I’m so happy, I finally got to level 17!! I’ve been on a roll the past week or so, and I’m hoping to keep it up. Level 18 soon 
Maybe I’ll even get level 20 before 2021, but we’ll see what happens.
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I’ll see you at level 60, space cowboy…
Well. Maybe. Here’s to leveling up!
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Haha it’s rare to see someone who’s been here longer than me and is a lower level, have you reset at all?
I’m excited for the day we can celebrate level 60 together, even if it’s 60 years from now haha. 頑張って！
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Yep, I reached level 10~ once waaaaay back in the early 2010s and reset to level 1 in like 2017 after several years of no study. Then I reached level 14~ sometime in early 2018 and reset again this year after two years of no study. I’m finally in a place in my life where I can devote time regularly, so hopefully I’ll be able to complete this, this time. No promises though. :^)
そうですねぇ。頑張ってください！
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I feel that about no promises… I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten sidetracked and missed a couple months of wanikani. I really respect the decision to reset when you feel like it’s been a while, it’s something I can’t bring myself to do (but thankfully I somehow haven’t lost my memory of already reviewed kanji). I remember back in the day when a couple of the first people to hit level 60 reset, I couldn’t believe it.
Do you do Japanese study outside of Wanikani?
Yeah. I’m working through a book series called Japanese: The Spoken Language. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a lot of determination. And you?
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LOL I’ll have to look it up. Even though it requires a lot of determination, have you been enjoying it?
I started out with Rosetta Stone and a bunch of sketchy internet websites, then took Japanese in college. Right now, I pretty much just use Wanikani and read some novels on the side, nothing textbook-related anymore.
It’s not so much a book to enjoy. It does drill your sentence patterns and pronunciation very thoroughly though. If you’ve already completed university level stuff you’re probably past it in terms of grammar, but the drills and pitch accent notation could be useful for shadowing.
It gets incredibly detailed, which can be both a curse and a blessing. Check out this info on the different uses of no and their pitch accent, for example, along with how na no does not contract.
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Wow that is very detailed… I kind of like it! What I don’t like is the romaji which makes my skin crawl. I don’t think I could get past two or three pages before I threw the book at the wall and begged for hiragana, kanji, and katakana.
The pitch accent detail is really cool too, it’s something that I went over in college, but not in as much detail as the book series you’re reading. The youtube channel “Dogen” is really good with pitch accent stuff, and I’ve used that as a supplement.
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Yeah I feel ya on that one. 90% of my time studying with this book is solely in audio, I only ever open the book for the grammar explanations or to check if I misheard an accent in one of the drills. The book explicitly tells you not to read in it while you’re practicing, in fact.
That said, I too think kana would have been fine, but I suspect word processors at the time (1987 to be precise) could not bear printing kana+pitch accents. Heck, even discounting the fact that it’s all romaji, I have misgivings about how this book is typeset, but eh, you win some you lose some.
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Ah, the audio portion explains a ton, sounds like a great resource.
haha 1987? Have you noticed any outdated vocabulary or strange sentences because of that?
Heck, even discounting the fact that it’s all romaji, I have misgivings about how this book is typeset, but eh, you win some you lose some.
LOL true. I don’t think there’s ever one Japanese learning resource that has everything you want or is completely perfect. Glad you’re able to make the most of this one though.
THE FEELS HERE THO
Yay for 2013-era crabigator worshippers!
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Oh for sure. Sentence-level it’s mostly fine, although it errs on a very polite/distal form speech mostly, explaining polite, humbling, exalting, neutral keigo forms long before the word すき is introduced (すき in fact does not appear before book two). It does tell you when to use and not to use these forms though, so it’s fine.
Word-level, well, yeah. Verbals and adjectivals seem fine. Us humans still eat, sleep, drink, do, understand the same way, and red is still red. Muzukasii is still muzukasii.
I’m not sure when I last saw a taipuraita (or even an old-fashioned denwa) though, so yeah, the nouns are old. Not like I can’t open a dictionary though, nouns are not inflected and easy to add to your word databank.
The strangest word I’ve encountered by FAR, however, is waapuro.
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YOOOO Congrats on level 60!! That must’ve been an amazing feeling 
I was talking with finnra about this, but now that you’re here I’m curious: What other resources do you use for Japanese? And what got you started with Japanese/WaniKani?
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nice !!!
very nice
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That’s sick man, congrats on the 60!
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not so nice
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explaining polite, humbling, exalting, neutral keigo forms long before the word すき is introduced
That’s incredible, I didn’t even approach keigo until about 5 years into my Japanese study haha.
Us humans still eat, sleep, drink, do, understand the same way, and red is still red. Muzukasii is still muzukasii.
LOL fair point.
taipuraita
I have one in my basement, but yeah that’s a great example of a very outdated word.
The strangest word I’ve encountered by FAR, however, is waapuro.
I like this a lot, I encountered it when I was doing my senior thesis on Japanese, but yeah it’s crazy how words just kind of go out of style, even if the thing they’re talking about is still in use to some extent.
What got you started on learning Japanese? And how did you find WaniKani?
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I still don’t really know why I’m learning Japanese. I bumped into some NHK basic Japanese tutorials at some point and just kept going, I think. I found WK in some tofugu article, probably.
A lot of the loanwords in the book sound real weird, though I guess most of them would still fly today. I don’t think its inconceivable that I might run into a boorupen or taipuraita at some point, though last time I used the latter was 23 odd years ago, and I much prefer gel pens if I have to write. 
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