Just out of curiosity, roughly how long does it take to reach level 60?

WaniKani
41

If you can find a website that has anime and subtitles. Kind of like satori reader but for anime and TV content that’d be awesome.

I think your method will be challenging at first but will pay off tremendously when you can recognize kanji instantly. Reading is a bit slow where you get all the time in the world to read.

42

I have been using Migaku recently. That is very convenient for looking up words on the fly and making my own context cards with video snippets

43

What were some resources you paired with WaniKani or used before/after it? N1 is a huge accomplishment and I’m guessing you’ve become acquainted with the many resources out there for Japanese learning.

44

The speedrun where you deliberately schedule yourself around the SRS intervals multiple times a day, strategize around “fast” and “slow” levels and if some kanji are gated behind radicals or not (forcing you to inhale lessons in two chunks instead of one with an extra ~4 days in-between to Guru the first chunk), and do 100% perfectly, is about a year and a half.

I took 9 years :joy:

45

For actual formal studying materials I started everything else after lvl 60 on WaniKani and that would have included:

  • Bookwalker.jp which I used for slice of life manga before gradually moving into more difficult manga genres.
    • I probably would use a different site if I was starting over due to the lookup difficulties when I started light novels.
  • Bunpro for grammar
  • JPDB for vocab specific to specific books (light novels) and other media
  • Before my first trip to Japan I got an online tutor and then after returning I went to an in-person even twice a month for speaking and listening practice.
  • I’ve been watching vtubers since starting the study journey during covid so that’s where most of my random vocab would get picked up and where I did tons of listening practice.
    • Mostly clips initially with some streams where I understand practically zero of it.
46

Thanks, this is super helpful! One question more question: do you use the free Bunpro? If so was that enough?

47

I went for lifetime (which I also did for WK). Being that I paused learning grammar after N2 but continued doing reviews for 2.5 years before starting on N1 I’d say that made it worth it for me. I also went through my earlier grammar (N5-N2) and quizzed myself to reset individual grammar points that had been “mastered” since I apparently didn’t understand them well enough or had forgotten during that 2.5 year “break”.

48

Oh that’s smart. And again, thanks for the recommendations, I have been trying them out and they are all amazing!

49

I’ve been taking my first attempts recently at watching Bocchi the Rock with Japanese subtitles. I’m extremely happy my Japanese is good enough to understand the subtitles without looking anything up (and jpdb is working perfectly for this), but as you said, the pace is fast and neither my reading speed nor my oral comprehension are up to the task, so I just pause and read all the time. I still think it’s worth it. I wonder whether repeated watches will get me to the point where I’ll be able to watch the episode without pausing to read the subtitles, since I don’t think it takes that much to sort of know beforehand what everyone is going to say. The subtitles I’m using have close captioning which add a bit of noise/even more things you’ve got to catch fast but they’re interesting too.