I just reached level 60 after almost 2 years!

[m0g]

Hey there fellow crabigator worshippers,

I just wanted to share that I finally reached level 60!

I had been going roughly as fast as possible for the majority of my time, and was mostly very successful with this. However, it did end up taking me about 1 year and 9 months since I stumbled a few times:

The stumbling points for me were always caused by one thing: time away from home. While I would always make an effort to keep up on reviews, there were a couple times in particular when I was away for a few weeks at a time and just wasn’t able to keep up with my WK habits at home, and quite a backlog built up. The first time this was pretty bad was level 44, and it took me about 3 weeks to catch up after starting with a review backlog of 2500….

That wasn’t so bad. then it happened again on level 55, and that time was just brutal after having done a bunch of the “fast” levels just before, in combination with tons of older items reviews piling up. It took me a few months to catch up, but I was resolute knowing that if I keep chipping away, I’ll get there…

But the most interesting thing to me about this was realizing: the real challenge here wasn’t that I was away and hadn’t done reviews for a couple weeks. It was that I couldn’t be in my usual routine of “stay on top of reviews each day, do radical+kanji lessons asap, spread out vocab reviews till next r+k lessons will be available”.

Also, it takes forever when you’re getting a ton of the reviews wrong and they come back up before the backlog is even remotely close to empty LOL. And then the next time I reviewed was longer than it should have been, which just makes it even worse.

I finally got out of review hell about a month ago, and was thrilled to be back to my regular routine. I decided I’d slow down the fast levels that have radicals a bit but otherwise push on through to level 60 and am stoked to have finally made it. I’m also relatively proud of my accuracy numbers in the end, even if it’s because I’ve convinced myself that something like 1% of particular vocab words are the whole reason my vocab accuracy is less than 90%:

Anyways, that was a lot more words than I thought I would have to share! But just happy to share this with people that will appreciate what the journey means Thanks for reading if you made it to the end!

[NinjaTech227]

おめでとう！お疲れ様だね〜 What comes next? Are you going to go for full burns?

[m0g]

I certainly do intend to try to burn everything - to me, the WK journey certainly isn’t over until at least all radicals+kanji are burned!

I intend to transition my time spent on WK to Bunpro, since the SRS has been incredibly effective for me but I need to expand my knowledge to better utilize all of what WK has taught me So that part will start pretty soon I think.

I also need to find some media to consume on a regular basis - haven’t decided what that will be, but it’s something I’m thinking about Not in a huge rush though since I know I need to improve my grammar a lot.

In the short term, I’ve been meaning to watch ラーメン大好き小泉さん for a while. Thinking I’ll watch it with subtitles on at first, and then try using it as a learning material, like understanding the various phrases used that I might not already (it will probably be a lot) - since it’s certainly a subject matter I care a great deal about

[Squintina]

Congratulations! That’s still pretty darn fast!

[superelf94]

Congratulations!!

[Roags]

Congratulations! Even with the setbacks it’s a very good time.

How do you feel about your current level of japanese?

[onesteadyguy]

Congrats!!! Time for cake!!!

[m0g]

Congratulations! Even with the setbacks it’s a very good time.

Thank you, I’m definitely happy with it! I couldn’t say it’s the fastest I could have possibly done, but the point was to be having fun while learning, not just doing it as fast as I could - even if trying to do it fast has been part of the fun

How do you feel about your current level of japanese?

To be entirely honest, I feel it’s pretty garbage, but somewhat intentionally. I was having a lot of fun really focusing on WK and learning Kanji, and so that’s what I did because I felt very motivated by it. So even if spending an hour or two a day on kanji, and mostly nothing else, for the last while wasn’t the most effective use of my time learning, it was certainly a fun one, and is something that kept me spending a consistently large (for me at least) amount of time learning Japanese.

This is a big part of why Bunpro and perhaps some other mechanisms of learning other parts of the language are my next steps. I know a bunch of kanji and words (at least that include kanji), but not all the glue that ties them together (or many common words that are typically written in kana).

I will add though, it has been super cool to be able to recognize all kinds of stuff!

The most memorable highlight was seeing an ad on the train in Tokyo this past February (when I was around level 48) and being like “oh interesting, that’s an ad for some kind of conference for cooking professionals. Holy shit, I could tell that was an ad for a conference for cooking professionals!”. While that example might not be especially practical/useful, it was the one I remember best from that trip lol. It was pretty wild to see how much a year of even just learning Kanji had improved my understanding of things.

Another time even at home, I saw a friend who was wearing a Bleach shirt, and I was like “Is the guy on your shirt Ichigo?” and he says he didn’t know I watched Bleach too - nah, don’t know anything about it, I just read the the name written in kanji on the shirt haha.

[cheru]

Happy for you^^ i think it’s an ideal time period to finish all 60 levels. I hope I’ll find the motivation to do my lessons as well because it’s been like 3 to 4 years and i’m advancing very slowly.

[MichaelR]

@m0g

It took me a few months to catch up, but I was resolute knowing that if I keep chipping away, I’ll get there…

This is always encouraging to hear, because we all hit those pile ups. I sure have. And it sometimes feels like there’s no getting out, but there is.

And a big congrats to you! What is your next goal, as in what will you do with your kanji knowledge?

[m0g]

My advice would be: don’t worry so much about lessons, but try to stay on top of reviews! If you feel like you got a little more time then the reviews are taking, then maybe do some lessons too

You got this!

[m0g]

Exactly - for me it was “well, there’s about 200 reviews a day coming up… if I do 250 a day, I’ll get there!”

And thanks! The short term goal is to go and use this to help advance my grammar; grammar is difficult to apply without words to connect/apply to - but the converse is certainly true too (it’s hard to use words without knowing how to make a sentence!). So, Bunpro in particular, and finding some kind of “real” media to read on a regular basis to try and keep kanji knowledge in practice - perhaps Todaii to start, since it’ works really well for my currently lacking grammar knowledge. And then probably Manga when my grammar is a bit better.

Longer term, my main goal is to be able to be able to get by as a visitor in Japan without English. I’d like to feel like I can eat somewhere without an English menu, or be able to converse with someone who doesn’t speak English. There will of course be many stages to this journey, but I can see lots of progress even just thanks to WK

[Buruberimiruku]

@m0g

The most memorable highlight was seeing an ad on the train in Tokyo this past February (when I was around level 48) and being like “oh interesting, that’s an ad for some kind of conference for cooking professionals. Holy shit, I could tell that was an ad for a conference for cooking professionals!”. While that example might not be especially practical/useful, it was the one I remember best from that trip lol. It was pretty wild to see how much a year of even just learning Kanji had improved my understanding of things.

That’s the best part about wanikani! I’m still working my way to 60, but I get so excited when I can read a word I’ve never come across before. Just today, I read 逆探知装置 and not only correctly guessed it was call tracing equipment, but also got the pronunciation right too (all thanks to Wanikani).

(Congratulations btw!)