I hit lvl60 late December, but I was waiting for the
to “confirm” it, which just happened.
Here is the chart
and my proof-of-turtleness
When the Lifetime sale hit back in 2016, I was honest with myself. Sure, if you can 2-year-hero it, it costs less to get Annual. It even stretched out to 4 years back then, if you knew the secret 50% word. But I picked Lifetime anyway. Got the sticker achievement ping when it was still a thing, but happened to be working in a hotel up in the mountains, probably misinputted something in the weird staff ryokan sub-address on my phone, didn’t get it, lol. That was back in what, Jan. or Feb. 2017? Feels like talking about an Old World, post-Covid.
Never used the Travel break, as the drops in discipline were never planned, BUT there is one advantage to going slow: the completely lopsided active-to-burned ratio:
It naturally happened to me, but at some point in the early 40s, I formalized it in a variation of the “100 Apprentice Max” rule many people follow: “50 Apprentice Max, 1000 Active Max”. This way, no matter how much I slacked off, the mountain could always be re-climbed in about a week and a half of semi-serious catching up.
Thing is, once I hit the 30s, I had enough of a foundation to bumble through texts at an okay-ish pace. It becomes much more manageable when a paragraph has like 2 kanjis you don’t know and one grammar structure you’re not 100% sure, versus an impenetrable wall of moon-runes. So, past a certain point, being serious on WK sort of became optional. But life also has weird patterns sometimes, and there would be pockets of time when it seemed the amount of stuff I had to look up would increase by a lot, and then I’d fall back to WK and find exactly the words that stumped me in the wild, lined up for me on the next level.
Other than that, uh…
My ultimate game recommendation to boost your confidence if you are in the early/mid-20s would be the phone/Switch port of Dragon Quest 1. Unlike the original that’s all in kana, it has elementary school level kanji. Everyone is straightforward in their speech and means what they say (barring one very notable exception, lol), and unlike the fake “thees”, “thous”, and “Walketh thine pathe” of the English localization, it’s all very casual short form, with a skew towards the 「○○がいい」or「○○がよい」structure (direct: “It’s good if you do ○○“ / means: “You should do ○○”) with a few old-fashioned words thrown in for flavor like そなた. You will need to search a few fantasy weapons/armor terms, but that’s about it. 99.9% “Press A for the next line” text, giving you all the time in the world.
Emulators’ “hard pause” feature is also your friend for this reason. For legal options, you can always hold the Rewind button in one of the various remasters/Switch service games floating around, but just hold it instead of rewinding. Personally, I have trouble with autoscrolling text even in my native language. The Conan and Star Wars text scrolls are brutal, lol. Naturally, this translates into the Reading part of JLPT being the worst for me due to the time squeeze 
I’ve since started walking the path of the ALT. I feel nowhere near business level even though I’ve giri-giri’d an N2, but the passive knowledge from WK helps a lot in figuring out words I don’t know by asking colleagues stuff like 「【たべる】の【しょく】プラス【whatever else】？」
Slowly making my way through the entirety of Kingdom Hearts. I stopped after KH2 at the time, so it is actually new stuff for me, in Japanese first. Just finished Re:Coded, currently on The World Ends With You (Yes, this is how the thorough KH walk through goes).
Oh yeah! Here’s another confidence-boosting trick: watch the anime of a story you already know from your childhood or teenhood, without subtitles. You’d be surprised. Say, you’d expect 1997 Berserk to be really thick, but anything past the opening narrator’s monologue about destiny and whatnot is quite intelligible…
… がじょう牙城 means “fort”. Adonis says it a few times.
So yeah. I’ll edit this post if I think of anything else. Cheers!
