Give me a moment

Look up radical meanings. After each lesson that contains a radical, first see if the radical directly corresponds to a kanji. If so, use the meaning of the kanji and/or vocabulary. If it doesn’t have a kanji, then try to look the radical up online: here, here and/or here. Those meanings are generally much more closely related to how they will later be used in kanji and vocabulary. If you still haven’t found it, see if it corresponds to a hiragana or katakana character. Spending some time verifying the meanings of the radicals will help you remember them down the road. Some of the quasi-radicals and names for them that WaniKani uses can cause a good bit of confusion later (e.g. this 黽 is the radical for ‘frog’, not this 支, which is actually ‘support’ or ‘branch’).

Spread out lessons over the course of a week if needed; no need to do them all immediately.

Spend more time up front on lessons. When you go through each group of 5 items, don’t go straight to the quiz. Click the ‘I need more time’ button, and just cycle through those five items until you can recite them all without hesitation.

Don’t do new lessons until all reviews are done, or else it'll be easy to get overwhelmed.

Keep Apprentice items below 100 to reduce the amount of daily reviews (e.g. if you’ve got 90 apprentice items, cap that day’s lessons at 10). Smaller review stacks mean you can focus on learning from mistakes.

Go at whatever pace is comfortable while still trying to maintain a decent level up time (8 to 15 days). It’s much better to go at a slower pace than to rush and burn out.

Right after lessons:

Use the Self-Study feature to quiz yourself on the items you just learned. This will help things stick better for the next 4 hours before the first review.

Reviews:

Work on reviews at least once a day. Consistency is good, but you don’t need to set the fastest pace possible.

Make sure to get the reviews down to zero by the end of every day. If this becomes difficult, reduce the number of lessons you do per day.

During study and reviews, recite the kanji out loud, reading-then-meaning, no matter which one the question is asking for. The brain has a powerful instinct for memorizing things that occur (a) together, and (b) in a consistent sequence.

Identify critical items (“leeches”) early and put extra study time into them outside of the SRS system. These are items that you continually get wrong: you push them up to guru or master and they tumble back down to apprentice. One or two is fine, but if you let them accumulate, they will hinder your higher-level progress and overwhelm you.

Don’t be afraid to get the kanji wrong early on. It is better to make sure you have a good mnemonic and understanding of the kanji early on than to find out you have to refine it later. A wrong answer at Guru will set you back a few days. A wrong answer at Master will set you back a couple of weeks. A wrong answer at Enlightened will set you backabout 5 months.

Using Radicals

Break down the kanji into at least 2 but no more than 3 chunks using radicals. The fewer radicals we can chunk a kanji into, the more efficient the memorization.

Combine two or more radicals into a single new one, especially if those radicals appear together often. Instead of using them separately to form a mnemonic, combine them into a new radical with a good name that you can clearly tie to the meanings of the individual radicals.

Example: 土 (“dirt” radical) and 戈 (“drunkard” radical) appear together in 裁, 載, 戴, 栽 and 哉

Combine learnt kanji into radicals instead of trying to come up with a mnemonic for a kanji containing 5 different radicals.

Example: In level 59, the kanji 擬 means “Imitate”. Wanikani presents this as consisting of 5 different radicals. 擬 also has the same reading (ぎ) as 疑 from level 13, so it's even easier to remember.

Most of the time, radicals don’t have direct meaning and are just a visual tool. However, because Japanese kanji are derived from Chinese hanzi whose parts do have a meaning, you can use hanzi to make a given kanji easier to understand.

Example: 掃

Instead of breaking this kanji down into four different radicals, use hanzi instead to break it down into: 扌and 帚.

The kanji radical on the left means hand, and the Chinese hanzi on the right means broom. Together, hand + broom = sweep. A lot easier to understand!

Making Mnemonics

Look up the kanji on Jisho.org. Learning just something extra about the kanji fleshes out its character and makes it more memorable. You might find that WaniKani has omitted a crucial synonym that makes the kanji click in your head. Add that word to the synonyms tab. Or the kanji may be related to another kanji with a similar reading.

If you encounter a new kanji that reminds you of some other kanji you learned, chances are there’s a connection that will mutually reinforce the two and help you remember both better. Look it up on Jisho.org.

For example:

(If you went by the WaniKani mnemonic, you get some nonsense about a guy who says “I’m a cutter, yo”. It’s needlessly convoluted.)

Use the Kodansha Kanji Learners Dictionary to preview the kanji you’ll learn that day. On a sticky note, write down the kanji and their index numbers (on Jisho.org, under dictionary indices). It’s fun to try to guess the readings and meanings of kanji and/or words you haven’t learnt yet before you review them. (Getting it right is encouraging, getting it a bit wrong is disappointing in an interesting way, and being completely off base is strangely entertaining!)

Do kanji math. If you break the bigger vocab into its semantic and reading chunks, you get a better understanding of how Japanese works. For example:

労働者 = labor + work + someone = laborer

鼻歌 = nose + singing = humming

走り回る = 走り (run) + 回る (to turn/revolve) = to run around

左手 = ひだり + て

hand (手) + sack (袋) = glove (手袋)

Use Google image search to distinguish between very similar vocabulary words that would be better understood through a picture (e.g. 跳ぶ and 跳ねる both mean “to jump,” but actually mean different kinds of “jumping”).

When you encounter a reading with very few English phonetic or spelling equivalents, be creative with mnemonics that may use people’s names, have more than one word in it (e.g. “toe cheese” for とち) or allude to previous kanji you already learned.

Choose one thing to associate to a given Japanese sound to make more efficient, less confusing mnemonics (e.g. On level 13, WaniKani uses “guitar” to remember ぎ but level 59 uses “guillotine”). Whichever one you choose is not really that important, as long as it is a thing you can imagine clearly.

Look for a natural mnemonic in English that mimics the Japanese phonetics.

Example: The kanji 殻 means ‘shell/husk’ and has the kun-yomi から. This sounds like the English word “carapace” (which means the shell of a turtle or crab).

If you can’t find one, use similarities in romaji spelling with English words. To make this easier, use The Free Dictionary, which will generate a bunch of words based on spelling.

Use English words that have either soft or long ‘o’ and ‘u’ vowels in them, or distinct spellings to create mnemonics.

Example: The kanji 相 means “mutual” and has the on-yomi reading そう. Tie this to a related English word with sou in it, like “soulmates” (e.g. ‘mutual souls’).

Example: The kanji 組 means “group” and has the on-yomi reading そ. Tie this to a related English word with so in it, like “sorority” (a group of people).

Use English words that have identical spelling to the romaji pronunciation (“couch” for こう). This spelling reminds you that you need a ‘u’ to follow the ‘o.’

Make your own rules to get consistent English mnemonics. For example:

Before leveling up:

Look up the next level’s kanji to make the upcoming lessons easier. Read the meanings, readings and mnemonics now so that when lesson time comes around, you’ll have more familiarity.