I never thought I would actually reach this point, but after a literal decade, in which I constantly reset my progress every time I fell off, I somehow managed to reach Level 60.
When I started Wanikani, I was quite naive, and believe that WK alone would be enough to basically get me to fluency. This pretty obviously isn’t the case, and that never was the purpose of Wanikani. I was just a dumb teenager who thought that the ~6000 words and ~2000 kanji WK teaches you would be enough to make me fluent. Now that I’m older, and the Dunning–Kruger effect has worn off, I’ve realized that with my current vocabulary/grammar skills, I’d put myself at around the N3 level, maybe low N2 if you’re willing to be generous. And when it comes to listening skills, I’m more like N4. My reading skills on the other hand are quite decent. It’s quite rare for me to come across one I don’t know. WK legitimately is an amazing resource when it comes to Kanij. It’s just that for quite a while I neglected to study everything else, which is something that I only recently started trying to rectify.
Now I guess the question is, where do I go from here? Well, there’s a lot of goals from here on out. The simplest of them is to finish all of Bunpro’s N2 and N1 grammar. But there’s also goals like becoming more consistent when it comes to listening practice. Also, I need to stop being lazy and start actually sentence mining. My current strategy of looking up every word I come across whose meaning I’m not 100% on in Yomitan and repeating that until the words get drilled into my head isn’t exactly the fastest way to learn vocabulary. Although I did finally figure out how to link Anki with Yomitan the other day, so that should make things a lot easier.
Now I guess, as tradition. I should attach my level up chart.
I definitely had a period of very decent consistency, but I ended up falling off hard near the end when the law of diminishing returns kicked in and the kanji started becoming less useful.
Now the question is, would I recommend Wanikani to others? I’d say yes, as long as you get it during the holiday sale. I’d say it’s probably the best resource out there for learning kanji, and the vocabulary it teaches you gives you a decent enough starting point. The only real downside I can think of is that the time-gating for each level can get kind of annoying when you’re just waiting for your radicals/kanji to reach the guru stage, but other than that, I have no real complaints.
So in conclusion, Wanikani was great, I enjoyed my time, and I’ll probably continue to lurk in these forums for good studying advice (at least until I finish burning everything).