WaniKani will tell you this instead of giving you yet another mnemonic to memorise. Both are used in daily Japanese, but WaniKani typically gives you only the on’yomi reading in the section on kanji.įor vocabulary words, if it is a jukugo, or compound, word, it’s usually pronounced the same as its kanji, typically in on’yomi form. All kanji will have on’yomi and kun’yomi readings that is, the word’s derivative pronunciation from Chinese, and the native Japanese pronunciation. This is how the word is pronounced in Japanese. Typically vocabulary words will rely on your understanding of the individual kanji, so the mnemonics will fall back on those. The mnemonics for vocabulary, on the other hand, are short, sweet, and to the point. But you can tell the effort that went into writing them because they remain hilarious and unique for each kanji. Since kanji characters can have multiple meanings, sometimes the mnemonics do get rather long, and in our opinion, overly complicated. This is one of two possible mnemonics you’ll get for a character or word. This is the definition (or definitions) of the kanji or vocabulary word. You won’t get a mnemonic for these, but it will prompt you to spot where the radicals are in a character, or how the meaning of the kanji relates to the word as a whole. For kanji, you’ll see the radicals that make up the character, and for vocab, you’ll see the kanji that makes up the word. You’ll get four tabs for every word in this section: radical composition for kanji and kanji composition for vocabulary, meaning, reading, and examples or context. The core of these lessons is very similar to the lessons you took for radicals, with a few additions and changes. If you review your radicals several times a day as WaniKani recommends, you’ll unlock kanji after a couple of days. The caveat is that this means you have to check in with the app multiple times a day, every single day. Frequency is key to memorisation, and overdoing it all at once will not help you learn kanji any faster. This is done to reinforce your memory while also encouraging you to step away from the program and not burn yourself out. When you finish a review session, you’ll see a timeline on your dashboard of when next to check in to review the next set of words. Why wait, you ask? It’s because you’re supposed to be checking in with the app frequently at the intervals it allows. Other programs, like MosaLingua, will allow you to go back review words as frequently or infrequently as you like. This system tracks when you get answers right or wrong and adjusts how frequently words appear in your review sessions accordingly.īut where WaniKani takes it a step further is that it doesn’t allow you until that SRS tells you to. WaniKani utilises a spaced repetition system (SRS), which is thought to be among the best methods of memorisation. Then comes the hard part… Hurry Up and Wait You can review the mnemonic if you need to, or jot down some additional notes of your own here. You’ll learn five at a time, with a simple quiz that asks you to input the name of the radical. I had no trouble getting through the first 26 radicals.
Each one is hand-written with a tongue-in-cheek style of humour that’s both entertaining and memorable. The mnemonics are really where WaniKani shines. You’re then given a mnemonic to help you remember the radicals and some examples of kanji that use that radical. Because WaniKani uses its own system of radicals, you’ll only be taught the names of these radicals in English.
The first few lessons you’ll find on WaniKani cover radicals, which are the building blocks of any kanji. You will catch up eventually, but we found it rather odd that WaniKani chose to focus on textbook literacy over actual fluency. The trade-off is that you don’t learn some of the basic, more common words until later on in the programme. The idea is that learning kanji with fewer strokes first, then building up in complexity, will get you learning more kanji in less time. As a result, WaniKani made the decision to start with simpler kanji from which to build upon. Even if a kanji has more strokes in it, children will learn easier if the word’s meaning is simple.Īdults, on the other hand, already have an established vocabulary to lean back on. Kanji is taught to Japanese children by order of word difficulty rather than structure difficulty. The single most important thing to realize about WaniKani is that it is first and foremost geared for adults. What Can You Do on WaniKani? WaniKani’s Philosophy: Learning Kanji for Adults This way, the programme caters to English-speaking adult learners to get you learning more kanji in less time. It uses spaced repetition and mnemonics and rethinks the traditional order you'd usually use to learn kanji. WaniKani is a web-based flashcard program that hopes to teach you Japanese kanji.
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