Yep, that’s correct @ChristopherFritz - they are unrelated. 
It is a common misconception, @evandcs, as I’ve posted in the Wanikani forums and it’s talked about frequently here. No connection between the level systems though!
(I’m the founder of Natively - learnnatively.com)
wow what an interesting journey!! ty for sharing and good look in your goals going forward (●’◡’●) your disciplines sound well thought out and well rounded !
i use bunpro daily and am going through a course from my employer atm (alongside the occassional tokini andy genki video; he helps tonnes!) but even so grammar still feels like i’m at the bottom looking up at this huge mountain sometimes - i feel like there r more jokes online from new japanese learners about how many kanji there are feeling insurmountable but for me it’s grammar that fills that role! when i learn a new grammar point it feels like i’m trying to stuff an overstuffed teddy bear lool
sorry for complaining a little haha! 
thanks for the information!!!
to this day I was avoiding reading some manga because of those numbers above my level 
I often felt the same and couldn’t understand why everyone is afraid of Kanji. Though I have to mention that I only learned for recognition and I attribute a huge amount to my success there to WaniKani.
So it’s partlly because of this site I think we feel like Kanji aren’t the biggest problem for Japanese learners 
Another reason might be that when you don’t try native material the “basic” grammar seems pretty managable in Japanese. Nearly no tenses and no cases and stuff. Only when you go in the deep end you realize how many tiny nuances there actually are to japanese grammar. Many of which are pretty foreign compared to tenses ^^
Hah, yeah, I remember the days when I thought “wow, this Japanese grammar thing is very simple, little to no conjugation, no cases, no plurals, I can totally learn this, easy!”
…And then the rest of it came knocking. And I’m not even talking the advanced stuff, but like… N4 grammar and the tendency to omit half of what you’d absolutely have to specify in English just to have a grammatically valid sentence 
Turns out the only easy parts of Japanese grammar are the things that have a very direct equivalent in English grammar…
I’ve enjoyed reading this thread.
It strikes me that much of the “minimize dictionary lookups” advice applies to spoken conversation as well as to reading: it’s usually best to just try and keep the conversation flowing no matter what. More conversation trumps short strings of “correct” conversation.
Nobody is going to pull out a dictionary in the middle of a conversation, but I have noticed that it’s usually best for me to completely ignore the words I don’t understand and hope I figure it out later from context. Same thing when I see confused looks or other indications that I’ve clearly said something wrong: just keep plowing ahead and hope the confusion clears eventually.
At most I’ll try to make a mental note to look something up later, or wait for a pause in the conversation to ask about a word or how I should have expressed something. It’s childish to just nod and keep plowing along when I’m completely lost, but children do the same and they learn languages effortlessly.
I constantly have to figure out some other roundabout way to say something when I see confused expressions, but it’s infinitely better to make the attempt than to just ask how to say something (derailing the conversation).
Adults obsess about mistakes and can’t stand the feeling of imperfection. They are used to knowing things. Kids don’t know much of anything, but the truly awesome way the human brain detects patterns means that more practice (more raw data for pattern matching) is infinitely more efficient than correcting mistakes and filling in holes as you stumble across them.
tl;dr: Find your inner child.
this post was v wholesome and made my language brain feel safe and warm hehe
To be clear - the ratings on natively do not correlate with WK levels. They’re generated by comparing books to other books to come to an idea of how relatively difficult different books/manga are. It helps to have read something that is on there and then you have a bit of a baseline idea of how the different difficulties feel. It’s also supposed to help you figure out what is relatively easy/hard when choosing new books.
I enjoy Natively because I like comparing and rating things (and it’s nice to have a guesstimate on how hard things are).
Yeah I knew they don’t relate to WK levels, I was using the descriptions in the grading system on their website to place myself! ^^
Ya it’ll be good to finish this book whenever that may be and have a baseline like u say 
I think the most important thing to remember is only you will be able to tell what works for you or not. Try any of the methods mentioned above (lots of good advice!) and keep using those you like.
For me personally, things have changed in how I read and which tools I use and for what reasons. I think that is normal. I’ve never done super intensive reading with the translation and all because it took the joy out of reading for me. Basically it drove me away from reading.
Instead, I tried to get to a stage where I understood the gist as quick as possible, because I knew that as soon as I could start reading with overall understanding (but maybe without the details), I could start to more deeply understand.
Hah, I’m not sure that sentence make sense. So I’ll use a couple of examples.
I’m reading through the Sailor Moon manga, and I figured out pretty quickly that their everyday living and talking is very easy for me to understand so I decided to read it more 多読 (tadoku, extensive) style and not look up so much. But when the bad guys talk I usually get super lost because they do not use everyday vocabulary, making them the bad guys in my world too. 
So I usually just look up enough to get the gist of what they are saying (mostly focusing on verbs because the rest tends to make a bit more sense if I have the verb).
On the other hand, I also read level 4 graded readers because they are more or less +1 for me. Aka I can understand it easily with just one word here or there that I don’t know/understand and any grammar I don’t know or aren’t that sure if is easy to understand in context.
When reading +1, I find it much more useful to occasionally really dig into a sentence to understand how it works because that deepens my knowledge of whatever bit is confusing.
So I had a sentence the other day where I understood the gist due to the sentences around it, but I couldn’t quite figure out how the sentence worked in itself. So I dug into it, and I felt that after I figured out how all the parts worked together, I learned something, and I knew the next time I got to a more complex sentence like that, I’ll probably have an easier time.
In contrast, when I try to fully understand the talking of the bad guys in Sailor Moon, I have to look up so much that when I go back to it a page or two later, I’ve already forgotten all the details I looked up because there was so much of it. While that one sentence in the graded reader is very clear in my mind still a couple of days later. (Not word for word, but the understanding/knowledge I got from breaking it down.)
The last thing I want to add is to understand the tools you use. All tools have advantages and disadvantages, and depending on where you are in your reading, or what type of reading you are doing, different tools can be helpful.
For example, if I get to sentences where I don’t understand much at all, despite knowing the words, I know it is grammar that is getting me confused. And if I can’t break out the grammar myself, then I will use ichi.moe to help me.
However, if I understand most of the sentence, or get the general gist, but I’m not entirely sure how I got there, I might just throw the sentence into google translate. While google translate is flawed, if I know what the sentence means, then I can work around those flaws. For example, I might take out a bit I know exactly what it means and only feed google translate parts of the sentence.
For me personally, the better I know the sentence, the easier it is to use google translate for just the bits confusing me and I can always tell if it is giving me wrong info.
But I’d never give google translate a sentence where I am completely lost, because it might give me gibberish and I wouldn’t know.
Basically, know the tools, know what they can do for you and what they can’t. Sometimes a flawed tool can do the job and the much better one isn’t necessary (if they are equally easy to use then probably use the better one). I use BunPro.jp for learning grammar and I will sometimes look up specific grammar there, when I know the structure so I can find it easily; but if I’m completely lost in a sentence, then I’d use ichi.moe or a quick google translate to start my understanding going.
Not sure I added anything new here really, but it’s important to remember that what work for one person, might not work for another. For example, I’d never suggest to a beginner in any language to use google translate, because it is flawed; but at the point I am now with Japanese, it is a quick, easy solution for some of my question marks. So it went from a tool that is unusable to something useful for specific things.
Impostor syndrome is normal when learning a language, you get better at it every day and before you know it you turn into what you mirrored. Language is pretty much faking it until you make it.
Start with easy content then progress to harder, check up on words, certainly on words that appear often and go from there.
Find something that you enjoy doing in the language for hours every day and you’re golden.
Before reading I’d probably want to know atleast 3k words, the most used ones at the very least. That is easily manageble in two months.
there are so many gems in this post 
ty for all your insight!!! that distinction between going in-depth with the graded reader sentence vs the villain sentence makes complete sense
this has come up a few times in this forum! i gotta remember this bc it’s so true!
for sure; I think I just assume that I do know 3k words bc I’ve completed genki I and am at an okay WK level but bc WK for example teaches you based on stroke-number rather than common usage there are seemingly really common words — such as 冷蔵庫 which came up in my reading last week — that i haven’t encountered yet and had to spend time figuring out haha
but hey, 読めば読むほど、やすくなります!
This is probably a good rule of thumb, but in practice it depends on your tolerance for frustration vs. your desire to read “real” material. If you really want to, sure, you could grab a Japanese newspaper and work through it line by line. But if you’re like me, you’d last for about two sentences that way. On the other hand, maybe you could read children’s books all day long without help, but after about an hour the banality of the material would make you want to scream.
(Edit: At my level, I’ve found material aimed at middle school age kids is good. Complex enough to be interesting, easy enough to be somewhat comprehensible.)
If you find that something is an exercise in dictionary usage rather than actual “reading,” maybe put it aside and find something easier. But if the topic is interesting enough to justify the slog, go ahead and do it. Or find something where you can enjoy looking at the pictures and only struggle with the text if something in particular catches your eye.
I really need to get back to my manga that I bought… I got super discouraged at this one page months ago that made no sense to me.
I just went back to that page to try and re-read it now and while I do understand more of it, I still cant understand all the little details and such without having to look at kanji I don’t know yet, or using a translator for some grammar or pure kana words I haven’t encountered before.
It makes me feel ultra discouraged to pick it up, so I admire your ability to power through lol. (the manga I bought is for a series I really like too, and there is no EN translations of it, so this is definitely something I am interested in!)
i’m sorry to hear you had that frustrating experience ! did you switch to reading something else after that happened?
what is the title of this manga?
Nope… I really need to just accept that it WILL require some effort and that I will be unable to understand all of it.
I sorta veered off to watching anime again, but that has taken a pause (which I hope to remedy now that I have a TV in my room 
)
ラブライブ！ サンシャイン!! Manga, volume 1
That’s a good thing. Now you have a way to measure your progress. Go back to that page in 6 months and see how it goes.
I’ve been doing a Jalup deck that introduces J-J definitions gradually and learning how to read Japanese dictionary entries is an under appreciated skill. 