47 now, started 6 yrs ago but “life” gets in the way so progress is slow. Still working on it here and there and lately picking it back up again. Not working now so going to see about putting more effort into it.
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I started Wanikani when I was 52, got to Level 60 last spring and am working on burning everything. I don’t believe that being in your 50s counts as “old” for these kinds of things. American culture (not sure if you’re from the U.S.) perpetuates the myth that anyone past their teens is decrepit. We’d all be a lot better off if we stopped buying into that BS.
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I’m 50+ years old and I’ve been using WaniKani since July 2024. By the end of 2024, the reviews started getting a bit overwhelming, so little by little I adjusted the number of new lessons to keep my daily WaniKani time reasonable. Now I’ve found a good balance and enjoy studying every day.
I’ve also been able to get back to another service I used before to study Japanese itself. I had to drop it temporarily because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with my WaniKani reviews.
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Thanks for all the encouragement. Everyone, lets keep learning.
I’ve reached level 3 now.
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I went on Christmas vacation. I’ve reached level 4 now.
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I’m now 71、started WK four years ago. While continuing my Japanese studies, I dropped WK at Level 19. Just re-started it a few months ago, reset down three levels; and now working through a backlog of reviews. (I’m a Lifetime member, and have used WK continuously as a reference, even while not actively progressing.)
That’s only a “success story,” from a perspective that any persistent effort to study Japanese, at this age, can be considered a success. For me, it’s not getting to the mountaintop (proficiency), it’s about the journey (studying and learning, keeping my mind active).
頑張って！
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That was my reason for starting, too. Along with fact that every single person in my family over 80 hadd dementia. I plan to break that curse, and so far so good.
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I’ll be 50 in March. Started WK a bit over a year and a half ago to get back into Japanese learning (took a couple classes in my mid-20s). I’m on WK Lv21 now and it’s been pretty useful for expanding my kanji and vocab knowledge a little bit every day. Need to spend more time on grammar review/learning and reading practice…
All the online tools available now are pretty amazing compared to what it was like back in the early 2000s. Even just Unicode/UTF8 support everywhere is such a vast improvement over the encoding hell of EUC-JP/SHIFT-JIS/JISX-0208/etc makes things so much easier to deal with.
It’s never too late to learn things!
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I’ll be 50 in March. Started WK a bit over a year and a half ago to get back into Japanese learning (took a couple classes in my mid-20s).
This is exactly me. Took classes in mid 20s.
This topic is so inspiring. I’m gonna make 35 this year and even I think “I’m too old for this” sometimes…
In my opinion even if you learned just one kanji with wanikani, you already used this site successfully
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I was going to ask on this thread - what does ‘successfully’ mean. I’m sure I’ve forgotten or never truly got a lot of my burnt items but しょうがない - most important for me is to have been exposed to the kanji or vocab and to have a chance to recognize it later ‘in the wild’.
I remarked to a Japanese teacher >25 years ago that ~2,000 Joyo Kanji were too many for me to learn and she said she agreed: “here are
一二三. Now you only have to learn 1,997.”
優しかったです。
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That’s what my Dad said at 80 when he learned to use computers.
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I started WK Aug 2014 when I was still 39yo. Two resets in WK and slowly taking all kinds of lessons outside WK, mostly self study.
I’m giving myself a challenge to pass N5 this year, in which I’ll be 51yo.
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I’m 68, started almost 3 months ago and have reached level 7. I’ve been diddling around with Japanese for years and years but only started to really try to learn it with courses etc. when I turned 67. Beside kanji issues, I’m somewhere between N4 and N3, I think.
My main problem with kanji has been that I can (relatively) easily remember the meanings but not all those darned readings. WK seems to be helping with the readings. Yay!
Now that I’ve retired, I go on trips. Have to pause new lessons a few days before leaving to keep the number of reviews during the trip down.
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