As for time like somedays i do it faster but just often i just feel lile i can’t think and i can’t focus and i just get lost in thougjts or distracted or nothing makes sense and yeah it ends up taking a long time
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In most of the (English) rankings I checked out recently there is something like a close race between five languages and finally tonal languages are ranked highest together with Japanese though it is not considered a tonal language (because of its writing system).
In order to have a better idea on how Mandarin compares to Japanese in terms of difficulty I studied it for some months on Duolingo. My impression is, that the initial hurdle for new learners is higher (not if you have already a Kanji knowledge), because there is no Hiragana like Mora- writing system, so either you use the Hanzi or the transcription. The Grammar is definitely closer to English and didn’t seem very complex compared to Hindi which I also study a bit now. The tonality is surprisingly easier to hear and produce than I thought it would be but it is definitely a challenge to remember so many short and similar sounding words. I think it is doable but you might need a talent for such an quest.
What I think is missing in the rankings, and I think it is due to the fact that what is called fluency there is actually not a very high level, definitely not native is, that Japanese has many layers of politeness and the pitch accent, which is dismissed completely. I would say that studying pitch accent is in the end the same as studying tonality in Mandarin but it is just not on the radar of most of the learners. In my opinion, if I would speak English in an accent I inevitably would have without taking care about the accent like most learners (including me so far) do in Japanese, it would be really hard to speak of fluency of any kind.
As a summary I think the differences between (at least the ones considered as the hardest to learn for any given native) languages is starting to fade out after reaching a certain proficiency and that makes it similar to playing an instrument. What is harder, piano or violin? There is simply no answer to that.
My intuitive feeling about it is, that there are not many people who could actually compare studying Mandarin to Japanese on a higher level because they would have to learn both to an extent that is simply not reasonable considering the time necessary for becoming really good at it. So I think the most comparisons are not complete and that’s why they differ also so much in what are the most difficult languages to learn (for English speakers).
So there’s no official ranking then? It’s personal and subjective…?
There is the army ranking with categories with Mandarin AND Japanese rated as most difficult for English natives. There are some language schools with their own ranking and often Mandarin is considered more difficult than Japanese because of the reasons I wrote about.
My personal opinion is, that pitch accent is underrated in that argument.
I’ve never tried mandarin, I only find that listening to it I can’t even mimic many of the sounds (like arabic, just can’t make some of the sounds). Does Mandarin have “politeness” built into the language too?
I’m genuinely surprised, I would have thought a few other languages would be more difficult. I tried Arabic just because sooooo many of my colleagues are from the Middle East and I thought it would be fun but I found it much harder than Japanese… I guess that’s where the subjectivity comes in.
This happens with me quite often when I use Anki. I’ll go through a couple cards and then just stop for minutes (I’ll want to look up a kanji on my phone but then I open another website or yt, or a word or context sentence just sets me off thinking about something or other), which over the couse of a review session can add up to like 40 extra minutes in aggregate:/ The context sentence 幸せな人生だった (It was a good life) in particular has yet to fail to get me to come up with a new dying scenario or two where I utter those words 
Anyway, a trick that works for me to keep me on track with Anki is to have coffee and a particular brand of chocolate that I like while doing reviews, with the rule that I’m allowed once square of chocolate for every 10 cards I go thorugh (not including new cards or cards I’m relearning after getting them wrong). It’s sort of motivating in the sense that right after taking a bite my dopamine seems to be engaged in a way that makes a few cards fly by, and after a few more cards, well, there are only a few more cards left between me and the next bite of chocolate:p For some reason I don’t have the same problem with wanikani tho. I’m just sharing my anecdotal experience in case you might want to try it out.
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I can only answer from my Duolingo basic knowledge
I don’t think so. It also doesn’t have conjugations of verbs, no gender of nouns etc. so in terms of grammar it is really simple while eg in Hindi there are already three ways of saying you (according to politeness) and you have to conjugate the verb according to the gender of the subject and so on.
I don’t think comparing two languages is just personal btw. but in order to be able to compare it scientifically you would need a big enough group of people who are fluent in both languages and as I said before there are not a lot of people who became real fluent in both Japanese AND Mandarin because it takes sooo much time to get there (as an English native eg).
Consistency is key, not speed. The same people talking about how fast they blitz through it will be the same ones going on a break in 3 months and returning two years later asking what went wrong. My best advice is that if the forum puts you in a negative mindset, then you should be avoiding it at all costs. There is no point comparing yourself to others, you should only ever compare yourself to who you were yesterday and strive to improve on that.
I studied abroad in Japan in 2013 and have been learning Japanese ever since, at my own pace. I probably went from N4-N3 over like 8 of those years haha. But went from N3-N2 in half a year once I had the basics down. The more you do it, the faster you get. But it’s no race, more of one of those endurance runs. Most don’t finish. But if you look forward, forget about others and just keep on keeping on, you’ll be fine.
TLDR
Get off the forum.
Endurance crawl…
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Your accuracy’s pretty good! I don’t remember exactly what the “target” accuracy is, but it was somewhere around 85%, so you’re definitely on track.
I feel like if you broke reviews and/or lessons up into smaller sessions, you’ll spend less time overall on it than if you try to force yourself to do it all at once. The longer a session goes, the greater your chance for your brain to just to stop focusing on it. You can start a review session and hit the wrap-up button before answering anything, do those 5 or 10 or whatever, and if your focus is holding, do it again, until you’ve cleared them or you feel your concentration slipping, whichever happens first. (I find sometimes that doing it in little chunks like that helps me do more. Sure, sometimes I can only get a few in before my brain goes bleh and I gotta do something else, but sometimes I’ll unexpectedly clear out my whole backlog before I’ve realized it.)
And ideally, when you start doing stuff other than WK, it wouldn’t be hours of that on top of your 2-4 hours of WK. You’d cut down on the time you spend on WK, even if that means cutting down on the number of lessons you do each day and levelling up slower, and devoting some of that other time to grammar, some to reading if you feel up to it (whether that’s easy graded readers, or joining one of the book clubs, or just finding something that interests you and sitting down with a dictionary to puzzle through it - even if it wasn’t an old book club pick, there are plenty of people on here willing to answer any questions you may have) or something to teach you vocab you won’t find on WK, particularly kana-only words
I’ve ended up with a bunch of different resources that I use, but I don’t use all of them every day. Drops, Duolingo, WK, and BunPro I try to do at least a little bit of every day, more if I’m up to it, as well as read at least one page of a novel or one chapter of manga. There’s also KameSame that I try to use to reinforce the stuff I’ve learned on here, 方法 for vocab in the book clubs I’m in, Katsu to practice conjugation, a couple apps to supplement basics and also stroke order for kana and kanji, but these I don’t use anywhere near daily aside from 方法. My study day looks very different day to day depending on mood and what brain feels like letting me do.
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If you’ve made it to level 10, you have what it takes to keep going. The pace you maintain only matters to yourself - if you’re able to stay motivated, then that’s all that matters.
I stopped comparing my progress to other people on the message boards a long time ago - there are people who seem superhuman to me, in terms of their speed and accuracy, but that doesn’t help me in my own progress.
It sounds like you are working hard. I would recommend trying to balance out all the WaniKani grinding with something fun, like watching movies or reading manga. You should be proud of the progress you’ve made and just remember that it’s a long road. Even someone who burns through WaniKani still has to do a ton of additional reading or they will eventually lose all the items they burned.
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Anyone with 98% accuracy or higher is probably cheating anyway XD
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Or spending a massive amount of time outside WK studying kanji, which sort of misses the point.
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Or reset and are still going through material they’ve already seen.
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Where are people getting those bar charts of level progression vs time?
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Your accuracy is pretty good, if you’re getting distracted or lost in thoughts, then that’s not really time spent in WaniKani. 
If nothing makes sense, or you can’t focus, then I would suggest either getting something wrong on purpose, and moving on, or taking a break and coming back later. You don’t really get anything out of it if you’re blanking on an answer. Hope you can keep going. 
I would say to just keep doing what you’re doing, since your accuracy is high, but I just say this as you don’t seem content with your process.
I mean, that sounds fun, and also surely helps with your retention.
I wouldn’t say underrated, I think people just don’t consider pitch accent as part of the language unless you want to get to a native level. At least that’s what I’ve encountered throughout my years both as a student and as a teacher.
While I agree to a certain extent, there’s no going around the fact that some people are just “built different” and can actually go fast and learn at the same time. In this case, I guess you would say that they have both consistency and speed, so your point still stands.
I also wouldn’t say get off the forum, maybe just focus on the parts that help you and ignore the others.
There’s no place on Earth where there’s only positivism, you need to know how to take advantage of where you’re at.
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If you want to compare the difficulty of Mandarin with Japanese I think it would be necessary to compare the time you need to go to native level otherwise it will be difficult to set up a level that can be compared. For example it you study Mandarin you are aware from the beginning that you have to shadow to get the correct pitch and in Japanese most people hear about pitch accent relatively late. So you have to spend longer time later on to become native. If you say it is not a part of Japanese native- ness to have the correct pitch accent than Japanese would be easier to study than Mandarin I think.
In my personal opinion I wouldn’t call an English speaker “native level” if they would eg say “za basu” instead of “the bus” and in Japanese it is the same, it’s just that until now there is not so much momentum in becoming native in Japanese or as you say most of the people are not aware of the issue.
I saw the title of this thread and thought it was asking for discouragement, maybe to test how well OP could handle it. Like demotivational images or something.
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Chocolate is a great motivator!
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