Where do I start regarding WaniKani? Oh, Covid-era. About 10 weeks into it, on May 27, 2020. I was (and even more so now) on the older side of life when I began the WK journey, a then young at heart 51 years-old. I had just read somewhere about “spaced-repetition-software” platforms like WK, Anki, and Bunpro. The concept behind SRS was intriguing. I had taken a Japanese class almost 30 years prior during my last semester in college on a lark. As a Californian, I had taken plenty of Spanish over the years and wanted something different. I wasn’t into anime or asian culture at all, but something about learning a language with non-roman alphabets got me to enroll in that final needed elective class to graduate.
Well, I learned hiragana and katakana using physical flashcards in that class and promptly forgot them all within 12 months. Moved to San Francisco in the early 90s, got my career in advertising going (media planning, specifically). Somewhere in there, I married one of the accountants in our ad agency’s finance department and suddenly needed to learn conversational Cantonese to speak with the in-laws (a total of six semesters at City College of San Francisco on Saturday morning or weekday evenings). I actually learned what I called “transactional Cantonese” and could (and still do) buy half a duck, a pound of roast pork, and a half a pound of BBQ pork in Cantonese at my go-to Chinese meats shop (Win’s on Taraval). Or get a $10 haircut (used to be $5 pre-covid) in Chinatown (New Image on Powell/Broadway). Or call my mom-in-law and ask her to walk over and please pick up the kids at school at 3:15 PM.
After mom-in-law passed in 2018, I lost my main partner that had me using Cantonese every day. So, when 2020 rolled around and we were quarantined for a few months, I somehow stumbled upon WaniKani. I had always regrets about not learning kanji. One really can’t get far just knowing kana. After signing up for WK and getting through a few levels, my confidence was strengthened. I soon learned about the JLPT tests, specifically the N5. I looked through the example questions and thought that I could easily learn the 80-100 kanji characters. Well, not easily, but the SRS WaniKani would get me there.
Did it have to take 5 years? Not really, but at some point in the summer of 2021 (about 14 months into my WK journey), I stalled at Level 38 and took a break for a few months. Really hit a wall and felt like I was flailing. I hit the reset button and went back down to Level 1. So it did take about four years. But keep in mind, I’m in my 50s, was (and still am) working full-time professionally in a global research company, raising with my wife two teenagers (both now young adults in college), and elder care for my father-in-law (now recently passed). I never quit, though (to the sometimes annoyance of my family around me). I learn things for the sake of learning—I’ve always done that. It doesn’t need to pay me back in anyway financially—I just like understanding the world around me and know I have a much greater understanding of Japanese than I did six years ago.
So to summarize this introduction, my two spur of the moment Covid-era goals became:
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Pass Level 60 in WaniKani.
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Pass the N5.
For me, and especially at my mature age (now 57), the four elements of learning Japanese were prioritized as follows:
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Reading
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Speaking
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Listening
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Writing
In other words, if I can do no other than mostly reading what’s in front of me, a decent amount of speaking (handling transactional requests of buying and shopping in Japanese), conversing better in my topics of hobbies of fishing, ham radio, and watching soccer, some listening (especially public address speakers in train stations and sports stadiums), and only a little bit of writing, I’m perfectly fine with that.
Of course, WaniKani only gets you so far, so I’ve pivoted heavily into Bunpro.jp. Bunpro has various textbook and JLPT decks ready to SRS. I’ve already completed the N5 vocabulary and grammar decks and about 20% into the N4 vocabulary deck. Bunpro, I find, complements WaniKani well. Not to do in tandem (though you could try if you have the time, I didn’t), but to do subsequently. The N3-N4-N5 vocabulary in particular is much the same as WK (maybe N2 and N1 too?), so it’s a good review to see in Bunpro the same WaniKani vocabulary that I had burned a few years ago (but lay in a dormant state). I wouldn’t be surprised if more WK words are found in higher-level JLPT decks, as well. Bunpro.jp also has JLPT practice exams that you can try and I got a passing 81% grade on a recent JLPT N5 exam. When it comes time to take the N5 next December, I’m going to crush it.
So, now goals are revised and here they are:
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Spend 3-4 months a year in Japan with wife and sometimes our adult children (however long each can visit with us). My wife likes the relative ease and safety of traveling in Japan, so she’s on board. She also can read and write traditional Chinese characters, so most of the Japanese kanji out in the wild are easily understood by her (e.g., kanji for medicine, hospital, grocery store, vegetables, pork ribs, roast chicken, etc.).
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Visit England twice a year with family (mostly to watch soccer).
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Internalize the N5 Grammar and Vocabulary Lessons on Bunpro.jp
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Pass the N5.
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Consider the N4.
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Go to that Kanji Museum in Kyoto. It looks really cool. Look it up.
Ok, I just logged on to WK after reaching Guru status on all my Level 60 kanji back in December. I noticed that there are five new kanji and two new radicals recently added. So I guess I’ll be on WK a couple of more weeks and then I’ll be out of here. I actually noticed one of the kanji already from Bunpro (the kanji for handbag). And you know, while Bunpro does a great job with syncing up vocabulary found in WK, it doesn’t really teach mnemonics the way WK effectively does. I may revisit WK to dust off some of those Mrs. Chou memes that were helpful in the initial stages of learning a particular kanji. We’ll see.
Final words of advice? I estimate a good 80-90% of us fail at our first attempts in learning Japanese (maybe it’s even higher). Japanese is a Level 5 language (as is Chinese—Cantonese or Mandarin), I believe, so it’s understandable that the language incurs a lot causulties. One really needs an incentive factor to get through it.
For me, as I near retirement, I feel that the incentive factor of traveling in Japan in a 2-3 years from now and being semi-literate worked for me. I also knew that I’m in a bit of race against time. Learning new skills is harder as one ages—the brain is just not as spongy as it was in my teens and early 20s. It still is achievable, but it may take 2-3 times the time needed to memorize a new kanji or vocabulary. So what, I’ve got the time and it will still be more useful to me than not having the skill. I’m not going to waste life and time watching a bunch of Netflix series that leave me no more edified after watching than before.
So, in closing, keep learning new skills, seeing new places, and making new memories with family and friends (both old and new). Cheers to you all and best of luck in your personal growth!
Post Script (2/20/26): one last insight I forgot to mention earlier as to why I truly value from my time spent with WaniKani. It’s that as Cantonese-learner/speaker, Conversational Cantonese classes typically don’t teach any Chinese characters and instead focus on using textbook materials using a variety of romanized scripts (mine was Yale script from Chinese University of Hong Kong).
I always had some regret, but in all practicality, just learning to speak Cantonese (seven tones, y’all) was going to be enough of a tall order–adding a couple of thousand Chinese characters was not realistic for a then thirty year-old to tackle. However, since many of the Chinese characters I learned in WaniKani are the same as I would see in the subtitles when watching YouTube history videos with my octogenarian father-in-law, I was able to now get the gist of what was being discussed in the video! Or just reading a Chinese restaurant menu and recognizing all the various meat dishes that were being offered.
It’s not 100% the same in all cases, but many times what I was learning on WaniKani, I was also seeing while walking the streets of SF Chinatown. Just a plus for you previous language learners of conversational Chinese.
