I’ll be buying a lifetime membership when the sale is on. I can’t wait.
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That winter sale is going to be hands down my best Christmas gift.
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Same here 
I need lifetime, otherwise spend wayy too much money on monthly.
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This is so salient.
Also, don’t feel like you need to be at X level just to do reading. Find graded material or just toss yourself into the fire (you have to at some point anyway), as long as it’s a good n+1 situation where you’re not hopelessly lost.
You have to make the items on here into actual words. Until you’ve formed meaningful connections around them, they’re just trivia.
But also – Realize that WK’s full 2,000 is a lot, and you’re not going to be functionally illiterate the whole time before you reach level 60. By the mid-upper thirties (where I am now), you’ve learned the vast majority of kanji covered in the N2 test, for example, and accordingly will be able to read most everyday material without terrible struggles, provided you’ve kept up on other vocab and grammar study. There will be unknown kanji and vocab, of course, but you’ll be able to contextualize and pinpoint the things you don’t know so much more easily, and often get the gist even without them.
So if your goal is an ability to be able to read most things, mostly, within a certain time frame, don’t feel like you necessarily need to be rushing to level 60–especially if you’re shortchanging grammar and non-WK vocab for it (which will prevent you from being able to parse most reading even with 2,000 kanji under your belt).
This is just a general sentiment about goals and pacing though. I agree with the OP; don’t stop doing reviews, and don’t get too leisurely with your lesson-pacing either.
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What is “graded material”? Also, what do you recommend for grammar? Is Japanese grammar hard?
graded readers are material adapted to certain levels of kanji reading competence. white rabbit press for example sells some.
my goal tho is to read The Shining on kindle, where it patiently awaits the day i hit lvl 40. i won’t start a day earlier… not worth the struggle.
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These are the graded readers I’m working on. Basically just kids books. Once you get to level 10 or 20 they start making sense. But you’ll also need to know some basic grammar points.
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Japanese grammar is just very different from most “western” languages. For example, the use of particles, the lack of noun genders, etc. It’s probably difficult if you come from those languages. If you already learned Korean, Japanese grammar might have more similarities to that.
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Yeah. I’ve been on my current level for over 900 days and I have over 1000 reviews. 
It’s hard to keep going if you lose your dedication. I never roll back levels when I come back from a hiatus though. I sort through each and every review. It’s fine if I don’t remember stuff cause it’ll just be marked wrong and I’ll have more chances to study it again.
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That there is your problem. You’re not doing it consistently and losing progress every time. It’s like 2 steps forward, 1 back, and the number of reviews wears you out before you’re even back on track.
Yeah that’s the point of my post, I’m agreeing with OP that you shouldn’t stop like I did, if you really want to progress in a decent amount of time.
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As mentioned above, “graded material” would be graded readers with vocabulary and kanji aimed at different levels of foreign-language learners. They’re sold by educational companies, mostly. White Rabbit is a big one.
Though you can also just throw yourself into easy manga, and then easy prose, and up and up. You just have to be comfortable with looking things up or sometimes getting a half-understanding of a sentence as long as you understand the whole.
Grammar is … actually pretty gentle at first, though as you move up you start appreciating just how little logic it shares with English, and how much that means you don’t know. I wish I had a better alternative to suggest for total beginners than the Genki textbooks and their corresponding workbooks, but I don’t. Maybe sometime else here can help with that, but they’re not bad. (I just have a few misgivings with the way they oversimplify some points in a way that I think almost requires relearning them later; you will get the basics though.)
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Agree on the reviews but on the lessons you need to be smart. Think about how well you are improving overall on Japanese and where you need to invest your time.
I recently took a month break from lessons, and then picked up at 3 per day. I used the time freed up to crack on with Genki and my Japanese is SO MUCH better as a result. Now restarted at 6 per day, aiming to level up monthly, but keep up time invested in grammar, general reading and listening.
Got my lifetime on last new year sale at $100 discount, fantastic investment!
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just sharing my experience, i bought a lifetime i think a year ago (when it was on sale) and since i drop twice. Where im from (south america) summer vacations are long so when i subscribe to wanikani i lvl up to 5 in 4-5weeks. It was really a rush. When the semester at the university started i immidiatly drop the reviews (not becouse i didnt have time, but my mind was somewhere else). I pickup back on winter vacations (2weeks), did all the reviews piles, refresh my memory, and started lvl 6, then again the new semester came in and drop wk again. So now almost finishing the lecture year im planning on picking up wk again, at me moment i have 600 reviews but i need to refresh kanjis from lvl 5-6. And hopefully this summer get back on track and keep lvling up.
Cheers, and thxs for sharing your story.
PD: sry for bad english.
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Great advice! I need to stop doing new lessons the INSTANT they arrive. I was starting to get a bit mental about it … I even considered setting an alarm to wake me up since the next review was going to be in the middle of the night! I didn’t, but the thought did occur to me.
I’m just going to take my time and ALWAYS keep doing the reviews.
-Robert
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To wake up in the middle of the night would be really mental… my tip is: do at least two reviews each day, one in the morning -9h and one at the end of the day, like ~21h (and I recommend learning new itens just after the morning review. Trying to learn late at night is not effective). The super ideal would be 3 reviews, with one in the afternoon, beacause it’ll lessen the load of the night review and you’ll be in contact with japanese more often of course.
If you manage to keep doing like this, everyday, without skipping the two main reviews I said, every new item will take ~5 days to go GURU level. I like to know this number since it helps you to know how many items you’ll going to have in your apprentice level, you just multiply the number of new itens you learn per day by 5 days. This is where I was becoming overwhelmed, I was learning 20 new itens a day, so I had at least 100 itens in the apprentice level, plus other itens that I got wrong on the reviews and were demoted, but they are less then 10 (normally less than 5). To have a ~100 itens in your apprentice basket and other itens of higher levels being thrown to your review list everyday is a CHORE and it was consuming me an amount of time that is incompatible with the rest of my life.
So I’m in a kind of 1 week holiday, especially because of the exam I took yesterday (I did great 
) and I decided that I’m going to wait for my apprentice basket to be 0 (is 16 today, maybe it will be 0 by sunday) and only then I’ll start doing new lessons. Also decided to do only 10 itens a day for the sake of my mental health!
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if you can afford to and don’t mind getting up at night, then by all means, go ahead.
i can’t. 20 years ago, i could have.
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The graded readers are fun and really help you to practice your Japanese. I’m reading through my first set of them now.
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I stopped at level 6, I just prefer having less than a hundred items in apprentice otherwise I mess up a lot and need to actually study to learn them, while the only reason why I use WK is because I’m learning without actively studying (as in doing reading to memorize)
honestly, consistency is quite important, otherwise you internally normalize not doing lessons and then you end up thinking you’re learning new things when you’re just reviewing the same things over and over again.
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