnJapanese subreddit one day, I happened to stumble across a link to WaniKani.
Where has this been all my life? It may be because I already had a fairly sizable Japanese vocabulary, but this site is improving my reading skills, pronunciation, and vocabulary so quickly I can hardly believe it. I’d have killed for something like this back in the eighties!
WaniKani is a spaced repetition system. Basically, it shows you flashcards and keeps track of what you get right and wrong, showing you the ones you miss more frequently.
I’ve read quite a bit about memory techniques, and it’s well known that people remember things best by associating stories and images with the things you want to recall. The weirder, more outrageous, embarrasing, or disgustingly visual you can make the stories the better you will be able to recall the information.
Coming up with creative stories/images is one of the hardest parts of memorizing any large list of information (like several thousand Kanji characters, compounds, and different readings). Amazingly, WaniKani has already done this hard work for you: they’ve already created stories for every character. It’s possibly better if you still create your own, of course (and I sometimes do) but their pre-made stories are already pretty good.
There are three types of cards in WaniKani: “radicals”, kanji, and vocabulary.
What WaniKani calls “radicals” are slightly different from those taught in Japan or used in dictionaries. Here, radicals are just small subcomponents of larger characters that are used as memory aids. You associate a word or idea with each radical shape, and later use them to build up stories for kanji that use them.
Kanji are the actual characters themselves. You’ll learn a couple thousand characters eventually, broken into 60 levels. Unlike radicals which only have an (English) name, kanji have both a meaning and a reading. When reviewing, sometimes it will ask you the meaning of the character, other times how it is read/pronounced. Note that Japanese is particularly difficult because each character usually has at least two different pronunciations. Usually, it will try to teach you just one or two “onyomi” pronunciations for an individual character.
Once you’ve got a Kanji character down, it starts showing you vocabulary cards that use that character. A vocabulary item might be the character by itself, but this time with a different reading (usually “kunyomi”). Sometimes the character has phonetic (kana) characters attached which affect the meaning and the pronunciation. Sometimes, it has multiple kanji characters together indicating a compound word with yet different meanings and readings.
WaniKani gives away the first three levels for free, after that it’s on a subscription basis (which seems pretty reasonable to me!).
If you have any interest at all in learning some Japanese, I can’t recommend WaniKani highly enough.