Editing Japanese learning resources (section)

== WaniKani ==
WaniKani teaches reading individual words, focusing on reading kanji, hence the name.

The advice for learning Japanese kanji given in Gamb's guide is that kanji don't appear on their own and don't have pronunciations independent of being in words; in Japanese, kanji are just sememes. There's hence no meaningful notion of "learning kanji" seperately from learning vocabulary.

WaniKani disbelieves this, and instead

* teaches a set of WaniKani platform-specific kanji-parts, called radicals, that each appear in many kanji. Because these are formed from the same generator of breaking down kanji, WaniKani's radical list has overlap with other lists of radicals
* once a radical has been learned, teaches the kanji that contain that radical, with their primary meaning and the list of possible pronunciations that it can take when it appears in a word
* once the kanji and its pronunciations have been learned, teaches words that contain that kanji.

Each radical, kanji and word come with associated mneumonics for the shape and where relevant pronunciation.

This means that rather than learning kanji as being drawn from the infinite space of possible squiggles, they're learned as draws from a more finite space of easier-to-learn WaniKani radicals; and rather than learning words as being drawn from a large space of valid strings of Japanese phonemes, from a more finite space of possible readings for their component kanji; at the cost of adding a lot of additional scaffolding to learn that isn't used at higher levels or outside of WaniKani. 

By the time I started using WaniKani, I already knew most of the beginner words, so I can't quite vouch for the value of WaniKani's method, though it is fairly canonical as far as