JLL - An Introduction to the Wondrous WaniKani
A post about my approach to Japanese Language Learning and an introduction to my favorite tool in my toolkit — WaniKani.
I recognize that emails often pile up in our inboxes and not every piece of content is relevant to every single person.
It is for that reason that I have several different series running within this Newsletter. You may be interested in my series on Indian Novels in Translation but NOT interested in my series on Japan and Japanese language-learning.
There are no pop quizzes; everything is for your enjoyment and edification, but to try and make it easy, I will do my best to ‘tag’ posts in the titles so you know what to skip and what to open.
Today’s post is about Japanese Language Learning, my overall approach, and an introduction to my favorite tool in my toolkit — WaniKani.
Language learning is both art and science and there’s no surprises for what constitutes a systematic approach to acquisition.
Speaking
Listening
Reading
Writing
Immersion (conversation partners & groups / media / travel)
Undergirding all of this, of course, is the question of motivation. Learning a language is a long, arduous journey and, at the end, you’re still likely to speak it worse than several million people. Might was well do something like learn welding or programming, right? Perhaps. But, we live, in part, to enrich ourselves and learning a language is undeniably enriching.
Initially, I was massively motivated to learn Japanese for several reasons:
We knew for over a year-and-a-half that we’d be spending an extended period in Japan; knowledge of that impending trip made me very motivated. Every hour spent studying was an hour that would pay off.
I wanted to impress Tatum’s family in Japan — How cool would it be if I rocked up to Japan and spoke halfway decent Japanese? Wouldn’t they love that? They did like that I’d made an effort and, since I love to impress, I felt it was suitable payoff.
But, now that’s over. So why continue?
Many, many reasons but we’ll stick with one today. I’m enjoying my journey progressing through the levels of WaniKani.
WaniKani is simultaneously many things — it’s all of the following:
Software product / Edutainment / Content library / Language pedagogy.
The parent company, Tofugu, describes Wanikani as a kanji-learning application.
First, let me explain what kanji is in the context of Japanese language learning, for those of you who may not know.
There are three writing systems that are frequently used in Japanese.
Hiragana
Katakana
Kanji
The first two are phonetic alphabets. That means that the symbols correspond with sounds, like our English alphabet.
Kanji is logographic — the character corresponds to a meaning; now that’s broad and there are exceptions and times when kanji are used phonetically, rather than for their conceptual meanings but broadly speaking, kanji is logographic.
All Shakespeare’s 37 plays, were written using 26 characters; that’s the power of a modular phonetic system.
However, to comfortably read a newspaper in Japan, you need to know 3002 kanji; some people say, you actually need to know 2136 but, in any case, that’s a lot more than 26.
Kanji came to Japan from China and there’s a lot to say on that subject. But there’s one important misconception to address. I thought, and I’m sure many people do, that hiragana and katakana were native alphabets that were used to substitute for kanji; not true. All three scripts are frequently integrated in sentences, paragraphs, and daily life.
In Japan, kids study kanji in school; now, for an adult outside of Japan, it’s unreasonable to imagine a course of self-study that is as time-intensive as school.
So how do you learn 2000+ characters? There’s many ways but I’ve chosen Wanikani. It takes the best of what we know about memory and learning and combines it with a self-study program and mnemonics as well as a software system that is open-framework so that it can modified and upgraded by users.
So, what does a WaniKani mnemonic look like. Let’s do one.
This Kanji is made up of two radicals — the one on the left is a modified version of the radical for ‘writing’ and the one on the right is ‘measurement.’
So, Wanikani suggests a mnemonic for this — it suggests that I’m writing an essay for a college professor; I perform a word count (a measurement) to see that I have enough words; the college professor decides it’s too short; this precipitates a disciplinary review and it’s me VERSUS the prof — hence, I remember the meaning of this kanji — ‘versus’
This mnemonic didn’t work for me so I devised my own; personalized mnemonics tend to work better since we spend time crafting them. Still, in general, WaniKani often provides very memorable mnemonics of their own.
My mnemonic goes like this:
I see ‘writing’ and I see ‘measurement’; I picture my friend, Maxime, who likes party games just as much I do, keeping a score for a game of charades. He announces excitedly to the room that the two teams cannot be separated because the game has ended in a ‘tie’!
This helps me remember ‘versus’, the meaning, but also one of the pronunciations — Tai(たい) .
I know. You’re thinking; this is way too elaborate. Just memorize it. But, for an adult learner, it’s easier (I promise) to come up with a thousand such stories than to memorize a thousand such characters. If you need receipts on this claim, you’ll get them at a later date.
But then, WaniKani comes in with its next contribution, an unrelenting Spacial Recognition System that is timed.
Let me explain:
After it teaches me the content, WaniKani supplies me with a steady stream of reviews. These are flashcard-style questions, asking me to provide the meaning or the pronunciation. These reviews are timed. First, a few hours after the lesson, then a few days, then a few weeks, until they’re seared into long-term memory. Wanikani keeps track of all my responses, right or wrong, and times the next batch of reviews, accordingly.
Here’s my upcoming review queue, for example.
That means, if I open the app before going to bed, I’ll have 47 reviews to complete.
If I do Wanikani twice a day, and I steadily plug at my lessons and my reviews, and I come up with strong mnemonics, then I have a chance of climbing the kanji mountain.
Now, look — this may seem like a lot but let me just end on a final note —-- this journey is FUN!
I’m loving Wanikani; I’m loving my kanji-learning journey; I do it everyday. I’ve learned 375 kanji; I know the kanji for ‘extinguish’, ‘diagram, and ‘mutual’ and from those 375, I can create countless vocabulary combinations. For example, ‘high’ and ‘level’ together give me ‘sophisticated.’ Now, when I learn all 2190 daily-use kanji, I still won’t know Japanese because grammar study is separate. That’s right. In addition to all this effort, one needs to make time for grammar study and practice.
The key to any long endeavor is ‘showing up’ — there’s many words that we use to describe ‘showing up’ such as ‘tenacity’ or ‘hard work.’ To do something for a long time for no paycheck and not under duress isn’t easy. One way to keep showing up is to make it fun, and to make it progressively challenging. WaniKani ticks those boxes for me.
Over the next few months, I’ll continue to share tidbits from my journey with the application and mnemonics and more meta-cognitive reflections on the process of language learning. I hope that some of my readership finds it interesting.
Please let me know in the comments if you have experiences learning logographic languages or if anything written here sparked something in you.
Yours Infinitum
Raghav
Seems to be quite complex ! Quite a challenge to learn the language.
Excellent
As a bookseller I had met a few Japanese professors well versed in Tamil
One pro Yamashita I think
Had translated jayakantans books in Japanese
Wrote the script for a rajanikant film a super hit
The Japanese and Tamil syntax😀 are identical it seems
Therefore it is easier for both
Linguistics to interact