(A wise @YandrosTheSane once said to me)
About me
Hi, I’m Robbie. I reached Level 60 on Tuesday, 381 days after I started, and if all goes well, I will Guru the last of the Level 60 kanji tomorrow morning. Over the course of those 381 days normal Japanese text has gone from opaque to legible to me. I’d hazard somewhere between JLPT N5 and N4 as a guess for my level last July. Last December I earned a B1 pass on the N3 exam, and I’m going to attempt N1 this December. I wanna tell you all about getting here.
Prehistory
The point of this little bit is to tell you where I’m coming from, how far I had gotten prior to last year, etc. The skinny is: “US standards ‘school good’” which is to say “functionally nowhere” (at least, what it felt like).
I first got interested in Japanese probably in middle school? I remember playing Pokemon, trying sushi for the first time as an outing with just my dad, and I’d been interested in languages and linguistics for a while. Me and a friend made up a couple hundred words for a language. I don’t recall where I first heard that Japanese had strange grammar and a difficult writing system, but I do know that I was the kind of child for whom that sounded like a fun dare.
At that time, I learned the basics of pronunciation and probably that there existed this thing called pitch accent and mora timing but not much else. I must have dutifully copied the hiragana table and katakana table idly a couple times over the years too. I made several other weeby friends and got into anime. I remember arguing with my friend about whether 「私はロッビー」was grammatical. I argued that it was not, because my book-gotten understanding was that Japanese can drop pronouns but not verbs. I don’t remember what her reasoning was; probably it wasn’t convincing to me but I’d say now that she was right and I was wrong. It’s maybe not the most crisp Japanese ever, but I’m sure I’ve encountered similar expressions in the wild.
In high school I had (still have actually) a book of Japanese grammar for beginners. It must have predated things like Genki, because the textbook gets pretty far grammatically but never abandons romaji and does not attempt to introduce kanji at all. I think I also asked for and received a copy of Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji vol. 1 as a gift, but didn’t really make it past the first few pages: if I remember correctly, Heisig delays learning how to read anything to the second volume, so the book felt like a mountain of vegetables I would somehow have to just force myself to eat with no obvious benefit. I never did.
I studied German in high school well enough to avoid my college’s language requirement (which—I’m glad I didn’t have to squeeze language classes into my schedule, but I like learning languages, so I also felt like I was deciding to miss out). At some point I picked up a copy of The Little Prince in Japanese and couldn’t read it at all.
In grad school (I’m a mathematician) in my 3rd year, after I finished my qualifying and candidacy exams, I was kinda staring down the prospect of just years of research until I Produced New Math™ and felt pretty nervous about just working without any kind of obvious progress. And then I realized that I was a student at a school that had Japanese classes, so I registered for Japanese I and took four semesters, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but left me with only about 100 kanji and a solid ~N4 grasp of grammar. This was 2019; that fall I didn’t continue with Japanese classes; partly because I’d run the course of the numbered classes and partly because I wanted to graduate that academic year, which I did.
During the tail end of lockdown I remember dusting off Heisig for all of about a week, but that was about it until…
きっかけ means trigger
Around the end of 2024 I woke up and was like wait, I am an adult who can purchase a Crunchyroll subscription if that is what is in my heart, and indeed in my heart I am a huge weeb.
I’m not really sure how, but I wound up several months later watching devouring the 3 then-existing seasons of Welcome to the Classroom of the Elite (ようこそ実力至上主義の教室へ, which I would translate as more like “Welcome to the Classroom of Meritocratic Supremacism” although “Elite” is pretty close and “Meritocratic Supremacism” is clunkier than the Japanese really sounds. Anyway, hereafter よう実) and was like holy moly I MUST know more about this whole thing.
The anime is based off of a light novel series (there is also a manga adaptation), and so I bought the first volume and … wowie still couldn’t read it. Around this time, a friend gave me his copy of the first volume of the Demon Slayer 鬼滅の刃 manga, which I could kinda-sorta understand the beginning of. He must also have mentioned WaniKani to me at some point.
So, that brings us to a year ago: I signed up for WaniKani in the hopes that I would be able to read よう実 one day. I finished the first couple volumes of 鬼滅の刃, dutifully copying down and looking up words I didn’t know yet. Painfully slow stuff. I was doing this on the train one day and the woman next to me asked me (apologizing, because we do live in NYC) if I was reading 鬼滅の刃 and was like “wow, what a great way to study!” I think I agreed but was grimacing inside too like “I can’t make it through this any other way”. Maybe she knew that?
Journey to Reading
Ok so much for the backstory. I’ll just wrap up storytime by spoiling the ending and saying that I am able to read よう実. According to Natively, I marked myself as reading the first volume at the beginning of April (after a good amount of hemming and hawing) and I finished it in mid-July. A couple days later I started the second volume and I finished it today. The books are basically the same length, but if you notice the second one took me half as long to read. How did that happen? Let’s find out. Btw I feel like I don’t read that kind of rhetorical question lead-in so often in English nonfiction content, but I feel like it’s very common in Japanese. Like a something something でしょうか type question in an intro chapter? Many such cases. Go figure!
The What of Studying
I decided early on to do my WK reviews more or less as soon as they were available, and my lessons similarly. As you can see above, I moved at just under the full speed possible more or less the whole way; it was pretty typical for me to fail enough Apprentice kanji reviews to delay level up slightly, and in any case, sticking closely to a 7-day level up schedule ends up stacking your reviews on certain days in a way that can feel pretty tiring.
In addition to WaniKani, here are other things I did over the course of the past year. I’ll tell you about how I feel about their usefulness later as well.
- I started back up on Duolingo Japanese
- I registered for the JLPT N3 exam (initially I was going to do N5)
- I took a “late intermediate” adult learners course in the fall semester (held once a week via Zoom)
- I discovered Kinokuniya while trying to find a weeby artist date to take myself on
- I think through this forum I discovered the Tadoku graded reader series and read one volume from levels 0–4
- I put together a “reverse WK” kanji deck on Anki for purposes of practicing writing kanji
- I joined the Absolute Beginner Book Club here on the forum. Through book clubs I read my first volume of manga in Japanese (ギャルと恐竜) and also my first with limited furigana (午后のあくび)
- On my own I read the first volume of Polar Bear Cafe (しろくまカフェ), whose anime I remembered fondly from college, ミラーさん, a graded reader novel for adults, and I picked up and put down 魔女の宅急便, the novel Kiki’s Delivery Service is based off of.
- I picked up Bunpro
- At the suggestion of this Days and Words YouTube video I decided to rinse (and I really do mean rinse) two pieces of media: the Japanese translation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (as a book and an audiobook) and the Death Note anime and manga.
These things take us to about May of this year. In the YouTube video above, Lamont claims that
between about the second and fifth month, you should hit a rocket of comprehension, which is about what it sounds like, where you start to be able to understand a lot more of the language than you previously could.
And indeed, I think that’s a fair description. I started those last two things in early January and finished reading Harry Potter in April (according to my Natively stats). I finished Death Note vol. 1 on March 28, vol. 2 on April 4, vol. 3 on May 18 and by June 26 I had finished all 12 volumes; I read vol. 12 in one day, whereas Demon Slayer, which Natively ranks as much easier than Death Note, took me almost a day or more to read one chapter back in August of last year.
Since then I’ve done a lot more reading and watching and was fortunate to have a chance to visit Japan for a week in June. 
What Worked?
I’ll go in order. Duolingo mostly did not help. Duolingo responds well to signals that your level has increased (especially if you take initiative and jump ahead with a test), but by itself I don’t think it does much to increase your level. That being said, I did pick up some vocabulary first from Duolingo, and maybe even a kanji or two a bit ahead of WK’s timing. Its score system, though, does have a claimed CEFR equivalence, which did empower me to register for the N3 level of the JLPT.
As for the JLPT. Obviously registering for an exam (even studying for one) is not the same as learning a language. However, it was definitely very motivating to use wkstats and see that if I continued at the quick pace I was at with WaniKani, I would have about 3/4 of the “N3 kanji” (scare quotes because all lists are unofficial) by test day.
Zoom class was mostly draining to sit in at the end of a workday. We learned some stuff, and it was nice to practice a little bit of speaking, but mostly I didn’t make friends via Zoom and I didn’t feel like I got much practice either. I think after a certain point, the purpose of a class is for you to reach the stage where you can realize that you don’t need to take another class, so it was nice that this was that for me with Japanese.
The Tadoku readers are a fantastic resource. If you, like me, hadn’t successfully read any Japanese before, I do recommend! It was honestly kind of healing to read the stories, which are genuinely interesting, even if their vocabulary is intentionally limited, and have it feel like reading.
I do recommend writing practice. After a certain point, the minutiae of WK’s “meaning” words for kanji are just that, minutiae (also not that i’m complaining, but “clear” and “dawn” are attached to three or four kanji each), so practicing the reverse definitely helps with review accuracy. Also, if you can reliably produce kanji with correct or near-correct stroke order even if you’re seeing them for the first time, you’ll have a better time looking up kanji you encounter and don’t know the reading of.
I highly recommend the book clubs on this forum. If you’re like me, you may not have many people in real life who are also a little crazy about learning Japanese, and it’s heartening to help and be helped understanding bits of grammar and unknown words.
Bunpro is worth it for me, not because I am a fan of SRS systems per se (he says on a forum for an SRS system), but because the explanation of grammar points and giving you a little practice filling them in is useful for when you can later acquire that knowledge by coming across and understanding instances of those grammar patterns in the wild. I haven’t been as consistent with it as WK and I doubt that I will even as WK starts to ease up. For example with the start of my new semester I accidentally let 150 cards build up over the week.
Of everything, Repeatedly listening and watching to something interesting to you to increase comprehension is probably my Number 1 recommendation. For example, I watched the first ~4 episodes of Death Note without subtitles probably 30 times each over the course of January and February and while the effect never has been linear, every couple days I’d find myself suddenly understanding more of a bit that had previously lost me.
I chose Death Note and Harry Potter because these are pieces of media that I was very familiar with in English and had enough motivation to want to understand in Japanese, and because a textual and audio version was readily available to me. It can take a particular kind of mindset to find that amount of repetition productive and not something to dread, so if you know how to cultivate or restore that for yourself, keep that in mind. But also, if it’s not fun? Hit the bricks.
Become a Parody of Yourself
That brings me to talking a little bit about my thoughts about consistency and speed or effort with WK (and Japanese in general). I don’t know if you were around for peak Tumblr, but maybe you remember this shirt?
This is kind of how I have been approaching Japanese the whole time. Even back in 2024, when I decided that the first video streaming subscription I would purchase would be Crunchyroll, there’s something kind of fun and freeing to be like “yep, I’m a nerd about this stuff, let’s go”.
I very quickly was like “oh, so you gotta be pretty diligent to get through WaniKani quickly? BET”. It seemed to me like a pretty good deal: spend a year really pushing to get good at something that I have wanted to be a bigger part of my life for a long long time.
I don’t know whether this is an intentional part of WaniKani’s design, but I’d say learning the reading for 大人, the kanji for 天才 and a new word, 入力, whose kanji I’d met separately in class but couldn’t have confidently pronounced otherwise really hooked me.
My perspective, as much as I am able to take it, is that 1) I want to be as fluent in Japanese as possible. No word is “too advanced” or “too niche,” just as I wouldn’t object to learning any English word I came across. 2) Every tool is likely as not going to suck slightly for me. This is the nature of being alive: things are not perfect. It is my job to learn, not the job of my teacher to teach perfectly. If things are within my power to change, by all means I should change them. But if they’re not, what am I going to do, quit? Who does that help exactly.
Also finally 3) I’m trying to learn to read, not become a farmer admiring and grooming my beautiful collection of Anki flashcards or whatever.
How I read
I tend to read books and manga in Japanese either on paper or with my iPad. I was surprised initially to discover that the Book Walker app is mostly hosting raster (which is to say pixel) graphics of manga, so that if you enlarge an image to try and parse out some teeny furigana, chances are you might see a pixelly blur anyway. If I recall correctly, even novels can be pretty hostile to copy-paste.
I have a Japanese–English dictionary app on my phone (Shirabe Jisho 白檜辞書 and not 調べ辞書, which is surely the pun) which allows you to draw kanji as well as type them. When I come to a word I don’t know, I look it up.
If I have the time and space, I’ll also keep a notebook with me. When I look up a word, I’ll write down the word as written and then any bits of the definition or reading which are new to me. At first, frequently both the reading and meaning were new so I’d write both—I think I have most of the words in the first several pages of the Demon Slayer manga and the first volume of よう実 written down this way. I’m pleased to report that lately I frequently only feel the need to write down either the meaning or the reading, since the other was close enough to my guess.
That’s kind of it. Although they’re in my notebook, I don’t frequently read through what I’ve written down (that’s true of my notebooks in general lol). Like I say, I’m not farming an Anki deck, I’m learning to read. If this means I look up the same word 15 times and next year I have to look it up a 16th, oh well.
It can be a little tricky to recognize when what you’re stuck on is a grammar point. Partly because grammar is just words again, of course, but grammar points in Japanese can be somewhat resistant to this lookup process, since they might be or use archaic conjugations or appear at first to be just a slop of hiragana that chunks ambiguously into words. If I suspect a grammar point afoot I’ll search Bunpro for it. Sometimes I’ve failed to find something only for it to turn up later in my (inconsistent) 3-grammar-cards-a-day Bunpro journey. Other times I’ve looked up a word a couple times only to find that Bunpro also considers just the use of that word to be a grammar point.
Initially I was kind of lamenting using my phone for these tasks. I don’t like being on my phone, and this creates a reason to have it with me almost constantly. I did purchase a small paper Japanese–English dictionary in December, but I didn’t find it very useful. As I’ve kept at it (and minimized my phone’s ability to interrupt me), I’ve found it actually remarkably easy to focus on reading, looking up words, reading and looking up words. Some of the times that I’ve been slowest to respond to texts, for example, have been because I was reading Japanese with the dictionary app open, so that not even my lock screen lighting up would let me know I had a text message.
I am looking forward to uninstalling Tsurukame (I think I’m gonna give it another week haha). I think I will also try out using a Japanese dictionary for looking things up. If you have Japanese–Japanese dictionary app suggestions, please let me know
Misc. WK advice
I agree with the messaging Koichi and the app give you: do your reviews. Do your reviews on vacation, do them on your birthday. The SRS timings are tuned pretty well: the longer you wait to review a new Apprentice item, the more likely you are to fail it. Obviously that’s not the end of the world.
As much as possible, do not get stuck on failure (actually, this is one thing I quite dislike about SRS systems: they risk throwing up what the Comprehensive Input people might call your “affective filter” pretty frequently). You are not succeeding or failing when you do your reviews. You are doing your reviews. You are not succeeding or failing when you read and run across a word you don’t know or have forgotten, you are building your knowledge of Japanese by reading.
As much as possible, do not get stuck on success. You should not be aiming for level 60 per se; you should think of this as a possible step in your journey towards greater comfort with Japanese.
If you want to go fast, one way is to do your new lessons as soon as possible, but preferably in the morning so that at least your first review is on the same day.
If you want to be reminded of when you have new reviews available, look at your forecast or install an app. I used Tsurukame, although I think I prefer the web interface for doing lessons. Being able to do reviews while offline (or only intermittently connected) was pretty valuable for me, since I have significant subway commute time.
If you do a lot of lessons at once, you may need to remind yourself to actually take in the mnemonic stories. Because they’re easy to read for the most part, if you are ok at holding things in short term memory, you might trick yourself into believing that internalized the mnemonic and the way to go from the kanji to the mnemonic even if you have not.
The Extra Study tools are your friends if you want to increase your accuracy.
Cards at Apprentice are cards you will see again within the next two days. If you have 150 cards at Apprentice, you are guaranteed to have at least 150 reviews due in the next few days. Cards at Guru are cards you will see again within the next two weeks. If you have 1500 cards at Guru, you are guaranteed to have 1500 reviews due in the next two weeks.
Lastly, start reading Japanese. I don’t really care when what or how. Especially in the last few levels, it feels awesome to unlock a card on WaniKani that you’ve already seen somewhere else. I felt able to really start reading graded readers at around level 10, and probably started native content at about level 20. It will probably be very tough at first.
There will be this weird crazy beautiful thing that happens where you’ll kinda feel the veil between you and the language start to thin. You might come across a bit of Japanese in the wild and remind yourself to try reading it and shock yourself by succeeding. You probably will do a bit less reading for a few days and find that the language feels a little further away from you. You probably will take a peek at a different kind of Japanese (tweets vs news articles vs manga vs novels vs nonfiction, for example) and find that it’s suddenly hard again.
In Japan in June, I spent part of my trip at a goofy fancy hotel near Shinjuku. Since I was alone, I got to talk basically in only Japanese if I wanted. One of the hotel staff told me I needed a Japanese girlfriend, since “you can read better than me, but I can speak better than you.” I’m not opposed, but on balance it’s likely I’d prefer a Japanese boyfriend, and I’m not really in a rush lol but uhhh hmu I guess?? And indeed, surprising me most of all, I could read any important sign and even make a solid guess at most place names. Listening was also okay, but conversation was tougher.
Anyway, that’s it for me. This weekend I’m gonna celebrate either go to the beach or try and corral some friends to watch an anime movie with me. It occurs to me just now that I should take myself out for sushi, so let’s go do that.
Thanks to the WK team. ホントにお世話になりました。読めるようになることは凄いプレゼントで、夢みたいなんです。感謝！ Thanks also to everybody who commented on my study log <3 especially if you were one of the many people who encouraged me to jump into reading よう実. In addition to @YandrosTheSane I’ll take the liberty of tagging @polv, @shitsurei, @Jintor, @Malinkal, @Lisaveeta and @trunklayer
じゃね！
)
おめでとう！
