Just out of interest do you know what the shortest time would be to burn everything and have completed Wanikani? When people say they have got to level 60 in under a year that doesn’t mean they have burnt everything as well does it?
Content keeps getting added and revised, so you’re gonna have to draw a line for yourself how much you want to burn and where you want to stop. The answer is going to depend on that and could be anywhere from “a few months after reaching level 60” to “never in your life”
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I think the shortest possible time (assuming doing ALL items when they’re available) would probably be time to reach level 60 + 6 months when the last burn review comes in.
@peterA In general it’s better to take it slower and treat WaniKani like any other tool in your language learning arsenal 
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Is it my imagination or do we sometimes see “I’ve reached level 60” or “i’ve just completed my last lesson” but we never see “i’ve just burnt my last item” postings?
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I guess that’s because content is always being added as you say. Yamitenshi.
Those exist as well, but many people just mention their plans post-level 60 in their level 60 “graduation” posts so no need for an extra thread.
Also, I would say there is waning interest in trying to 100% WaniKani, because at levels past ~40 the diminishing returns are brutal and one doesn’t have to even reach level 60 to know all of the kanji WaniKani teaches and some it doesn’t.
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I know of exactly 2 wanikani users that have burnts 100% of all items. The fact is, it’s incredibly timeconsuming to burn everything. While in theory, it’s 6 months after you’ve gotten to lv 60, that’s not realistic or has ever happened as far as I know. (pretty sure someone would have posted and bragged about that insane feat).
You won’t burn every item on your first try. In fact, for several of them you’ll only burn them on the 3rd or more attempt if they’re true leeches. That means years of using Wanikani to actually burn every item.
It’s a much more sensible goal to decide to reach lv 60 AND to finish all your lessons and at least get them to Guru or Master and then call it a day. Or for me, to burn 85% of all items. That’s plenty. The rest will be leeches that just takes even more time to finally burn. if you have lifetime, sure keep at it, but if you have a yearly or montly subscription, it’s not worth your money.
And, once you’ve gotten that far, you really need to put the majority of your time into immersion and reading anyway, or what you’ve learnt will start to come apart at the seams and be forgotten. You need to make use of what you learn on WK for the knowledge to stick long-term (the same for any language knowledge).
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WK has diminishing returns as you advance.
that means that at some point in your journey to learning japanese, you will get much more progress from other activities. there comes a point where literally just reading books for fun (in japanese) teaches you more than continuing on WK.
where exactly that is will differ from person to person. but it’s almost certainly long before you burn your last items.
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I think I reached level 60 in November 2020, and have kept going, no scripts, lots of leeches. I still have 96 items left to burn. There’s a good chance more items will be added before I burn those! Though realistically that won’t slow me down by much.
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At level 40
N5 100%
N4 100%
N3 98.09%
N2 83.38%
N1 32.71%
This is according to WKstats.
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I think I reached level 60 in November 2020, and have kept going, no scripts, lots of leeches. I still have 96 items left to burn. There’s a good chance more items will be added before I burn those! Though realistically that won’t slow me down by much.
Have you achieved the most chill review schedule every? Is it like a couple a week?
Your point being? 
I did mention levels past ~40, not exactly level 40. Also, what’s more useful than JLPT levels is general jouyou kanji frequency, since WaniKani doesn’t follow JLPT levels strictly.
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I might add that, past Level 40 or something, WaniKani gets more often not to teach enough vocabularies to support Kanji meanings and readings.
In addition, lower level Kanji could be found to miss some readings and meanings as well.
To the point that, as many vocabularies as have been learnt from WaniKani, it’s not enough to claim of really knowing 2000 Kanji.
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I copied the stats from wkstats so people can see the percentage for JLPT at 40 since you mentioned the return diminishes at around the 40s level, so I just picked level 40 just so users can get an idea/look at it.
Honestly the most important kanji to me is the ones that comes up in the manga I read. Lol
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It’s amazing isn’t it that once you’ve learnt all the kanji in wanikani you’re still only a third of the way to knowing all the Kanji to pass the N1 exam. It shows how much work you need to do to pass the N! exam
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It’s amazing isn’t it that once you’ve learnt all the kanji in wanikani you’re still only a third of the way to knowing all the Kanji to pass the N1 exam. It shows how much work you need to do to pass the N! exam
I think you could easily pass the kanji section of N1 if you “finish” wanikani assuming your grammar is up to snuff. What is it like 50 or 60% right to pass? You also can make educated guesses and whatnot.
Don’t despair!
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It’s not that bad. Note they said level 40, not 60 (the last). Further, the number isn’t cumulative – meaning that it’s 1/3 of the kanji estimated to be on N1 and not any other JLPT level. Using WKstats numbers, iIf you make it cumulative, it’s actually 59% at level 40. But when you finish WK, those numbers become 79% and 88%.
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oh yes…thankyou
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It varies! Usually a little more than that, but about 10 a week is probably the average.
This week I have 20 
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I don’t know about how the JLPT samples the kanjis it wants to test, but note that in the real world the distribution is highly skewed. For instance while at level 40 you will know like ~1400 kanji which is a long way from reaching N1 or full joyo, in practice you’ll know about 95% of the kanji you encounter in your typical modern Japanese text.
On this I fully agree with @Iinchou, my current objective is to continue doing one level/week until I reach level 40 and then slow down for the rest of the journey to 60. By then I expect that I will be more limited by grammar and vocabulary knowledge (especially kana words) than pure Kanji. Actually even right now at level 28 I find myself looking up hiragana words and complicated turns of phrases more often than kanji when playing videogames.
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