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Can you use WaniKani with Jalup? — 4 Comments

  1. I started Wanikani and Jalup at about the same time, but dropped Wanikani after a few months, mainly because I felt it took too much time for too little progress. I eventually settled on the app Kanji Study for Android, and the All in One Kanji deck for Anki. I don’t think Wanikani is a bad product, but dropping it was probably the right call for me.

    Since I learned Kanji from multiple sources, keywords deserve special mention. At first, I was worried about English keywords disagreeing between sources, but I actually don’t think it matters at all. When you’re recognizing kanji in J-E, it’s good enough to think of any approximate English word; when you’re recalling kanji in J-J, you’re not using English keywords at all. You only need an exact keyword to recall kanji in E-J, and that’s not how they’re normally used.

    Knowing 服 and 衣 ⇒ clothes/garment/attire/something is useful
    Knowing いふく ⇒ 衣服 is useful
    Knowing clothes ⇒ 服 and garment ⇒ 衣… seems like a bit of a party trick.

    To its credit, I think Wanikani was reasonably forgiving about this sort of thing. Or maybe I just added lots of keywords to every kanji?

  2. I reached level 60 of Wanikani then transitioned to Jalup. Already knowing most useful kanji made the sentence grind much easier.

    Let me give some context. I went into Japanese with the mindset of “learn all the kanji first, then everything else”. Additionally, I prioritized building a Japanese routine, and sought to do so with minimal work every day for a long time. Learning Kanji with WK fit the bill for me, then when doing SRS reviews was already a part of my life branching out became much easier

  3. So I’m currently on WK level 23 and have just started Jalup Intermediate, and I’m finding the two work pretty well together. I use WK for kanji learning and Jalup for grammar/reading practice. I tried using Kanji Kingdom, but I guess my brain really likes the WK-style of learning, with each kanji broken down into radicals, a mnemonic device to remember it, and the reading parceled along with it. (Plus, if I’m honest, it’s nice to be able to do WK in a web browser. As I use the Jalup app, it can only be used on my phone, no other devices (easily).)

    I haven’t found any meaningful conflicts between the two, in terms of differing keywords – but I guess I look at a particular kanji as representing a concept, not a specific word. To use the example someone above said, 服 can represent “clothes”, and whether the word used is “clothes”, “apparel”, “garment”, or whatever, it’s still the base idea of “clothes”, so it doesn’t matter that much to me which specific English word is used to represent it.

    You do raise a good point about the use of English in WK being a bit of a barrier to pure J-J learning, and to be honest that’s something I’ve been wondering about as I start JI, but I have felt like I’ve still been learning something valuable as I puzzle through the J-J definition for a term on a JI card. And (so far) there hasn’t been too much overlap between the kanji I’ve learned through WK and the kanji presented in JI. Granted, I am only on card 20, so. :)

  4. I‘m glad you made a post about wanikani an Jalup together ^^
    Those to are my main study resources. I tries knajikingdom, but I never really got the kanji to stick. Wanikani did the trick gor me and it work‘s great. Knowing many kanjis before doing jalup beginner helped me a lot to go through the sentences and learn new vocab and grammar points. Recently I started to use bunpro to further improve my grammar knowledge.

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