Today’s my 100th Day of Studying on WaniKani. Getting to know everyone in this community has been awesome, so I wanted to share my happiness with you all and what my plans for the future are.
Studying on this app has been an emotional rollercoaster for me. I can’t count how many times I’ve lost my mind over the fact that I’m a little slow on leveling up or whenever I’m behind on learning vocabulary, but I wouldn’t trade those struggles for anything else.
My Progress So Far:
Awhile back, I joined the amazing Absolute Beginner Book Club and got to read “Gal & Dino”. I fell in love with the characters and would read a chapter per day until I finished all the way to Volume 5.
Then, life got a little busy, and I fell behind on learning Vocabulary, so whenever I have time, I would try to catch up (but I’m still behind)
I’ve finally been able to think more in Japanese and form some sentences
Whenever I see kanji “in the wild” I was able to read it and understand sentences.
If I watch subtitles, I can actually understand a lot of Japanese in the anime I’ve seen before (Genres like Slice of Life I could understand up to 80%)
Also reached WaniKani Level 15
There’s probably more but I just forgot lol
My Plans For The Future:
From here forth, I want to finish Level 60 by around October or November this year (if I’m going at a good pace)
Get back to reading and listening to Japanese on a daily basis
Catch up with all my WK Vocabulary (seriously, send help, I’m falling behind )
I plan to take the JLPT N1 next year, followed by more studies so I can take the KanKen 1 (Kanji Proficiency Test)
Then maybeeeeeeeee sometime in the future, I’m going to study abroad in Japan
Anyways, I’ll continue to work hard and I’m very thankful to be in such a supportive community.
I’m just going to say that getting to level 60 in October - November is not possible for you. You’d have to go faster than 6 days per level to get it, and with the way the SRS unlocks work, you can’t actually do that.
There are a bunch of late levels that can be done in half the time, so it might be barely doable by the end of this year if they full-speed everything. I would not recommend it.
First of all, congratulations! You are progressing very fast and you seem genuinely very hard working. Hat off to you
However, a word of caution. Learning Japanese, and any language for that matter, is a marathon, not a sprint. While your goals are admirable, I would urge you to think about your goals realistically. While N1 is feasible, don’t underestimate how hard it is, only partially (even if heavily) reliant on your understanding and kanji knowledge.
Of course, it all depends of your level! If you’ve studied Japanese for a while, have solid understanding of your limits, I might be wrong. However giving yourself realistic, step-by-step goals, would serve you better (eg N3 in December). If you keep your 7-8 days schedule levelling up you might also reach level 60 by the end of the year (the fastest you could do is mid-December).
At the end of the day, you are the master of your fate. That being said, we see many burn out too fast, being discouraged by setbacks, and sometimes, unfortunately, failures. All because of the simple reason that they want to achieve too much too fast (myself included).
Keep up the hard work and good luck with your studies!
When you say you are falling behind with your vocabulary (send help), are you implying you only do kanji lessons to level up faster and leave your vocab for later??? do more people do this?
I might be really really slow at this,… but I usually manage so all stuff from previous levels is done before going into the next.
You hit severe diminishing returns as you reach the end of the course. If you full-speed these levels you’ll most likely have to spend most of your study time rushing through hundreds of kanji that you will most likely forget by the time you encounter them in the wild.
My advice is always to go as fast as reasonably possible through the first 30 levels or so, then start pivoting towards reading more and moving Wanikani to a lower priority.
Nah, I usually do it in one go. But once or twice before I was gonna leave some words for later and it kept piling up. So now I’m a few levels behind, but I’m catching up.
)
I’ll make sure to keep it in mind so I don’t burn out haha