It took me 5 years of on and off to get to this point, and I am glad I finally did it! I am finishing off my reviews and guru-ing the last kanjis and then I’ll be off to focus on grammar with books and more reading!
I am now living in Japan and I can say I still have a lot to learn, but Wanikani has helped me a lot with Kanji as a stepping stone and I can recognize now a huge percentage of them in my daily life here as well as games, books, etc. Even contract Japanese, I can get the gist of it because of WK.
My biggest tip for reaching lvl 60 is to do wanikani every day, some days you might only do 10 reviews, some days 200. The important part is building the habit and focusing on the process and not the results, by doing that I reached lvl 60 without even thinking about it "oh, seems I am 60 now ".
Finding a time span where you can do it is also important. The reason why it took me 5 years was that I stopped completely while I was a University student and started again due to Covid. Basically, there was a period I did not have the time and energy and that is ok, and when my free time came back, I started again. My recent trick is to always do reviews and reading before any recreational activities (games, anime, whatever it is) and even on the weekends, I would do them at the start of the day, so you don’t have to think about it during the day and if you want to do more during the day, well so be it.
My final message would be to advise people to go at their own pace and based on their priorities in life, if Japanese is your priority, for sure you’ll make it. If it’s not, don’t blame yourself for not making it in comparison to the ones who did sacrifice other things for learning Japanese, it’s as simple as that! The people that sacrifice their energy and time to learn the language vs those that do so but put other things in priority (their children, school, work, etc.) will always grow up faster and learn more! And both ways are ok!
Wishing y’all the best