Some folks have asked for updates on how I’m doing with some of my initiatives for the year as outlined in my birthday post, so if you are not interested in personal stuff, you can skip this post. :)
Continue reading “February 2019”Tag: Wanikani
(I apologize for the lighting quality on all pictures in this post; it is late and I did not feel like messing with it beyond getting clear images.)
I wanted a Crabigator sticker for my laptop now that I’m digging in pretty hard in learning my kanji via WaniKani, and noticed that the Tofugu store was having a pretty rad sale on pretty much everything.
Turns out they have a pretty great set of WaniKani stickers, so I ordered a package that included those stickers and a tenugui with one of their illustrations. They showed up today, and I love the merch:
The stickers are nicely-rendered and high-quality vinyls, and the tenugui is also pretty great. It’s slightly small to fit around my giant gourd as a headband, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to use it that way.
But the coolest thing was this hand-written postcard that came with the merch:
Kristen, I want to say thank you for taking the time to personalize my order, and I hope this will be a good year, as well. I’m a few weeks back into rejoining WaniKani now that I have purchased a subscription, and I’m already hitting those points where I level up my kanji and unlock a stack of vocabulary, causing me to run like I’m being chased by the boulder at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Some of you know that I had been working on learning Japanese recently in a renewed capacity. I had started on it some time ago in a very casual way as a hobby thing, and last year at Combo Breaker, I was in a situation where having knowledge of the language would have been a huge plus, so I decided to start again.
Jon Chinnery recommended WaniKani to me for learning the language from a vocabulary and reading standpoint, and the system proved to be very helpful and successful. I ripped through the first two levels fairly well and was on my way towards finishing the third, which is where the free tier runs out.
I ran into yet another instance as a bracket runner at CEO where having more functional use of the language would have helped me a lot. I knew that I knew just enough Japanese that I should not attempt to speak it in a functional capacity.
WaniKani has a sale every year around the Christmas season, where a lifetime membership to the service is 1/3 less expensive, so I decided to pare back a bit and wait for the sale. The end result has been that I haven’t touched it in over two months, and the other day, I decided to reset my progress completely to re-start the track and prepare for purchasing the full product in preparation for the next year of learning.
So I’m back on the train of learning a language for the first time since graduate school again. Japanese has proven to be quite difficult, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. I’m planning on taking a fairly long time to get there, as I’m only doing one set of reviews and lessons a day, but the nice thing about WaniKani is that it lets you assign your own pace and handles the spaced repetition for you.
Let me know if you have any tips or suggestions as I learn!