Finally I reached level 60 after 4 years and a half spent on Wanikani.
And honestly it was totally worth it. I am not sure that last levels are providing usefull kanji and vocab as highlighted by mainy other people but yet I feel really satisfied to reach something that looked hard to me. I feel like spending years and hours in something make it important and worthy, and so I feel proud to have spent that time learning all these kanjis.
From a pure learning language point of view I feel like it could have been shorter, sometimes wanikani makes you learn some not so usefull words I guess, but feeling good with my routine of waking up a bit earlier to spent 30min on WK helped me to stick with this learning process (I am not sure if I would have stick to it with a quicker approach).
I also had the chance to spend a year in Japan with working holiday last year and knowing a bit of Japanese was definitively life changer. We (with my wife) had the chance to meet lot of Japanese people and we ended spending times in friends’ family where no one was able to speak english.
Knowing Kanji is a real plus because at some point Japanese vocab feel like a rebus (or a puzzle, not sure of that word in english). You hear a new word and you try to understand the kanji composition to get the meaning, or knowing the meaning you try to guess the kanjis to help memorize it. In that point I feel like Wanikani is definitively a game changer in my learning process and I felt like Japanese people are also doing this work of getting all words kanji composition to understand the meaning (as we can do in french with latin for example but it’s far less direct and usefull).
The only thing I want to tell WK beginners is that it totally worth it. It totally worth the time spent, sometimes the lack of motivation (look at my level up, you can see sometimes I was fed up lol) because in the end it is a core learning for Japanese language. If you ever have the chance to go to Japan and that you go a bit outside big cities like Tokyo, this language learning will feel like a life changer.
My only advice would be to stick with it every day, even if you only do your reviews or your spend just few minutes on it because if you stick to it you will succeed. And please don’t be too harsh with yourself looking at people finishing WK in 1 year, take your time, slow down to not be overwhelmed and you will succeed !
