Another day another level 60 forum post, and I’m very happy to share that today I too get to join in that tradition!
I started Wanikani a little over 600 days ago when I was just getting started with Japanese. At the time I was living in Canada and was just beginning Genki 1 to study towards the JLPT N5. Currently, I am living in Japan and studying for this Summer’s upcoming N2 exam. Though there is still a ton of Japanese for me to learn, I believe I have come a long way since when I started, and a lot of that is due to Wanikani.
Going into Wanikai I never expected it to make me fluent in Japanese or be able to read kanji flawlessly, but that it would help unlock other resources for me to learn from such as native media and easier access to look-ups. In that sense I would say using the app has been a great success. On the homepage of the app it reads “2000 kanji. 6000 vocabulary words. In just over a year.”, and as someone who finished the program in around that time I would say the pace required to do this for the average person is way too much, yet the ideal way to use the system. I think if I were to draw Wanikani out another year, the experience would have been much more manageable, but also if you are going to spend that much time learning just kanji there would likely be more efficient or fun ways to do it. For me, my mindset going into this was to be exposed to everything as fast as I could, remember as much as I could, and then relearn/fill in the gaps in my knowledge with immersion once that’s easier to do.
In the beginning of my studies, I found it particularly difficult to remember kanji, and Wanikani became the first tool to really make things stick in my head. That all said, as time went on a lot of the flaws of the Wanikani system started to show, and I really do think the last 10-20 levels may not have been worth all the time they took to complete. Because of so, I wanted to outline my thoughts in this final forum post to break down what I liked about the app, what I didn’t like so much, and some tips/recommendations for those thinking of starting or continuing with Wanikani.
Let’s start with the good! As mentioned before, I had previously tried other methods of learning kanji such as from Anki and textbooks. These approaches were quite difficult for me to use since they didn’t give me much to go off of when learning. There were no radical breakdowns or reasoning to help understand why this kanji was being used, it was just a word with one (or many) kanji, and I needed to remember it. Having Wanikani build you up from radical, to kanji reading and then to how it is used in words was a great onboarding process for me.
It was also nice to know I was loosely following the same kanji order as the JLPT, so the words I was learning early on were all relevant to my studies. Between that and the necessity to come back every day to review was great for building my work ethic, and in this sense, I truly think Wanikani is a fantastic tool for those just getting into Japanese.
As time went on however I came to have more of a love-hate relationship with the program. The deeper you go into Wanikani the more time it demands. That in it of itself isn’t that bad, but if an app is going to ask you for hours of your time every day it also needs to make sure it respects your time, which in the end I felt like it did not.
If I had to boil down my biggest complaint I had with the application it was the lack of any sort of “leech” system. As you get to the last final levels, all the kanji and vocab you can’t quite remember start to pile up, and just become a part of your daily reviews. This is particularly frustrating when the words are things such as specific baseball terminology or scientific terms you don’t fully understand even in English. If there was a system in place that removed items you got wrong maybe 4-5 times in a row and made you retake their lessons, I think this would have saved me a ton of time and frustration.
On the topic of vocabulary choice, I really found the choices Wanikani went with to be a mixed bag. I assumed the vocabulary used would be based on some sort of frequency list, but I completely gave up on that Idea after moving to Japan and realizing I didn’t know the word for cash, 現金. Sure enough, I checked if it was in Wanikani and no it wasn’t. This to me was very strange. I had learned both kanji months prior, and this is a word you will hear daily in Japan, so why was it not part of Wanikani’s vocabulary? I understand its difficult to optimize which words to use and which not to, but when there are so many words we have to learn that you may only say in English once every year or two, having such basic Japanese words missing is very confusing. From then on whenever something like “Pitchers Stuff” and “Sugar Sculpture” popped up, it really did make me question why the words I was learning were being taught to me.
Ultimately in order to finish Wanikani at the pace that I did with my current schedule, I had to get up and do 30-45min of reviews before work, and another 2 hours after work just to stay on top of things, so having those questions of “why am I learning this word and not the ones I see every day” pop up in my mind every time I failed to remember some obscure term really felt like a test of willpower As everyone reading this knows Japanese is incredibly complex, and having the majority of my time taken up every day for just this one app seemed to yield diminishing returns near the end for these reasons. Despite wanting to balance grammar, listening, and reading as well, no matter what I did Wanikani would eat almost all my time. If it wasn’t for the fact that I am in Japan now and need to see and hear the language every day, I think this level of mandatory Wanikani upkeep would have worsened all my other areas of Japanese.
The above Image is my average week with Wanikani during the 50-60 levels
The above image is my tracked time learning Japanese since May 2024 (so about 8 months since posting this). This isn’t 100% accurate since I do plenty of listening and watching of Japanese media that isn’t recorded, but this is all dedicated sit down and try to learn time. As you can see, just to stay on top of Wanikani it took 50% of all my time.
Changing toics, if there is one thing to take away from this post please make use of all the great extensions people made for Wanikani here in the community. Without tools like “Wanikani Double-Check” and “ConfusionGuesser” I’m not sure If I would ever have been able to finish. So many words share such similar meanings (cemetery/graveyard, to reply/to respond, shout/scream/yell etc etc) that not having a way to go back and correct your answer makes things far too difficult. Wanikani does allow you to add in your own definitions which is great (especially during the lessons), but when you have 500 reviews a day you tend to want to get through things as fast as possible, and these were a true blessing to have.
The final con I wanted to talk about was not so much an issue with Wanikani, but single-word SRS flashcards in general. When learning words this way its very detached from how the words will be used, and so its not clear how to use any of these vocabulary. Countless times when speaking to my Japanese teacher I used words I picked up on Wanikani only for her to chuckle as the word was very misplaced within our conversation. You could argue that Wanikani DOES have sentences that come with each vocabulary, but I really found these to either be far too simple or way too complex for the purpose of teaching a single word. That, and when you have to do your 500 reviews a day chances are you aren’t going to take your time and read each sentence as they pop up.
With all this in mind, I still think Wanikani was very good for me overall. Despite being far too overwhelming and packed with questionable words near the end, I do owe it my ability to read most kanji I know, and for expanding my vocabulary greatly. It is because I think it has so much potential that I want to be hard on it, and I wouldn’t have finished it If I didn’t see the value in it, but I truly wish it continues to improve itself and take some of this feedback into account. As it is now, I’m not sure I could wholeheartedly recommend this experience to anyone other than those at the very beginning of their Japanese learning Journey and those who have several free hours of time a day for the next few years. If this isn’t you, prepare for a tight schedule, constantly turning down invites to do things with others, and very literally revolving your entire schedule around Wanikani for years to come.
I am incredibly glad to be finished, and to those still working their way through Wanikani, stay strong, good luck, and can’t wait to read your level 60 post <3