Level 60!!
I almost can’t believe it.
I feel like I’m Sisyphus, but I’ve just been told that it’s all over now, I don’t need to push the boulder anymore. 
Reaching level 60 is a very nice opportunity to look back and to share the journey I went on.
As the title says, back in January 2022, I knew 0 Japanese, never tried to study it. Barely knew arigato and konnichonwa. And today, this is my current read:
I have finished 5 books in Japanese, one Visual Novel and more than 100 manga. Full disclaimer, I’ve read all of those on my computer which made lookups very painless (read-on to find out how to do it too), so even though I’ve been reading for a while, I kept having the imposter syndrome.
But now, less than one week into reading my first paper book, I’ve read more than 30 pages and it’s going great, so I guess I kinda feel legit about talking about my journey as a successful one 
So let’s talk about what happened in between 2022 and now!
As you can guess, Wanikani happened, but not only. 
When I started Wanikani and saw that some people completed it full speed in one year, I thought of course that would be me too! 
However, in the end I completed WK in 2 years and 1 month. 
And the reason for that, is that my ultimate goal has always been to learn Japanese in order to be able to read everyday. And as it turns out, you don’t learn Japanese with Wanikani (! this was a bit of a shocker for me), you learn kanji!
So I used a lot of other resources to achieve my goal. And to be able to spend time on these other things, it made more sense to not be doing Wanikani full speed.
There are only so many hours in a day (and only so much space in my brain). 
So I want to tell you all about the resources I used in this post, in hope to pay forward.
Because I learned how to learn Japanese thanks to this community.
I had no idea how to do it before, and was using some uneffective method, but since I’ve started using Wanikani and found this community, everything changed and I am so happy to be where I am today! The whole journey itself was a lot of fun too!!
So if anyone one day, on the journey to learning Japanese, stumbles upon this post and find useful for them, then this post has accomplished its mission 
Note: I am not trying to say with this post “I found the only right way to learn Japanese, do exactly like this”, but simply “here’s what worked for me, who knows, there might be something in there that works for you too”.
There are so many resources out there, that’s great, but it makes it also hard to choose, so hopefully this post can also guide those who don’t know what to pick.
Table of Contents
- About me
- List of Resources used to go from knowing 0 Japanese to reading everyday
- Computer setup
- Dictionaries & look up
- Self studying tips
- FAQ
- Thanks
- One final advice
About me ↑
There are so many ways to learn Japanese. Not only because of the amount of resources available, but also because it all depends on many different factors.
What’s your motivation (watch anime, read books, talk to your spouse / parents / grandparents / colleagues from Japan, visit the country, etc), what’s your budget (are you a student, fully employed, etc), how much time and mental space do you have (are you single, are you a parent, etc), and many other things.
That’s why I want to tell you a bit about me here, because if your profile is very different than mine, what I used might not work at all for you.
So my profile is:
- Motivation: learning Japanese because I want to read things. I have never been to Japan, not necessarily planning to, and I don’t know anyone from Japan
- Time: I don’t have a lot of time (full time job + small children), I usually spent between 30min to 2 hours everyday. However I have a very stable life, I didn’t change job, or country, or had anything else major happen recently, and I am home every evening, so that balances a bit
- Budget: you can do a lot of things for free when you have time, but for me, it is more convenient to pay for services that gets the job done fast
- Language learning: wouldn’t be fair without a full disclaimer. Yes I had never had exposure to Japanese before, and I was born and raised with only one language (
), but by the time I attempted learning Japanese I was fluent in 3 languages ( 
), pretty good at a fourth one (
) and knowledgeable in two more (
). So Japanese 
was my 7th language.
List of Resources used to go from knowing 0 Japanese to reading everyday ↑
Before you start ↑
As you may or may not know, Japanese uses three writing systems combined. Hiragana, Katakana, and finally kanji. Before starting on anything, take a few days to learn Hiragana and Katakana. There are many apps and websites for that. I think I just downloaded a free app on Android and went with that.
Hiragana ↑
Learn it! Whichever resource is probably good enough but if you don’t know where to start, try Learn Hiragana: Tofugu's Ultimate Guide.
Katakana ↑
Link to Tofugu’s Ultimate Guide to Learning Katakana: Learn Katakana: The Ultimate Guide
This one I still struggle a bit with haha. But one of my attempt at getting better at it was to practice with Pokemon names.
If anybody wants to practice the same way as me, I’ve made a Google Sheet you can just copy: Katakana practice with pokemon names - Google Sheets
Input the name in the column E, and if you get it right, the column G will be green! If you want to check the actual name, it’s in the column F, it’s hidden by simply having the font set to white on a white cell.
The fundamentals (from 0 to N5) ↑
If you have hiragana and katakana under your belt, you are ready for this part 
Kanji: WK 1-16 ↑
Time to learn some kanji!
I’ve put this as the first section. Is it because you need to learn kanji before any grammar or any other word? Not really, it’s a bit of the chicken or the egg problem. Which one comes first? You need both.
If you know the kanji for what 何 and for the verb to eat, 食べる, you still don’t know how to say “What do you eat?”. But if you try to learn that “何を食べますか” and don’t know 何 and 食, it’s also hard. So for me what worked was to start learning kanji while learning grammar on the side.
I used Wanikani for that and until level 16 I went full speed.
I never did any review on my computer, all on mobile, so I haven’t used any User scripts but settings in the app that do the equivalent.
My setup with the Android app (I used Flaming Turtles all the way but the maintained version is Smouldering Turtles).
My configuration:
Settings, Enable advanced settings
Then in advanced settings.
Mine is configured like that:
Two other features that I love: random font, and undo button.
Random font:
Font settings, select fonts for quizz question:
Undo button:
In other advanced settings, special button behavior
- Anki mode for meanings: I learned from level 1 that life is too short to write “With All One’s Strength” at every review of 力いっぱい. Also sometimes I know the meaning of a word in another language. So I want for the meaning, I always just get the True / False button and judge myself if I think I know the meaning
- Reading/meaning back to back: That way I can wrap up the session anytime I want and it makes more sense to me to output both things at the same time, I was just getting confused when it was only 1 thing now and the other one later. One kanji, type the reading, say the meaning, move on.
- Random fonts: realized early that I couldn’t recognized kanji in the wild if they had a different font than the one I was used to seeing in the app! Works really well now to have all fonts randomized (I have only 1 font a bit challenging to read, Otsutome)
- Undo button: I like mistakes. I learn from mistakes. I welcome mistakes. So it’s not to undo the mistakes that I needed this button. What I don’t like is that Wanikani blocks new content until you Guru 90% of the kanji of a level. I would be in the situation in the early levels, where I was out of lessons for 3 days, waiting for the last kanji to be passed, feeling nervous about making a mistake on it and being sad not having more lessons available when I was so eager to learn.
So my strategy since level 6 has been:
- Learn the radicals of the level and pass them as Right until they are Guru for the first time
- Learn the vocabulary of the level, a mistake is a mistake
- Learn the kanji of the level (by that time the radicals have been gurued and everything is unlocked), pass them as Right they are Guru for the first time
That way I always had a planned level up, and when I was done with my lessons new ones would arrive from the level up. Apart from that trick, I failed items when I didn’t know them.
WK forums ↑
Now what to do when you have just made an account and are waiting for your next reviews to be available in four hours? 
Just go procrastinate find resources on the WK forums!
- Guide to WK by jspeira
This really helped me understood what I was getting into with Wanikani and how it worked. - Complete Journey by Vanilla
A nice inspirational journey, I don’t remember where I found the two hours it took to watch it but somehow it was so interesting that I managed! - Level 60 posts Level 60 Celebration
I absolutely love those. I’m so happy to get mine now! I think it’s almost a stronger motivation to finish Wanikani than the kanji at the last levels haha. You learn so much with these posts. What to do. What not to do. What people have been through. Some good advice. Some teary moments with the community celebrating in the comments. Some good jokes too (my favorite one was someone who had made a section “My stats” and when you opened it it read 60/60 levels completed xD) - 0/0 challenge
That’s how you do it
Well the point of this challenge is simply to clear every level before you reach a new one. You could technically get to level 60 by only leveling up all the kanji and ignoring the lessons. That’s fine, but if your goal is to learn Japanese, then it’s not, do the vocab!
- Study logs
Absolutely go and hang out there. Especially if you are self studying. Self studying doesn’t need to be alone studying! It really helps with accountability to have a Study Log. And it’s awesome to go and look back and see the progress. I also love reading others’ and I got so much inspiration from those, tips and tricks, things to read, motivation, and a great sense of community!
I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the Wanikani forum. You can find a lot more in there, I’m pretty sure there’s a thread for every hobby possible for example, and so much more! You never know what is going to happen on this community. You might even get sent Macaron one day xD
Tofugu ↑
While Wanikani is good at teaching kanji, there is no context and sometimes you are confused without knowing which question to ask. I knew early that the verb 行きます had the reading いきます so why is Wanikani trying to make me learn こう for 行? This article explains it well: On’yomi VS kun’yomi
Check out their articles!
Genki 1 ↑
I started on Genki a few weeks after starting learning kanji. It wasn’t a problem to use Genki before knowing a lot of kanji and was nice to do both things in parallel, so no reason to wait
Now raise your hand if you have seen me post this message on the forum, I must have done it at least 200 times 
This textbook is so popular that many people have made great tools to go along it. Those tools are so great, that I ended up using them and not really opening the actual book anymore. (So basically you can skip the step where you buy the book and use the resources for free). Also the kanjis always come with furigana (the hiragana on top to know how to read them), so no need to worry about your Wanikani level, you can start the grammar now and do Wanikani on the side at your pace.
The way to do Genki, without buying Genki, is as follow.
For each lesson, first watch the video of TokiniAndy on youtube go through it:
Then do the exercises for the lesson on this website:
Then next lesson
Hehe I posted this a lot but I really got so so much out of those resources, I feel bad when people don’t know about them (not trying to say that it’s for everybody of course, but for me it made a big difference!)
Bunpro ↑
Maybe it’s because I had my first Pokemon game at Christmas of 99 and starting filling out my Pokedex, but I’ve always found it very satisfying to catch them all. So while I was using Genki, I had heard great things about Bunpro and subscribed so I could use the Grammar SRS. I didn’t do X amount of lessons per day, instead everytime I would see a grammar point mentioned in Genki (or in later resources), I would add it to my list of reviews and do SRS on those. Felt really good to see the numbers climbs with the months. Still have some screenshots from that time:
Cure Dolly ↑
I watched the first 24 videos of Organic Japanese with Cure Dolly I believe.
I loved that she had a completely different approach to explaining Japanese. Really helped making things clear for me to approach them from a different angle.
In particular the video about verbs conjugation
This was mind blowing. Before that, I had found some website to help me conjugate verbs in their different forms. After that video, I never had any use for them again.
I also was inspired by her drawings and built up my own grammar sheet. I was using it a lot when doing Bunpro reviews or Genki exercises, but haven’t had a need for it in more than a year now. The making it itself helped a lot my retention I think.
Brush up: Game Gengo N5 ↑
This is especially nice if you like video games but now that you know a lot of N5, check out this video and see it explained in Native material:
The first experience with Native Material (from N5 to N4) ↑
Alright, now we have some basic grammar, a bit of vocabulary (from Genki and WK) and some kanji under our belt. Time to put them all together and to try reading for the first time!
Kanji: WK 17-30 ↑
More kanji doesn’t hurt, but now I had a good starter pack. So I wasn’t rushing anymore to go full speed, just doing 12 new lessons a day.
I changed my homescreen in the app so I wouldn’t see anymore which level the upcoming items had. I realized that I was starting to know which items were coming up based on the type of items, so I was becoming very good at Wanikani and not actually at learning kanji, oops!
Genki 2 ↑
Same strategy as Genki 1! Watched TokiniAndy’s videos and did all the exercises online.
I had already my eyes on Quartet and made a Study Group for it so I was a bit under pressure to finish it fast! But I would say that I really enjoyed all of it and consider it a very fundamental part of my learning journey.
Satori Reader ↑
I started Satori Reader in November 2022 (I was level 16 then) and I am still using it daily. There is so much content!
Well maybe also because at the beginning I wasn’t good at using it regularly and was just using it from time to time. But then I began being more disciplined in my learning approach and have been reading 2 episodes a day since June 2023 I think.
What I got (and still get) from it:
- Native material accessible at my level, from Beginner to Advanced
- Furigana can be turn on / off / or synced with you WK level, great for reading practice
- All the sentences are voiced and can help for practicing listening too
- Cultural insight with life in Japan, which holidays they celebrate, what kids do at school, festivals, hot baths in the mountains, life in Tokyo, all kind of things
- Grammar notes and explanations that I would have never guessed from reading books alone
- Built up my stamina to reading sentences
- Convenience, when I was on vacation without all my gear to learn Japanese (my path is very computer-assisted!), I was so happy to have Satori Reader on my phone and to be able to do some reading there
I really recommend this resource. You can also check out the Satori Appreciation Thread for more tips and love for Satori!
ABBC current ↑
Wow that was a really exciting time when I started reading my first manga.
The first thing you should know is that I have used Mokuro from the beginning and I am still using it to this day. Takes a bit of effort to make it work (especially if you are not working a lot with computers), but we are a lot hanging out in the thread ready to help you if you ever need it. I assure you that it is worth it.
Once it is setup, the text in your manga that you read in your browser becomes selectable. You can copy it, or use browser addons such as Yomichan to do lookups literally by only pressing one key:
So, I started my first manga by joining the Absolute Beginner Book Club.
Book Clubs are amazing. There are always ongoing and there are some for each levels here, so take this opportunity! It is thanks to Book Clubs that I have read my first manga, my first novel, my first paper book.
It was really hard at the beginning to read my first manga.
So many abbreviations and contractions in the spoken language, so Yomichan wouldn’t really help there. I used this thread a lot.
Even getting used to the manga format was a bit hard. Who is speaking is not always clear. There is no punctuation and no space between the words. In the same bubble there can be different sentences even:
So it took a lot of time to get used to all that.
But the great thing about reading my first manga with the ABBC was that I wasn’t alone! Some were reading a manga for the first time like me, and others more experienced were here to answer questions. And I had a lot of questions at the time. It would take me a whole week to get through the 9 pages assigned for the week 
ABBC previous ↑
After around 7 weeks of reading with the ABBC, I realized that I could finish my assignment before the end of the week was gone! Even with still doing Genki + Wanikani + Bunpro. So that’s when I started reading on the side by myself :o
I picked things to read that had been read before by the ABBC. That was, the previous threads were still there if I had questions.
My favorite / recommended for beginners:
- Happiness, there are a lot of pages where they don’t talk at all or just say 大丈夫 so I was feeling super proud of myself for reading 10 pages in one sitting haha. Gotta use that self confidence at the beginning! You can read the whole series (10 volumes) even though you don’t have a lot of stamina yet
- Big Brother Rental. More text but still on the very easy side, and the series finishes after 4 volumes
- Yotsuba! this one is often recommended as a first manga. There are some videos online of people reading them outloud and so on. On top of reading it for the learning, I really enjoyed the story of this one, was nice to have so much slice of life when you don’t know anything about Japan!
There are a lot more, you can find the whole list in this thread: Master list of Book Clubs
Dictionary of Basic Grammar ↑
It was a bit of a strange idea to read a dictionary from back to cover, but it worked out quite well! Read it with the club last year, around 7 entries per week and it was quite interesting. Wish I had started with the Appendix, it’s a gold mine when you’re just starting and haven’t internalized everything yet.
Brush up: Game Gengo N4 ↑
Same as previously the N5 video, a way to review N4 grammar points for video games lovers:
Less studying, more reading (from N4 to N3) ↑
At that point I stopped my Bunpro subscription, SRS was great for N5 and N4 but I didn’t find it necessary beyond that. However I still think it has a lot of great content, which is also available without a subscription, so I just decided to read all the entries in Bunpro, at the pace of 3 per day. It was nice to brush up on things I already knew and work slowly my way up to new things / things I was learning via other resources.
It took me around a year:
- N5 2023/07/30->2023/09/09
- N4 2023/09/10->2023/11/07
- N3 2023/11/08->2024/02/09
- N2 2024/02/10->2024/04/21
- N1 2024/04/21->2024/06/25
From that point on of my studying journey, around one year after I started Wanikani, it became harder to tell what was contributing on improving my Japanese. Was it Quartet 1? Was it still Bunpro? Was it the Dictionary of Japanese Gramar? Was it reading everyday? Probably a combination of all of it!
Around that time, I was definitely reading regularly. I think I was reading everyday already. So why not make it official and be in good company. That’s when I started participating for the first time to the Read every day challenge (look for the current one in the Reading category).
I had always seen people who were in these challenges as GODS and couldn’t believe that I was joining them
Being in this challenge was so much fun that I kept it up for a year. It was a nice ritual to end the day with making a list of what I’ve read and to see the list of things read grow in my home post. And even more fun interacting with people, talking about things I learned or that I found funny or interesting, and read other people’s stories. There are people of all levels reading and I found it super inspiring to see the more experienced reading post as well.
Kanji: WK 30-45 ↑
Still learning kanji at a pace of 12 lessons a day as it was going well. Having a lot of exposure to the learned kanji in the wild so it makes the reviews easy.
BBC ↑
I graduated from the ABBC and made it to the Beginner Book Club! At that time I was reading both with the current BBC but also some previous BBC picks on my own and having the time of my life hehehe
Quartet 1 ↑
Quartet 1 is Genki’s big brother.
I found it much more advanced in that there are real exercices to get better at each of the four skills:
- Reading
- Writing
- Listening
- Talking
Maybe a bit of an overkill for someone like me who was mainly interested in reading. But I think when I will be satisfied with my reading and ready to improve on the other skills, I might go back to the book.
Dictionary of Intermediate Grammar ↑
Same as the Basic edition, it was nice to read this one. And the timing for me was perfect, I kept reading about the same thing in this, Quartet, Bunpro and the Visual Novel I was reading, so it was like having an SRS for grammar.
VN / IMC / IBC ↑
Visual Novels! I had never played any before learning Japanese. Now I am hooked. Also Steam has so many sales. I put in my wishlist VNs I want to play, and very often get emails that they are on sale. Now I need to go through my backlog before I buy new ones, I have so many!
Anyways.
Visual Novels might be the best way to improve at reading in Japanese.
- It has voiced dialogs
- It has both people talking and lines of narration (manga tend to be 100% talking and novels 85% narration)
- It has visual cues
- Most of the VNs on PC can be “hooked”, that means you can grab the text that the game is showing and therefore make easy lookups on it.
I have completed only one in Japanese so far, it’s ISLAND. I loved it but I might be a bit biased because it was my first one. I ended up reading 800.000 characters, maybe it would have been wiser to start with something shorter!
Check out the Visual Novel Book Club if you need any help with text hooking or any recommendation for a VN.
I also joined the Intermediate Book Club for the first time in November 2023 to read my first novel! It was a great feeling, I don’t know if I would have dared do it by myself. So grateful for the Book Clubs, it’s much less scary when you’re not alone, and the weekly assignments keep you going.
And now the club I participate the most is in the Intermediate Manga Club. I struggle much more to read manga than I do to read Visual Novel or novels, so I need more practice! And it’s a bit more fast paced club (rotation every 5-6 weeks instead of every 12-14 weeks) so that’s fun.
Brush up: Game Gengo N3 ↑
I actually haven’t watched this one yet! It’s on my list but I haven’t gotten around it. But I’m ready to bet that it’s just as good as the N5 and the N4 one.
Ready for immersion (N2 and beyond) ↑
Not a lot of new things to say here! At that point I was pretty comfortable with reading anything (provided that I had easy lookups accessible). Still had some study material I wanted to get through but I think I would have been fine if I dropped it all and went full on reading.
Quartet 2 ↑
Not yet done with this one! Quartet has so much potential, especially if you want to improve on all 4 skills. But now that I feel like I can already read anything on my own I have to admit that it’s a bit hard to finish it :x but having a Study Group for it here on the forum really helps with the motivation.
Oh I haven’t even talked about Study Groups yet. Another great thing about being here. You will find plently of such active groups here, it’s really awesome to have studying buddies, so don’t be shy and join in!
ABC ↑
Joined the ABC for the first time in April this year. The first two books weren’t a problem as I was reading them from my computer and Yomichaning everything. Now I just started on the third one which is my first paper book. It’s going pretty well so far but I think I will go back to reading on my computer after this book. On my computer I was able to read 40 to 60 pages a week, in paper it’s more like 5 - 10 pages a day haha. I will probably get a bit faster at looking things up manually as I go but I don’t think I will ever be as fast as with a computer. And there are so many things I want to read, so the things that are paper only can wait that my Japanese gets better!
Dictionary of Advanced Grammar ↑
Haven’t read this one yet but it will be my last “studying” material. Will be reading it with the club around January if you want to join
Computer setup ↑
Alright, some practical tips here
Yomichan ↑
I’ve mentioned Yomichan a few times!
It’s what allows to have look ups by just pressing a key. It can even have some neat functionalities like a button that creates a card from the lookup word to one of you Anki deck.
The maintained version is Yomitan but it’s essentially the same thing so I hope you don’t mind me saying sometimes one and sometimes the other!
The way it works is that you install the extension for your browser, and then add dictionaries to it. See the guide here: Getting started - Yomitan
One tip: add a Japanese dictionary in addition to your JP / EN dictionaries.
And if you want to use Yomitan on a Yomitan popup, you need to activate “Allow scanning popup content” / “Enable scanning on search page” and tada:
Japanese keyboard ↑
Setup the Japanese IME keyboard on your computer. I only have a Windows PC so I followed this guide: Microsoft Japanese IME - Microsoft Support
A few tips I wish I had known as soon as possible:
- F7 to switch what you already typed from hiragana to katakana or from katakana to hiragana
- Alt + Shift to switch back and forth between Alphanumeric and Hiragana
Ttsu reader ↑
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reading books on my computer.
This was done by using the epub of the book I bought, and then reading it in my browser via the TTSU app: https://reader.ttsu.app/
My settings:
- Theme, sometimes I like the dark theme sometimes not
- View mode: Definitely Continuous for me
- Writing Mode: Vertical! It takes some used to it but that’s how paper books are written.
- Auto Position On Resize: Set this to OFF or Ttsu reader will drive you crazy >.<
Dictionaries & look up ↑
What do I use when I stumble upon a word I don’t know?
Jisho
Don’t have a good app to recommend, I usually read with my computer, even with my paper book I’m not too far from it.
I use https://jisho.org/ for my lookups. That is, if I know how to spell the word because I know some of its kanji compound’s reading, or it has furigana, or I can copy the word from somewhere.
It has also a nice function to search by names.
KanKan
When I can’t spell out the whole word, I use KanKan to get to it, it’s really amazing: KanKan: kanji-component-aware online Japanese dictionary
Draw kanji
If I don’t manage to find my kanji in KanKan, then I draw it manually on https://kanji.sljfaq.org/
Remember to check “Ignore stroke order”, unless you know those
Ain’t it beautiful!
Self studying tips ↑
I studied without a teacher or a tutor and had some things that worked great for me so I thought I’d share.
Spreadsheet ↑
My Ugly Spreadsheet has been an amazing teacher during those two years.
I just made rows for everyday of the month, and columns for all the things that I wanted to do everyday. It didn’t need to be pretty, it needed to be easy to use.
So everyday I could just sit at my desk and follow the plan, instead of wasting time pondering on what to do.
The plan was adjusted anytime it needed to. If I could see that for 4 days in a row I didn’t meet my target of 30 minutes on Genki, I had to recognize that it was too ambtious and tune it down to 15 minutes to see if that was better.
If I was easily going through my WK reviews during the day and wanted to learn more kanji, then I would increase my 10 lessons a day to 11 and see how that goes. Etc.
If you are interested in writing: langcorrect ↑
I’ve only used it around 10 times but yet I am blown away by how useful it turned out. Definitely will go back to it whenever I want to work on my output.
Not only it is free, but you can write 30 sentences or only 2, and Natives will correct you and give you tips! Really priceless. Sometimes you can get lucky and find someone with a language-match too, I found a Japanese person learning French so I can also correct their French texts and read the Japanese version of them (they have the option to write the native version too).
Tip to get through a big pile of reviews ↑
When I say a big pile of reviews, I mean around 100. If you have more than a thousand, that’s a HUGE pile of review and it’s a different problem 
Just a small tip that made wonders for me. Find a Japanese activity that I enjoy, such as read a manga or a book. After 1 page of the book, I do 10 reviews, then read again, then 10 reviews again. This did wonders, the piles always disappeared so fast and I did my fun reading.
FAQ ↑
Show your stats ↑
- Time per level
Source: wkstats
- Full speed until level 17
- 10 lessons a day until level 35
- 12 lessons a day until level 47
- 6 lessons a day until level 60
Not going full speed was great to not be overwhelmed by reviews. I think I had around 100 reviews per day everyday. I got level 60 with 57 apprentice only and 70% items burned
- Lessons per day
Is WK worth it? ↑
If you have no knowledge of kanji, definitely! My knowledge of kanji is very good now. You can also just try the first 3 levels for free if you are unsure. I saw the results immediately.
I recommend the lifetime so that you don’t have to rush through the levels and can learn at your own pace, but if budget is a factor in your decision and you consider subscribing for one year only, I don’t recommend speed running but rather stop before level 60. Read more below.
Is speedrunning worth it? ↑
I think doing WK full speed is bound to leave you having less time for other things, which are think are more important to learn Japanese. So unless you have something like 5 hours a day or more to use on studying Japanese, I don’t think this will help you to learn Japanese.
Example of sentences with no a lot of kanji that, in my opinion, requires a lot of knowledge in grammar to get it:
「存在するはずのものが消える――つまり、神隠しに遭った人間は存在そのものがなかったことにされてしまうのではないでしょうか？」
(the sentences are not related)
辞めるなら辞めるでいいけど、後からやっぱりやめなければよかったとかって言わないでね。
I think that grammar knowledge is important to study (at least N5 and N4) and I wouldn’t want to wait to long to apply the knowledge of learned kanji to real material. It’s happened to me more than once, to see a word in the wild, and think “Hm I wonder if this one will be taught on WK at a level I haven’t seen yet? * looks it up * oh, I already burned it…”
Are the last 15 levels worth it? ↑
After level 45, the kanji and words taught are less common. So while I don’t believe that there are words that are not worth knowing (you never know!), I can see the point in dropping WK at level 40-something and learn the vocabulary you use.
For example today I learned 6 new words on Wanikani (I still have the lessons from level 60 to go through). None of them I have seen in the wild yet. On the other hand, in just one page of my book, I saw 7 words that were new to me. Wouldn’t it make more sense to learn these 7 new words instead of those from Wanikani? I might see those 7 words again soon in the book.
Because of that, I think it’s completely fine to drop Wanikani or at least slow down in the end. Better use of your time on something else.
Anything you don’t like about Wanikani? ↑
Oh, I’m glad you ask, thank you! Well, there is ONE thing I am a bit mad about.
The fact that the “list of recent topics on the community” has been removed from the Wanikani home page. Without that section, I would have never stumbled upon the forum. Without stumbling here, I am not sure that I would have figured out by myself how to learn Japanese.
I wasn’t new to learning a new language, but Japanese is a complete different beast and when I tried to tame it my usual way, I failed completely. So I am very sad that this has been taken away from the future new learners.
To tell the truth, every time something was changed / broken on Wanikani and people got angry, it made me very happy, because as the angry users looked for a place to complain, they ended up finding the community, and who knows, there are chances that they might stay
Thanks ↑
I think this has to be one of the main reason why some people who get to level 60 don’t make a level 60 post:
I decided to go for not writing names but instead I will write about all the different people who I am thankful for, and how you made my life more wonderful so I’m sure you can recognize yourself somewhere in there, maybe in more than one thing!
Thank you to all those who finished WK before me and wrote about how they did it, I learned from you how to do it and also sometimes how not to do it, it made my journey much more effective to learn from your experience!
Thank you to those who studied at the same time as me, that was super fun to do it together
Thank you to those who studies after me, it makes me proud to be able to help in return
Thank you to people participating in book clubs, asking or answering or liking or voting or even just reading along, it unlocked so many things for me
Thank you to those who made tools, websites, scripts, etc for WK and learning Japanese in general, you literally saved me years of my life!!
Thank you for people making and maintaining WK, my kanji knowledge is over the roof, it’s a bit funny to impress other Japanese learners or even Japanese natives!
Thank you so much to everybody who already went and wrote congratulations on my study wall or liked my post when I got level 60! It was a very emotional day and it was so nice to read all your messages. Kind of like a birthday but better, this one I earned it
And in general thank you to everybody on this community! To all those who interacted with me in one way or another, I really enjoyed getting to know so many of you and exchanging about so many different things. And in particular sharing about learning Japanese, I am so so happy that I have this community to do it with. There’s nobody IRL that really understand what we all go through to get where we are!
Although I tell people IRL that I learn Japanese “by myself”, thanks to all of you, it does not mean “I learn Japanese alone”, and that makes a big difference <3
I tried my best but there might be things missing from this post, I didn’t even mention https://learnnatively.com/ or https://jpdb.io/ and I use them everyday :o
but not even sure where I would put them in this post. And now this post has to end at some point, so I can go back to my book
One final advice ↑
60 levels, 762 days, 6463 turtles burned
How did I do it? One review at a time
Genki 1, Genki 2, Quartet 1, (and soon Quartet 2), finished
How did I do it? One page at a time
850 episodes on Satori Reader, read
How did I do it? One episode at a time
All the 900 entries on Bunpro, read
How did I do it? One entry at a time
All the entries on 2 Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar, read
How did I do it? One entry at a time
133 manga, 5 novels, 1 VN all in Japanese, read
How did I do it? One sentence at a time
You get the idea your turn now!
一歩一歩
