I'm just about at level 8 how long get to level 60 at this rate?

I apologise if this has been asked a million times before, but today I made a typo on a kanji which set me back about a day or so on progressing to level 8 and it got me wondering will I really make to level 60 this year, because I started around late December to January, and now I’m only at level 7 and its almost June. I do my reviews every single day, morning + night and finish up the lessons when the reviews are cleared.

My situation is also a bit different as in I’m not really learning vocabulary from scratch more so because I’m kinda of just illiterate at Japanese but can speak pretty well so what I’m really doing is associating vocab that I already know with Kanji as opposed to learning brand new words. I’ve studied for a number of years and I’ve amassed a good level of vocab already I just never seriously studied kanji and would always forget them. It’s frustrating because I already know a ton of words and I just don’t know how to read them, my comprehension of grammar and spoken language is pretty good its just knowing the kanji’s thats the road block, and I feel like I’m not getting to level where I’m learning the actual useful vocab yet, like do I really need to know the names of all the planets or how to measure light years in Japanese?

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I hate to break it to you, but you will probably not make level 60 this year. Level 60 in one year is technically possible but its pretty extreme. You have to spend many hours per day on the site, especially at higher levels. Very few people actually manage this. Don’t worry so much about making level 60 and just focus on learning at your own pace.

I can’t say for sure how long it will take you to get to level 60 because variables are going to change in the amount of time remaining. There isn’t enough data to make a good prediction.

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The answer is no, because it’s literally impossible for you to reach level 60 by the end of the year now. The fastest that most levels can be completed is 6 days, 20 hours. There are a handful of “short” levels later on that can be completed in half that time. But even at max speed, it would probably take you about 10 more months to reach level 60. And that’s only if you overhauled your approach to actually complete the levels at max speed.

As was already mentioned, it’s quite rare for people to actually finish WaniKani within a year. Personally, it took me about 2.5 years to reach level 60.

Hate to break it to you, but if you think the vocab from the first 8 levels is useless you’re not likely to think much of WaniKani’s vocab is useful. It’s important to remember that WaniKani is first and foremost a kanji learning site. The words selected are primarily to reinforce kanji meanings/readings and introduce additional readings that weren’t taught with the kanji. Also, since a lot of jukugo are taught, the words on WaniKani tend to gravitate to what you might find when reading, rather than when speaking. Personally, I think the vast majority of words WaniKani teaches are useful, including things like the planets.

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When I read your topic title I thought, “60 is not the goal, feeling comfortable reading is,” but if you already have a lot of vocab and grammar then maybe another system like Heisig or the Kanji Learner’s Course would be more helpful to you. WK can be frustrating for people with prior knowledge because it won’t let you skip stuff you already know.

In regards to typos, there are several scripts that can help with situations like this.

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Like others have already said, it’s impossible to get to level 60 by the end of the year. To find out how long it’ll take you to get to level 60 at your current rate, I recommend checking out wkstats.com. It’ll estimate how long it’ll take you to get to level 60 based upon how long it’s taken you to get through the previous levels, and also tells you how it could hypothetically take you to get to level 60 if you level’d up as fast as possible.

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There`s a website that will give you lots of information that would be useful, including predicted (based on your progress) and fastest possible level up dates: https://www.wkstats.com/ You need to get and API Token from Wanikani (under API tokens on the page) to unlock all the stats. Good luck!

This is an old version of the site, so the level-up projections won’t be 100% accurate, but it’s definitely a fun tool to fiddle around with and get a general sense of timing. The user who created it is working on an updated version of it for the new wkstats site!

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Oh, that’s cool! I had no idea; thanks for the info. Looks like it’s not as comprehensive yet, but I’ll be keeping my eye on it!

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Thanks this was really helpful it said my general accuracy was at 91.8% , I didn’t mention but my main aim was to pass JLPT N2 and this gave me a clearer idea of what level I’d need to be in order to be prepared for the exam.

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The general accuracy (called ‘total’ on wkstat) is a useless number. You should look at both the reading and meaning accuracy separately because if you miss either of the two you have failed the review.

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Came across your post looking for the same thing. I also was thinking g I was going really slow, but was working hard at it. My brain may be a bit out of shape.

I’m level 6 after 130 days.

Glad to see you’ve progressed a lot! I’m interested to hear if anything changed for you between now and then, and if level 20 in a year is what you feel is a comfortable ball-park figure for others to expect also?

When I first started using WK, I had no knowledge of how it actually worked tbh what the stages meant or how even level progression worked, I just kept doing the reviews whenever they came up but this wasn’t sustainable. So I did some research through the forum about scripts and the most helpful advice was to download the flaming Durtles app that had settings built in to the app so that I could manipulate which review items came first, this was fine for me cause I was solely doing WK from my phone.

I learned about the srs stages and understood that I need to get majority of the new kanji in level past apprentice iv and in to guru to move up a level and that I needed to do the same for the new radicals straight away to unlock the remaining kanji per level, every time I started a new level.

When I got to level 10 I decided to go full speed, complete a level every 7-14 days. I uses the durtles app to focus on getting the new kanji reviews done first, so that I could move up levels as fast as possible, this meant ignoring vocab but I didn’t mind as I found vocab backlogs easier to deal with than learning new kanjis. At certain point between levels 10 and 15, I decided to start cheating on the new kanjis just to get past apprentice iv and unlock new vocab as fast as possible as this was the most useful and important to me and impacted my learning the most, I found learning on’yomi readings first less useful and less intuitive than learning kun yomi readings first but that’s how WK is designed, I went on like this until I reached level 20.

Once I reached level 20 a new problem arose though I had a backlog of about 700-800 new vocab lessons, and since I cheated on the kanjis most of them came back in my review piles as I got them wrong after guru level. So I had to stop going fast and slow down and focus on getting my apprentice level item down below 100 items or even lower, so that my daily review count would stay relatively low and manageable before starting a new batch of lessons, I did about a 100 at a time, then did the reviews till apprentice items went below 100 and then rinse and repeat. Took me about 3 months, It was only about last month that I cleared the 800 lessons down to zero and now I am slowing down my pace on leveling towards level 30.

I feel at level 22 its much better that I focus on consolidation of the knowledge of the 700 kanji I’ve learned thus far than overwhelm my self again going fast as I did through levels 10-20. Hope this helps I’m glad I did it this way as I was able to move through 10 levels quickly and learn many useful kanji earlier but I wouldn’t recommend it to others. Feel free to ask me if theres anything else you want to know.

Also I want to add the fact that I was already at an intermediate level at Japanese before starting WK, and I could understand/speak Japanese fairly decently, but I just couldn’t read or remember kanji. So having a huge vocab pile in the first 20 levels wasn’t a big deal to me as I already knew about 70% of the vocab already just didn’t know which kanji were related to the vocab.

Thanks for explaining all of that.

I too use flaming Durtles, great app. I also use KameSame to help with the kanji production from English, something that WaniKani doesn’t have. I don’t mind that this is absent, as reading is more important than writing kanji at my beginner stage, but there are a lot of new vocabulary words that I learn through WaniKani, so when I need to recall a word (English to Japanese) I often struggle, but put the kanji in front of me, no problem.

My mind does consequently visualise the kanji and go through the mnemonics when trying to recall, quite odd, but the mind will always latch onto the concept from the initial introduction of a word.

The downside, is when I’ve done tests, I struggle with words that I associate with a kanji variant. Hiragana variants take me a little longer to recognise. Since one hiragana character could be one of many kanjis.

I’m going through flaming Durtles as designed, but it’s also my kanji dictionary that I copy and paste mnemonics into flash cards when there’s a new kanji involved.

I’m a beginner, but not zero. I’m hoping I get to start my 1year course in Japan soon as the borders allow. I’d love to get to a solid N3 level of kanji, grammar, vocab from now. So hopefully around Lv 25-30, but by your description, time and previous knowledge, maybe Lv20 before end of 2021 would still be a good achievement (who knows when my course will actually start!)

KameSame also allow you to target specific lessons, i.e exclude vocab, JLPT, English>Japanese vice versa or both. It’s a good compliment to Flaming Durtles.

Thanks, and keep it up, sounds like it’s back to being a pleasure.

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