In any case as others have mentioned reaching level 60 or for that matter any so called indicator of proficiency from any other app or even the JLPT, should be taken with a grain of salt. The moment you see your goal with the language starting to become a possibility, just jump into! read, watch shows, talk with those japanese people you intend to, start practicing your favorite related hobby, etc. Otherwise you might feel really disappointed when reaching one of those “milestones”.
After leaving WK I’ve kept watching shows both raw and assisted with tools to pick up unknown vocab (in my case Voracious) for Anki reviewing later, but in a much more relaxed way than before (30 mins a day). I’ve also taken japanese calligraphy classes and overall made that my hobby, in the same way studying japanese was before, so I feel I’m actually “using” japanese and not so much studying it anymore.
As for kanji, I feel I’m nowhere near an educated japanese adult, which is the target for most of my books nowadays, so I’ll bump with both kanji I don’t remember and kanji not present in WK every day.
I’m also reading some novel (aimed at kids most likely) and there I will face some unknown words in each page most likely, but kanji is not an issue there.
Overall I can say after WK I’m able to do the things I want in japanese (reading / watching shows) even if not fluent yet, and then I’ve become very good at looking up things I don’t know quickly or even guessing the meaning, which overall allows me to focus on the interesting things.
I’ll put a couple hundred hours of listening before speaking much more than I have already. I’m able to have basic conversations… but … they are pretty basic you know … I don’t know If I would want to hear what I can say in japanese at this point.
When I went through Wanikani, I did little to no grammar. So I’m not very good with my Japanese still. I’m good at recognizing kanji and remembering the readings (albeit I still struggle sometimes). There will be kanji I look at sometimes and think “What’s this kanji again? I know the readings are X and Y. Oh yeah it’s insert name of kanji here.”
First thing to understand: wanikani will not teach you Japanese. Wanikani will not make you able to speak Japanese. Wanikani will not make you able to read or understand Japanese. Wanikani is a Kanji app. It teaches you to read Kanji, nothing else. Using wanikani without other resources is like studying English spelling and learning to spell and read 10,000 words without ever actually learning anything else. If you come to wanikani with the expectation that it will be the only resource you need, you will be sorely disappointed.
What did wanikani do for me? Now I don’t have to look up kanji when I read. Also it gives me a ballpark guess at what a word might mean in the sentence that I’m reading, but that’s about it.
I probably won’t be adding much here, but let me reiterate what other people have been saying in that Wanikani isn’t very useful on its own. I had a friend who went through a huge Anki set (probably much larger than Wanikani), but with very little background in grammar he wasn’t able to use it for anything and ended up just wasting a huge amount of time. I took 6 semesters of Japanese at university and studied for 3 months in Japan. When you’re already able to converse well in Japanese, Wanikani can give you some nice vocab to try using in conversation, and if you understand Japanese grammar well enough, Wanikani will let you read most things. The only caveat to that is that you want to start doing a lot of reading at the higher levels so you can get some familiarity with words in their natural contexts. It’s also pretty good if you want to start taking JLPT stuff. To prep for the N2 all I did was study a small Anki set and Kanzen Master grammar and it went really well for me (if you’re not taking classes though you’ll probably need to do a lot of listening practice).
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