I have reached level 3! ^___^ It took 10 days and 22 hours, which feels like a very reasonable pace 
I was doing about 15 vocab lessons a day originally, then once I got to radicals and kanji I slowed down to around 10 a day. Actually leveling up again is making me feel like hey, maybe I can stick with this. I really wish I could buy the lifetime membership while it’s on sale, but I just don’t have the money for it right now 
I’m only a high school student after all… Hopefully when I finish level 3, I will be able to buy the yearly membership at least!
Thanks to the bookwalker freebies thread, I’ve gotten quite a few manga for free. Some of them, I’ve never heard of, and some I’ve been meaning to read in English for a while but I’ll take the chance to read it in Japanese! I would like to get a better foundation in grammar before I start on any of them, though.
Speaking of grammar, I’ve finally started Genki! I only got part way through lesson 1, though, as I’ve just started it. I really need to find a way to work in grammar study into my daily schedule like I have with WK.
Some particularly challenging kanji for me this level were 玉, 才, and 白. For vocab, 土 was extremely challenging but only in reading. Also, distinguishing the 五月, 五つ, 五日 from each other was extremely difficult, but again, only in reading. Of course, as I typed that, I remembered all the readings and was able to type them without looking it up… maybe I can remember them now 
Thankfully, because of Genki, the reading of 五十 was easy to remember because I’ve already put in the time to learning numbers.
I finally put in the time into learning katakana, although it was at the expense of doing my schoolwork… whoops. I’m justifying it to myself that it was important to finally get that out of the way. The day after I learned it though, I was able to read a tweet in all katakana and it was very satisfying! It was only one word, but it made it feel worth it.
I’d really like to take the JLPT N5 (or maybe N4, depending on how confident I’m feeling 
) exam next year—it would give me something specific to work towards in my studies. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if there will be a location near me. On the list of hosting sites on the JLPT website, there is a city listed not too far from me (maybe a couple hours drive) but it doesn’t have any specific hosting institution or links. Hopefully, it will be edited eventually to reflect the locations for 2022. I’d really like to push myself and take it in July, but I’m currently in my last year of high school and am graduating in mid June; I simply don’t have the time to study for the JLPT while studying for huge exams in May. Here’s to December!
I’ve just remembered something else I’d like to include in my immersion soon— Hololive! If you don’t know what Hololive is, it’s basically a group of Japanese vtubers (streamers who stream with a virtual avatar instead of a face cam) who are huge among the vtuber community! (There is a small group that speak English, but I don’t know too much about them.) Personally, I love Korone, but in the past I haven’t been able to consume much of her content that hasn’t been clipped and translated by people in the community. She’s also done a few “english-only” streams, but she has so much content in Japanese that I’d love to watch. To me, this seems like a great way to get listening practice. I’ll have to incorporate this into my schedule soon, but probably more on a casual basis compared to my other studies.
Not strictly related to learning Japanese, but I discovered the Japanese recipes thread which has some links to some great sites to learn how to cook Japanese recipes— I spent a while just reading through some of the articles on the basics, and I’ve now got it in my head to try to actually cook! I don’t have much experience in the kitchen but if I could get some of these recipes under my belt, I think I’d be a lot better off. I also learned a lot about bentos, which could be interesting to try in the future, as currently I tend to skip lunch a lot because of not wanting to plan what I’ll have for lunch.
I wrote this as I thought of a lot of this, so this ended up being a bit long… whoops. Anyway, onwards to level 4! I’m considering using a script so I can at least get a start on the radicals without having to work through 50 vocab lessons beforehand. Don’t worry though, I won’t neglect my vocab studies :>