I think those edge case stories are people who don’t work or are in college and have way more free time than most. I’m almost five years in and still not done. Brute force powering through Wanikani is a waste of time in my opinion; if you’re not also studying grammar and practicing with a tutor, what’s the point?
2 Likes
I was able to hit level 60 the first time after about 18-19 months. It was during Covid and I was still in the Army/transitioning out of the Army. So I really had nothing better to do and hit every review as soon as it came up.
It’s been a much nicer experience after resetting and just going at my own pace.
3 Likes
This seems slightly antagonistic to me. While you do have a point that those people with more free time will have the ability to spend more on Wanikani and complete it sooner, it isn’t simply a matter of having that free time or not. It’s having that free time and choosing to spend all of it studying.
I think very few people who would even have 8 hours of free time would sit down and study japanese non stop for all of it. At which point it could become completely irrelevant as to who has a full time job or not because the actual hours spent studying could be the same. And even people with full time jobs and school find time to game, read, watch tv shows, hangout with friends and family, workout, etc. All of which could be spent studying.
The reality is that, any way you look at it, hundreds and thousands of hours are required to reach a level of mastery in Japanese. If your job or circumstances prevent you from dedicating a serious amount of time to it, it will simply take you a significantly longer amount of time to reach your goals, or you might never even reach them. It isn’t so much of a commentary as to who has a life and who doesn’t, or who has a job and family and who doesn’t, it’s simply the reality of what it takes to learn the language.
There is also a big distinction between years and hours. When you consider having been doing something for years, it’s not very clear how much exactly has been done in that time frame, since the amount of time directly invested in studying is a small subset of that period.
Someone who has spent 1 hour a day for 5 years vs someone who has spent 8 hours a day for 1 year have a different amount of time invested into their actual studying and will more than likely be at different levels of proficiency. (This is ofcourse assuming that those hours of studying are comparable in quality of studying.)
So to simplify it by saying one person has been doing it for 5 years and the other has been only doing it for 1 year is very misleading. Especially when implying that the 5 year person has more experience, retention, has done it better or has been more consistent.
As for brute forcing WaniKani being a waste of time, at its core Wanikani is an SRS program, so much of its review is comparable to flashcards or similar types of quizzes. There is value in this regardless of whether you spend 1 year doing it or 10.
Now, one of the promises of the program is the ability to burn items. So if you believe that an item you burned 3 years ago will never be forgotten for the rest of your life, then maybe there is more value to not accelerating the system for faster completion.
Lastly, why does completing wanikani in a year or so imply not also studying grammar and practicing with tutors, and so on? If the implication was that people who are powering through Wanikani have loads of free time, why wouldn’t they also be studying textbooks, reading, writing, speaking, etc? If people with full time jobs and families have barely any time to be doing Wanikani, how are they then doing these things too? I think in general most people understand Wanikani to be a sidequest you do on top of the main quest of immersion. So even for those doing it quickly doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing they do or care about.
The main point is that it ultimately comes down to the individual, their goals, their skills, their study habits, their schedules, etc. It’s not a matter of who is doing it right or wrong, better or worse, traditionally or fringe, but a matter of everyone doing their best with the circumstances they are in.
11 Likes
and it’s not like you have to do all your reviews in one go every time. do five minutes here or there during the day when you have a break. those things add up over a work/school day.
4 Likes
Tried that, did not go well XD
5 Likes
I don’t know if our atomic chess friend has already posted here as I didn’t read anything.
But reading his story might be a good spot to start with if you’re fresh
It’s not antagonistic, it’s realistic. The OP asked, how is it possible to complete WK in just over a year? The answer is, if you’re working full time and/or have a family, it’s virtually impossible to complete in that timeframe. If you don’t work and/or you’re in college, it’s still difficult but dramatically more feasible. The posts I read here about people who tear through WK tend to be younger people, perhaps in college, perhaps living in Japan, and those lifestyles often are not applicable to “most” people who just want to learn Japanese for fun in their free time.
Similarly, you can read countless posts about people who brute forced WK in a short time frame, but their ability to comprehend spoken Japanese, long-form written Japanese, and personal speaking ability is poor because WK absorbed most of their study time.
5 Likes
It’s definitely not virtually impossible.
And people who “speed run” wanikani only take a year. Basically everyone’s speaking sucks after a year. And a decent portion of those folks, myself included, focus mainly on reading and read while going full speed.
Not saying I recommend it necessarily but I don’t think you realize how much you’re blowing things out of proportion. Full speed wanikani took me about 1.5 hours every day. I dedicate more time than that every day just practicing illustration after work. Those 1.5 hours are so much easier because I could do them in my little bits of free time on my phone. Hell I managed it when I was working 60+ hour weeks with a 1.5 hour commute by car.
10 Likes
Congratulations on your accomplishments, but again, you’re not the norm.
5 Likes
So then the assumption is that people who have done it have no jobs, no family and spend 8 hours a day on Wanikani?
If had they not done wanikani and done other things instead, they would be fluent japanese speakers, readers, and listeners in a year?
And if someone says otherwise they just don’t count?
Still sounds a bit antagonistic to me🤷🏼♂️
1 Like
I think I take it more as “if you want to do this in a year, you should know that it will mean spending an hour and a half a day just on WK; and also you probably ought to be spending at least as much time on non WK stuff”. And most people will reasonably conclude that that’s not a cost they want (or perhaps are able given their other commitments) to pay and that they should set their expectations accordingly. The people who do have the dedication and time to do that should go right ahead.
6 Likes
There certainly is merit in attempting WK at full-speed.
With some grammar study in parallel (preferably started together with WK at a leisurely pace), then diving into reading somewhere along the way… maybe when the first batch of burn reviews comes along?
After almost 15 months at it, I am now about to start L33 and, looking at how often higher level vocab shows up in the books I’m reading… I really wish I was 55-60 already, it’d have been so helpful 
(Other SRS systems don’t really work for me, as I’ve learned the hard way over the last few months.)
But my review accuracy is relatively poor, somewhere in the ~80-85 percentile I guess, and had I gone through it faster I imagine it would have been much worse. There’s just so much new info my brain can process and retain. And then the review mountain would have gone higher and higher and would have likely led to burnout… at least for the time being I am hanging in there.
Anyways, what I’m getting at is: I’d say ignore the prodigies and go at whatever speed you’re comfortable with, aiming for accuracy and (more important even) enjoyment of this learning journey.
3 Likes
Mm, we know from the statistics about WK levels that the most common WK experience is “user does it for a while but stops well before getting anywhere near L60”. So the best advice if you don’t know the recipient should probably aim at getting them to avoid the kind of thing that leads to burnout and quitting, maybe?
4 Likes
Not all, but yeah, if someone tells me they got to level 60 in WK in one year, I’m going to assume they have a lot more free time than most people and/or are sacrificing other parts of the learning experience to move that quickly. There’s no need to get defensive, my response was to the OP as reassurance that you shouldn’t feel like a failure or intimidated if you don’t “finish” WK in a year, as advertised. I am impressed and amazed by anyone who can do it, that’s great, but those folks tend to be outliers.
9 Likes
Fair enough. I agree with what you said here except for the sacrificing other parts of the learning experience.
It wasn’t my intention of getting defensive about it, but I can see how it headed that way. I was just providing some commentary from “the other side”, so to speak, to keep things from being too one-sided.
I will say though that a common thing I’ve noticed on the forums is the amount of shade that often gets directed towards “speedrunners”.
Comments about no jobs/families, too much free time, wasting time, doing things wrong, etc.
It’s possible to simply state that something is difficult to do and requires some time commitment and sacrifice without making assumptions about others or throwing them under a bus😄.
2 Likes
Beautifully said, thank you 
1 Like
Probably 3 hours everyday or so, for various parts, for about 1.5 years. I had a job, though no family.
I wonder how weekender pattern work, like taking a good amount of time on weekend, similar to taking a weekend class for a few years.
Going slow also bring up an image of not willing to take a commitment and allocate sufficient time to studying. Just wanting to take the language for free and no sweat.
Not always enjoyment, but fulfilling certainly.
5 Likes
Hmmm. Only if all you’re doing is slow WK and no other engagement with the language.
But slow WK and other SRS/grammar/listening/reading/speaking/all-of-the-above paints slightly a different picture 
2 Likes
Would it be safe to say then that the most “normal” or every day people don’t finish WaniKani in the first place?
Oddly enough, the thing that gets me to avoid burnout and quitting is strong committment, fast pace, and fast progress. I acknowledge that actually burning items isn’t going to physically happen regardless of whether I spend 1 year completing the program or 10, so I’d rather spend the year getting as much as I can out of it while doing other things too and then moving on to bigger things.
For me at least, the thought of having to dedicate 5 years or more on here deflates me a bit from wanting to actually do that instead of already reading and doing bigger things in that time frame without still doing Wanikani anymore.
So if I was a new user going in and I was told that nope it’s impossible if you’re a normal person and it’s better to take it super slow and spend several years on this, I probably wouldn’t bother and would just do Anki or other SRS instead.
But knowing that it is possible, with the right time commitment and dedication ofcourse, from the success stories of others motivated me to go for it. And now that I’m nearing the finishing line for the one year or so completion mark, I’ve learned a lot and made huge leaps in my goals and abilities. So I’m super grateful for the program and for those that gave me the motivation to do it.
I guess what I’m getting at is that the same way that people might get discouraged from the thought of the time commitment and sacrifice of finishing in 1 year, people might also get equally discouraged from the thought of the much longer time commitment and dedication of finishing in 5+ years.
Maybe both of which contribute to the majority not ever getting near 60🤷🏼♂️
6 Likes
Even outside of burnout or losing interest, the benefit of this system reportedly diminishes over time for many people (reading the forums, it happens around level 20-30 or so, I believe, if my memory serves me right). They switch over to actual reading or whatever other content they want to consume and find success with that because while using WK, they learn how to learn their own vocab and get and intuition for studying ‘better’ (the way that works for them).
So basically, they do WK until the returns start being too low and then switch over to learning “in the wild”.
8 Likes