I’m halfway done! Never made any threads of any sort and never shared my progress, but today felt a bit special. Who knows, maybe I won’t get to 60 and this is the only time I get to share my experience.
Started in April, the first couple of months were a little rough, in the sense that my WK sessions were highly irregular and thus didn’t feel like proper routine. Then I found a groove and now I follow a very particular schedule:
My current schedule
Wednesday: level up in the morning, do radicals right away. Review in 4 hours, then review in 8 hours.
Thursday: review the radicals in the evening.
Saturday: level the radicals in the evening, learn level critical kanji, review in 4 hours (before bed).
Sunday: review kanji in the morning.
Monday: review kanji in the morning.
Wednesday: level up.
I don’t follow any particular schedule with items that are not critical for leveling up, sometimes I divide the lessons and do 20-30 a day, sometimes I do the entire pile right away. Depends on how free I am. However, I never let them spill over and I never let anything pile up.
Which resulted in this:
I think that the most crucial thing that contributed to the pace I was able to sustain is that I never took any days off. There hasn’t been a single day when I’d have any reviews left before going to bed, come rain or shine:
This approach left me with plenty of time to do lessons according to the schedule above, as I never had to dig through any sort of insane review piles. I think the biggest one I had to deal with in one sitting was about 200 items.
So far everything has been very enjoyable, I’m glad that I decided to go with WK back when I was figuring out how to learn kanji. Here’s to another 30 levels!
I’m not sure how these study logs and milestone threads are done, however since I’m sharing my journey today, I might as well share the entirety of it. Sorry if it’s not customary, but here goes nothing.
My Japanese language journey started with me joining a language exchange Discord server, where I was bombarded with resources and valuable insight. I decided to go with WK for kanji and Genki for grammar. I used Anki to get done with Genki vocab ASAP so I didn’t have to look anything up while learning grammar, I feel like it worked pretty well. After ~50 days I was done with that deck and moved on to Core 6k.
Each Genki lesson took about a week to go through, so I was done with Genki I and II by September. Then I quickly went over Shin Kanzen 文法 N4 to polish whatever grammar I learned from the previous textbook, then I moved on to Shin Kanzen 文法 N3. At this point I’m a few days away from finishing it, which is a little behind schedule.
I’m 62% done with Core 6k, yesterday I decided to stop new cards for the time being. I’m going to try sentence mining since I started to read native content.
My Anki streak
Currently I’m reading Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, with Tsugumi and A Wild Sheep Chase in the backlog. I run into a considerable amount of unfamiliar kanji, vocab and grammar, but having Jisho and DoJG open is enough to understand everything. It takes me a long time and a lot of elbow grease, but I’m hoping that by not skipping anything and figuring out every new grammar point I’ll improve soon enough.
I registered for JLPT N3, the exam is one month away and I’m completely fine with failing it spectacularly. I think it’s going to be a fun experience and who knows, maybe having done it once already will take the stress out of the equation when I go for a rematch. I live very close to the venue, so all I really lose is one afternoon and the exam fee.
Apart from everything I mentioned above I also frequent the server that got me started. The Japanese chat is another source of reading practice for me, plus I pick things up here and there when I lurk in studying channels or even try to answer questions myself (with sources, of course).
That’s it, I think. Sorry if I’m sharing too much, got carried away a little bit. The main takeaway here is that I love studying Japanese and that WaniKani has been, along with other things, places and people, integral to that new, wonderful part of my life. I’m very thankful for everything.