I’m considering getting a one year subscription (it’s pretty expensive for me, so I probably will only be able to get it for one year). Is it realistic (or even possible) to be able to finish all 60 levels, or at least most of them, in a year? I’ve already finished levels 1-3 and have basically everything burned, so that makes it easier.
If you’ve speedrun wanikani, how many lessons did you have to do each day? How many reviews? And about how long did you have to do it each day?
My main concern is getting burnt out. Spending money on a subscription might motivate me to keep going, but I don’t want to throw all that money down the drain.
(Ironically, I’ve already been on Wanikani for over 3 years, but I never made the decision to go premium lol.)
possible yes
realistic NO!
WK is missing many basic features every other SRS system has, there is no Undo, if you make a typo, oops back down it goes, leeches - no built management or even a way to suspend them. Sure you can run scripts, but WK will break them several times a year and too bad soo sad you are up a creek until they are fixed or really doomed if they aren’t maintained.
Yes it’s possible, but those that do it are the exception rather than the rule.
Don’t believe all the marketing, review the forums for yourself.
There’s a reason many people give up beyond Japanese is just hard, WK is missing some of the most basic tools to make this a worthwhile SRS IMO.
Before plunking down money check out other free resources first, Anki or Renshuu (both free). There are also paid competitors, MaruMori was developed by a past WK user (still being developed for for the higher levels, but all the kanji is there).
Shop around before giving WK any of your bucks. If it works for you great, but for many of us the lifetime purchase ended up a sunk cost.
Renshuu isn’t the prettiest interface but the free version will work just fine.
Best of luck!!
I did 20 items a day (minus the fast levels) and I’d say it took me about 1.5 hours every day to do all my work and that included maybe 150-200 ish reviews a day?
I think that pace was very comfortable and was actually just my natural pace that ended up being full speed. The harder part is the fast levels which is essentially double that pace.
I can’t use anki (bad computer lol) but I used a similar web based flashcard app and it works fine for vocab, but not for kanji for some reason—it’s just way harder and I don’t know why.
As for Renshuu, have you used it? I checked out the website and it seems a bit… clunky, to say the least.
I think it’s possible if you can accept the work-load. The even better news is if you only make it to the high 50’s, that’s probably close enough with the SRS, and I believe you still have access to the mnemonic pages if you want to do the rest on your own. (confirmation needed on that last part)
Clunky yes but it works fine and you get used to it.
They also have a very active discord server with live/free/chat teaching stuff.
I just recently hit level 60 myself but I left WK at lvl44 and migrated everything to Kitsun to finish. Took me 5.7 years. The leeches were unbearable. Never reset and did my reviews every day.
If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have wasted any of my money on this platform. WK is by far one of the most expensive tools out there and it lacks too much IMO
Whatever you do, do what works for you, there are people that have done it in a year, but for many people the lack of basic srs features w/o scripts makes this platform less than ideal.
I think it’s worth it for a certain group of people. What you’re paying for on WK isn’t some super efficient state of the art learning tool. The actual Japanese content on WK is “alright” at best imo. What you’re paying for is for comfort. All the mnemonics, items, and ordering are done for you so you really just have to get a routine going and you can do the same thing every day more or less. For those who want that sort of guided learning at the start I think it’s a fine way to spend your money provided you actually use it.
It’s possible but I wouldn’t recommend it. If you make it to around level 30 in a year you’ll have a very solid base and then you can decide if you want to pay for a second year or just move on.
You get diminishing returns from WaniKani the further you go, the first 30 levels are massively more useful than the last 30.
Do you know if there’s a way to check out renshuu without signing up for it? i’m interested in trying it out, but I don’t want to put in my email only to never use it again.
On a side (but important) note, the main reason I like Wanikani is due to its system of teaching kanji by radical, instead of going and teaching kanji like 働 right away through rote memorization and brute force (unlike most resources that I’ve found)
If your ability to concentrate is good and you have free time on your hands it’s feasible. I got burnt out after 5 levels at full speed, because I couldn’t manage 150-200 reviews plus ~40 new items everyday, so now I’m back to the default pace - 15 lessons a day, not rearranged. That should take 2 years, which I reckon is not bad at all, especially since reading is supposed to get much easier after level 30.
you can sign up for free, and it stays free for life
I signed up years ago and didn’t use it actively for many years.
They do have a paid version if you want, but honestly the free version does everything you need. Give it a try, if it doesn’t work out no loss.
Recommend spending some time in the WK forums and search through past posts, look for the summary page, kana vocab and other “fun” things. Make your own decisions, but if you do decide to go with WK, my personal rec is to go monthly and see how it goes. You really can’t tell how its going to go until about levels 15-20, that’s when you get into a rhythm and can really see if it works or for you or not. Then at that point you can plunk down money if you want or ditch w/o wasting too much.
Really hard to know wk will work for you until you start using it for a while. But def can say don’t buy a year or lifetime sight unseen.
There’s no real rush to sign up for WK spend some time browsing see if some of these things will be deal breakers for your needs.
As a person who did that feat before (WK in less than a year in my second try)… I seriously recommend to you (and for everyone else ) to get the lifetime subscription near year’s end: That’s the best deal you could hope for
Now after a new reset, I’m reviewing kanji and vocab from mid Tiers (Lvl 30 and over), at a much more leisure pace and really enjoying it while reading my favorite mangas at the same time… And all of that for the same price!
While WK helps tremendously, to do it over a year will consume lots of time and energy, and if you don’t mix it with actual reading and/or grammar studies, your kanji knowledge will dissapear incredibly fast.
And if you ask me… The very best thing about WK is: These forums for sure . You’ll get here lots of support, motivation and friendship. Nothing like some other places full of toxic stuff
In summary: Great value, superb tool, nice community. Get it in December at half the price and forever
I think Anki has a web version too though. Does that also not work?
(Kinda surprised Anki doesn’t work on your computer. It seemed to me an app, which doesn’t need much resources.)
I get though if you prefer to use Wanikani. I think to build up an useful Anki deck, one would need to come up with a system, where one learns some radicals, then kanjis based on that, then vocabulary based on that. And you still would have no mnemonics, which WK would provide.
Already lots of great advice here, but one thing I’d like to reiterate:
If you think you’ll want to finish WaniKani (that opinion might change once you’ve made it further in), doing so in a year might be best for your purse, but it probably isn’t the best for your Japanese.
Unless you spend a lot of time on Japanese each day, you probably won’t find enough time for your other studies. You’ll need some additional way to learn vocab (because WaniKani isn’t nearly enough), you’ll want to learn grammar and you’ll actually want to apply what you’ve learned through reading/listening.
You wouldn’t be the first or the last person to slow down their progress by overly focusing on WaniKani.
Personally I’d probably try to get Anki to work instead. It’s entirely free, and many a Japanese student wants to use it eventually anyways, and if you insist on using WaniKani perhaps you’ll be able to find some shared decks that are suspiciously similar.
If your hardware meets the minimum requirements and the only problem is the operating system, then it should definitely be possible to run Anki on a Chromebook:
) to get the lifetime subscription near year’s end: That’s the best deal you could hope for 
