It’s definitely worth it!
When you see a Kanji/vocabulary word you haven’t seen in 4-6 months, and go “oh, I think it’s this” right away, and you are right… It’s not only a great feeling, but proof that you are really learning. I burned something yesterday that I felt I knew on instinct. I didn’t know why I thought it was so, but obviously, the real answer is because I learned it well with this SRS system. It was a happy surprise, and a bit of an “Ohhh!” moment for me - I think the first time where I’ve really seen evidence of the SRS system at work, because I’m pretty low level still so am usually exposed to most of the items elsewhere still.
So it’s totally worth it! The first three levels are free, so you might as well give them a try. : D
I was one of those part-time studying people, pretty much like tomroyal. I took high school and university classes on Japanese, but never seemed to retain any of my knowledge, especially the kanji and vocabulary. So despite studying for a long time, my kanji comprehension was pitifully meagre.
Then I started Wanikani, and I can say in my case there were immediate benefits, once I hit levels that contained kanji and vocabulary I wasn’t familiar with. All of a sudden, all the Japanese text I was trying to read was so much easier. Vocabulary and kanji I was learning in WK were showing up in the text, and kanji and vocab I’d seen but didn’t know in the text showed up in WK. Even if I didn’t understand the vocabulary yet, remembering the common readings of the kanji made it far quicker to search up kanji, which led to faster reading (very useful for not spending 4 goddamn hours trying to translate one page in a light novel).
Like everyone else, I recommend you supplement your learning with other sources, because WK won’t help you learn grammar and obviously does not contain all the vocabulary you’ll ever need. But it’s very good for picking up kanji. Personally I recommend reading as much as you can. Light novels, newspapers, video games, anime (though that’d help with hearing moreso than reading JP), all of that will help you associate kanji and vocabulary to meanings and make your learning quicker. Also, it’s more fun than just straight up memorizing and reviewing, so that’ll give you motivation to stick with it.
If you’re like me and need something structured like SRS to help you learn, I fully recommend WK. I once tried Anki for learning a language (Chinese, close enough right), and I just couldn’t do it. There’s something charming and appealing about Wanikani that makes it fun and easier to stick to. It’s still something that needs a bit of discipline and commitment though. If you do it once a day like me you’ll get days where you have 100+ reviews and if you skip one day suddenly you have 200 or 300 reviews, and that can be a pain to get through. But it’ll be worth it in the end.
