About a year ago, I was testing out different apps to help me learn Japanese. And now, I’m coming back with two other resources that I’ve been using and enjoying a lot. Before I explore into each one individually, I want to start by talking about the SRS. No, it has nothing to do with your car’s airbags or software development, SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System. This is a learning mechanism to help you memorize vocabulary by increasing the interval between reviews every time you are correct. The idea of the system is to focus on the vocabulary that you are struggling with instead of wasting time with the ones you already know. The system kind of works in levels. For every right answer, the word goes up a level while answering wrong brings it down. And the higher the level, the less frequent the word appears in the reviews.

Both tools use the SRS and are focused on teaching kanji and vocabulary, so it’s imperative to know kana. It’s easy to find a lot of free resources online to learn hiragana e katakana. Also, some of the apps that I mentioned in my previous post teach both writing systems as well.

WaniKani

WaniKani is an exclusive web app that can teach you around 2000 kanji and more than 6000 vocabulary words with the help of mnemonics and the SRS. To unlock all, you have to pay for a monthly, yearly, or lifetime subscription. Although the first three levels are completely free, and it teaches you about 600 vocabulary words, which is already a good start.

The learning system is based on the number of strokes it takes to write the kanji. It starts with only one and goes up to I-don’t-know-how-many-but-it’s-too-many, rather than teaching the common kanji first. I find it easier to learn this way, but it’s not exactly the most practical way. As simple and useful it is to know the word “water”, you only learn it on level two, and it will take weeks to unlock. Meanwhile, you already know how to say “river”. So WaniKani is not the place to learn how to say “good morning” or “thank you” before anything else. The website focus on teaching kanji and vocabulary more easily and efficiently.

Radicals, Kanji, and Vocabulary

It’s important to mention that WaniKani teaches three different elements: radicals, kanji, and vocabulary. The radicals are patterns and symbols that make up the kanji. They don’t have any meaning or pronunciation, but they do have names to identify them and help explain the kanji. And now things get a little tricky to define. Kanji and vocabulary go hand in hand, but with WaniKani, they are taught separately to explain the two different readings.

Kanji are words that have come from the Chinese language and adapted to Japanese. WaniKani teaches the kanji with the on reading (the Chinese derived pronunciation), while the vocabulary for the same kanji is taught with the kun reading (the Japanese pronunciation). And yes, it’s as confusing as it sounds. Both readings are important since they alternate depending if the kanji is alone, attached to hiragana or attached to another kanji (all part of the vocabulary learning). And I already know when to use each reading, the challenge is to memorize both.

I would prefer if the kanji section of WaniKani was taught with the kun reading since that is how you read a kanji alone. And switching to the on reading when needed. This probably isn’t the best method, but I feel that my brain wouldn’t give up on me as much. In all seriousness, it gets a little confusing at times, and that’s when the SRS comes into play. If I can’t memorize the on reading, then it will appear more frequently in my reviews until it sticks to my brain.

Lessons

The lessons are presented in stacks of five, and they teach you everything you need to know. For radicals, it teaches meaning and mnemonics for that meaning. For kanji, teaches meaning, reading, the radicals it uses, and vocabulary words it can be found while using mnemonics. And for vocabulary, it breaks down the kanji used, meaning, synonyms, part of speech, reading, and even context sentences. Each lesson is only complete after doing a quiz for what you have just learned. Both the quizzes and the reviews only focus on meaning and reading, so if you are not sure that word is a noun or an advert doesn’t matter because the objective is to learn kanji, not grammar.

With each level, it unlocks new radicals that you can learn straight away. But you have to wait for the reviews to be ready, and guess correctly a few times in a row to unlock the kanji. And the same process applies from kanji to vocabulary. Doing the first radicals was a bit nerve-racking. I wasn’t learning any kanji, and I had to wait to unlock new stuff. Once, I started learning the kanji, it started a pleasant dynamic between the reviews and the lessons. If I didn’t have any review to do, for sure I had a new lesson.

Mnemonics

If you don’t know, a mnemonic is an association of words, patterns, letters, and other things that helps you remember something. In WaniKani, the mnemonics are usually a story or related to the draw of the kanji. They are very helpful to memorize, and speaking a second language, comes in handy. Not all mnemonics used are easy or intuitive, but there is a section in every lesson to add personal notes that you can use to write your mnemonics. Since Portuguese is my first language, I can use other words that don’t exist in English with meanings and sounds more close to the kanji.

But creating mnemonics isn’t easy and sometimes, nothing works, so you just have to bang it inside your head over and over again until you learn it.

Reviews

To progress in the SRS, WaniKani has five stages: apprentice, guru, master, enlightened, and burned. To go up each stage you need to guess correctly a specific number of times in a row, think of it as points. From apprentice to guru it takes about 5 times, so 5 points, from guru to master it takes 10, and from master to enlightened it takes 15, and so on. If you answer wrong, the word loses a point. For example, you guessed a word correctly 7 times, and got it wrong once, the word now has 6 point, which isn’t low enough to go back to an apprentice stage, but it’s now further away to get into the master stage.

This system is only important to determine how frequently you should be studying a certain word. And this is why I enjoy the SRS so much. There are words that I can pick up more easily than others, therefore I don’t need to work on them as much and focus my study where it’s necessary.

Website: WaniKani

HouHou SRS

HouHou is a Japanese-English kanji dictionary combined with SRS to help you learn. It’s a desktop software that works as a normal dictionary presenting the different meanings, variations, reading, and even strokes order, which you can’t learn with WaniKani.

One of the things that I enjoy about HouHou is that you control what you want to learn. Maybe you are trying to use your favourite manga to help you learn Japanese and want to use the SRS, then just add the vocabulary to HouHou with your mnemonics. It’s simple and completely customizable, although you have to do all the work. Every single word and kanji that you want to learn, you have to add it manually.

When I say the programs it’s completely customizable, I mean it. You can define the time between every review for every stage, you can customize the “clues” for when you answer wrong, and other bits and pieces I haven’t found yet. And the best part, it’s completely free.

HouHou can be connected with your WaniKani account and transfer every kanji and vocabulary words that you have learned and even the stage they are on. It’s really handy both programs can be connected since it would be a pain in the a** to transfer manually everything. Also, both resources work similarly with the exception that HouHou has a full dictionary of words available for free at any time and any level of learning, while WaniKani is limited to the level progression and the paid version.

Website: HouHou SRS

By any means, I’m trying to say this is how you should be learning Japanese. I’m a complete beginner that wants to use her free time to learn a bit of Japanese for fun and making my own learning path the way I find it feats me better. I’ll probably be back with other apps and resources that I find interesting and helpful somehow. Until next time!