Hello. I reached level 60 awhile back and now am just consolidating and trying to burn everything.
There are still so many kanji that WaniKani has yet to cover. Has there been any official mention or even unofficial mention of potentially adding more levels at some point? I remember reading they only had 50 levels awhile back, so it’s good to know it has been done at least once.
I know the amount of people who get to level 60 is probably a small percentage of the userbase, and many of these people probably already have a lifetime subscription, so there isn’t as much monetary incentive to add to the “end game”.
But I really do like the WK system and would love to get more overall coverage, like the rest of the Joyo 9 kanji, which are probably relatively common considering grade 9 students in Japan need to have studied them.
This has probably come up in the past, but just wondering what the current take is.
That’s a common request but it’s important to note that a significant portion of the jouyou kanji not currently covered by WaniKani is frankly rather niche. Some of these kanji were clearly chosen because they’re used in important official texts and not because they’re very common in daily usage.
You have a handful of kanji dealing with imperial edicts, others having to do with lineage, mimeographs, poetry, archaic systems of measurements, lawmaking, etc…
Will you want to learn some or most of these kanji eventually? Possibly. Do you really want to be fed those in an arbitrary order ahead of time with no flexibility? I know I don’t.
I personally don’t think WaniKani needs more kanji, past a certain point what needs to drive your studies is the unknown kanji you encounter in the wild while reading (most of which won’t be jouyou), not arbitrary kanji lists curated by third parties.
I actually respect that WaniKani didn’t stuff another batch of levels will all remaining jouyou just so they they could mention “full jouyou coverage” in the marketing material.
Thanks for the reply. What you said makes a lot of sense. I guess I’m just sad to be heading towards the end of the main WK experience. I’d definitely benefit from other learning resources at this point, but something about WK just resonates very well with me.
I think I’d still prefer to have the option to learn more. I would love to even learn the kanji that most Japanese might even be confused seeing. Though after reading your reply, maybe in the distant future instead of the not so distant future I was hoping for.
I sympathize with the feeling, I enjoy learning kanji! I think my main issue with WaniKani adding many more kanji is simply that the structure is too rigid.
Yesterday for instance I added 溺 to my Anki kanji deck because I encountered it a few times in the wild and it is jouyou. If WaniKani had it, I could have learned it here but only if it happened to be in an unlocked level. If it’s on level 67 and I’m on 61 then I would have to go through hundreds of unrelated kanji to get there.
I think I would like WaniKani to add more kanji, including semi-obscure stuff, but only if they also relax the level structure past a certain point and let you pick and choose what you want to learn and in what order.
I actually love that idea. WK would need to add a whole new system to implement that, but we can both hope!
I got a Bunpro life subscription recently and am doing a similar system by adding new vocab slowly to the review queue myself. It’s also nice having the freedom to choose which ones to add when, as long as they have it in their decks. I really should use Anki, but the interface and usability puts me off a little. I should probably just jump into the deep end and get to work though!
Haha I remember when I was in Japan, someone showed me a table of all the common fish. There were like 20 different characters with the fish radical on the left. I probably only recognize a few currently. But for people living in Japan, it’s definitely useful since it’s so engrained in their society and culture (and of course like you said, the food!).
It wouldn’t necessarily require much of a system change, just a slight shift in approach. For example, they could implement a single specialization level (61) as a collection of maybe a couple hundred more niche kanji, including additional jouyou, JLPT N1, frequency F3-F5, etc, then include an explanation that it is intended for each user to select the kanji that interest them. That would allow users to utilize WK’s SRS to learn just the more specialized kanji that they expect to run into, based on the type of materials they expect to be reading.
This would feel somewhat different than the levels we have now, but should be easy to implement, while empowering the users to keep going according to their individual needs. Maybe it could be called a “bonus” level, instead of level 61, so people can still feel like they’ve finished the course once they complete level 60.
Being completely honest, I wished they had added more levels when I finished solely because WK was part of my routine, easy, and not nearly as daunting as picking up a book I know I’ll struggle through. If they had another 60 levels I probably would have done all of them before trying to read anything harder than slice of life manga
Now that it’s been a while since I hit 60, I’m glad I was forced out of my comfort zone by the end of the WK material. But it sure hasn’t been easy to keep up with reading to the same extent as I kept up with WK. Sorry, that was more me rambling than adding to the discussion
I think you described my situation quite perfectly. I feel the same way. And hopefully it works out better in the end forcing me to expand to other methods of study. I’ve already started to focus a lot more on Bunpro grammar and vocabulary, taking extra time reading the sentences. It has been good reading and listening practice.
For this case particularly, there are other ways to learn Kanji than WaniKani. WaniKani is good Kanji with various associated vocabularies using multiple readings (multiple Kun, one or multiple On), but probably not that much for Kanji with practically single reading and not based on phonetic components. There may be a second rare reading, but similar reading to a lookalike Kanji anyway.
I don’t know if there is a good list online somewhere, but many Kanji can be browsed in Wiktionary (Appendix:Chinese radical/魚 - Wiktionary, the free dictionary). I would add Kanji to Anki for a handwriting deck, putting the Kana name of the fish in the front.
I think extra levels for jinmeiyou kanji would be interesting, but given how odd name readings are, maybe it should be a separate program teaching common names. I’d expect it to be surprisingly long and hard to commit to, because of disinterest.
My opinion is past a certain degree of proficiency it’s easier to just pick up what you encounter, and kanji-wise I expect Wanikani to provide that level.
After a little more time now at 60, I don’t miss having 300 reviews a day. It’s actually quite nice and relaxing doing only 150 or so a day. I’m looking forward to it going down to less than 100 too.
If they added more, even if it was an extra category that you can choose to add like an Anki deck, I’ll definitely jump all over it. But if not, I’m feeling okay now about finding other forms of study.
I’ve also been doing a lot more Bunpro, but something about it just doesn’t feel as smooth as WK. Probably since they use sentences for everything and reading it takes a little more time. Less instant feedback for the small dopamine hit like finishing a review card every second or two.
I’d honestly love extra levels in WaniKani. However they want to give them.
I’ve been at 60 for a few years now, and while I use other resources (kame-same and bunpro mostly) I find that my retention and progress on new content is much lower then it was on WaniKani. I think the combination of mnemonics, example sentences and the way the levels are structured to build on each other all contributed to me making much faster progress while going through WK that at any point since.
