I've moved on from the free tier!

Seltox · May 20, 2019, 10:02pm

So I recently moved to Level 4, breaking past that free tier and becoming premium

Although not a big deal for me as I bought a lifetime account back when WaniKani was in beta. Having an account this old is actually causing one annoying thing though. My wkstats are horribly skewed, even though I reset my account (two or three times over the years actually) - but oddly enough its only level 2 which is messed up. See below:

Also the projection for level 60 is 2061…

Besides that though I’m really getting into the swing of getting through my reviews. Pacing my lessons is working as well. At level 3 I just did all of the lessons in the same session and found it took me ages to move through them. Big reviews where I’d get around 50%. With level 4 I tried to do around 15 lessons a day. It’s possible that this will make me take longer to learn everything, sure - but it helps keep the motiviation there when I can consistently be at least 75%+ in reviews.

Out of curiosity… I’m going to Japan for 3 weeks at the end of the year. Assuming I got to level 20-25 before then (and kept going through Genki for grammar) how much do you think would be possible on my own? Obviously not expecting to be able to read newspapers or information plaques - but would it be possible to read signs, restaurant menus, etc (at least be able to get a “… I THINK it might mean this…” level of understanding)?

Belthazar · May 20, 2019, 10:08pm

Welcome back!

You can remove that outlying level from the calculations by clicking on it. My level 3 took me 1095 days.

Honestly? My first trip to Japan was before I really started learning Japanese, and my friend and I managed just fine. Admittedly, there were a couple of occasions where we had issues thanks to the language barrier, but even then we would have been able to avoid them if we’d had smartphones with data.

Seltox · May 20, 2019, 10:11pm

Oh my gosh I can’t believe I didn’t try clicking on it. Thanks for that tip.

wrt the Japan trip - I can’t say I’m worried about getting around or being able to do things - it’s just a great potential learning activity. But it’s hard to learn when you can’t even grasp any of it at all.

jerseytom · May 20, 2019, 10:13pm

I think you can click on a level to exclude it from the average.

I went to Japan at I think L23. That was after 16 months of study, all the N5 and N4 vocab on Bunpro as well as a chunk of N3. Got around great on my own! Really fun.

Part of that is the major cities really are very English friendly. Tokyo maybe most so. Japanese/English signage all over. Train announcements in Japanese and English. Hotel and station staff speak reasonable English. With Google Maps and such on your smartphone that makes getting around even easier. Easy to fall back on all of that. Just the same though you can dive into Japanese and people will be happy to talk to you.

For restaurant menu’s I’d actually suggest English versions as much as possible. You could go by pictures of course, but if you actually want to read it… I felt like there’s some time pressure when you get in at a busy place and they expect to take your order pretty quickly. A full menu can just be a lot to try to parse quickly in a foreign language whereas it’s easy to scan at a glance in English.

If you do want to use the language and interact with people in Japanese, if it were me I’d start listening practice now. Every day. By far the most challenging thing when I was there.

Belthazar · May 20, 2019, 11:09pm

Oh boy. I went to a restaurant with this as the menu. It was taking me all night just to read the thing.

That said, many places simply won’t have English menus, and sometimes even if they do, the staff can’t read them anyway.

Saida · May 22, 2019, 4:44pm

For restaurants, provided you don’t have dietary restrictions, maybe you can just ask for the chef’s recommendation!

system · May 21, 2020, 4:47pm

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