Let’s climb Tokyo Skytree - level 60 in autumn 2023

I burned my first items today! It feels so satisfying!

I got a little stuck on level 11 for a long time due to some life problems (no energy for new lessons), but at least I continued grinding reviews everyday. It feels good to be back on track. I might not reach the goal in time, but I will still try my best.

Let’s gooooo, to the top of sky tree and beyoOOooOOoOnd. WOooOOOOoOOOO!!!

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Congratulations!

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Congratulations? So the cake is actually a pie?

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i’m back!

…but no level-up this week. instead i’ve been on vacation mode for 6 days. was travelling (best friend’s hen-night), and though i’d planned and made a schedule about when i’d have time to do my reviews, once i was travelling that all fell apart. and then when i got home i got my second shot of moderna, and it knocked me out completely. so yeah, this is going to be my longest level so far :smiley:

i did get my first burns on friday morning, before leaving on my trip! and didn’t make a single mistake :smiley:

it’s cool to see how so many of you all have levelled up this week! and two new level-60 cakes! wow! :smiley:

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Congratulations🥳 @latepotato さん

I wonder who is the cool guy in the middle of picture.
No wait

He is cooler. Congratulation @username21 さん

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Dude ASAO has levelled up my listening skills to a monstrous level. £7.20 for unlimited lessons with trainees, book in like three a week and you are laughing.

Also, I have a week off from 12th - 16th July, you want to get lunch? I am eager to hear more about your Wican ways.

I remember you! Congrats dude! :cake: :partying_face:

Congratulations! :cake: :partying_face:

I’ve really enjoyed following your progress (and chatting with you on Discord) and now the day is finally here! Truly awesome effort and I will celebrate today alongside you :muscle:

What are your plans now and going forward?

Holy guacamole that looks epic! I want a piece :sob:

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Woaaa congraduations @username21 :tada::tada::tada::unicorn: what a run ~
Sorry I can’t make it together :sweat_smile: I’m still dealing with things, and still on low time now…

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Woooo おめでとう! Your potato sister is following suit; although it may take a while :smiley: Wait for me at the top!

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Thank you guys!

Yeah, totally understandable! Like I said in Discord, I’m rather impressed with you being able to combine work with WK and make progress this much.
Most of all, great to hear you’re still around here! Will be looking forward your cake day as well, just don’t forget to @ me then.

Thank you! Agreed, the cake was great and I wish I could share a piece with everybody here!

With plans, there are always more ones than I manage to handle. First of all, it’s burning / catching backlog / bunpro / moving burns to Anki / etc regular stuff all lvl60 people do after graduation.
Regarding interesting things, perhaps you remember my panic regarding language school few months ago? Fortunately, by now everything settled down and I managed to squeeze myself into October semester. So within upcoming 3 months I have to finish all the things home to get ready for my first trip to Japan with only one-way ticket on hands.
Another thing is a part-job on the place. With some miracle I managed to find little company that seem to be interested in my programming skills and they don’t mind to wait Oct, neither my part-timing. Not sure if everything would turn out cool with them, but so far I have a great on-field language practice in a wild, with abundance of technical terms included. Fortunately, part of them are katakanaed from English, but I still have to figure out myself all the glueing words like “development”, “execution”, “implementation” etc used in technical speech. I’ve been already told the gist of technologies stack I may work with in that company, so besides preparing for departure, I’m going to focus a lot on reading and watching lots of tech things I’d have to deal in future and breaking them down to my Anki decks.

iTalki? iTalki. I’ve broken my schedule this time only because of JLPT, other time I’m clinging to my 1 lesson/week schedule. Outside of native environment it’s the only way to keep speaking skills up to something relatable. Besides, I managed to find a great teacher with absolutely godlike amount of efforts she puts into lessons and pro-active advices she gives me. I was largely impressed with her offer to switch entirely to keigo speech to practice it. Most of other teachers are fine to give advices regarding keigo, but using just 丁寧体 by themselves. But she’s fine with actually talking keigo herself and she’s absolutely gorgeous at it and every lesson is just like visiting opera and my ears are just blossoming :cherry_blossom: (this is the point when you know you love Japanese - you can enjoy keigo speech). More importantly, with such context I’m more confident to use keigo myself. She’s a huge boost to my business language skills. I swear when I get there I would write her 年賀状s every year till the very end.

With best odds, borders would open this autumn (fingers crossed! :crossed_fingers: ), so I have just 3 month before Oct to squeeze there professional language skills that people usually acquire during 4-6 years in uni. Maybe lurk more some job hunting sites, learn more about job/immigration laws in Japan, etc - after graduating from learning alphabet on WK, it’s time to learn some real professional life in Japan!

Speaking of which, you’ve intrigued me with

Mind to introduce it a bit more? Brief googling brought me just to some language school in Tokyo, but I’m not sure if this is what you’re talking about.
Would be happy to talk a bit more about resources/tools you’re using now, actually. May bring mine as well for exchange, if you’re into it.
(would be cool others join as well, since I believe WK+bunpro+iTalki bundle is not the limit and I’m always starving for new ways to improve my studies)

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That is amazing news!!!

Thanks for the level of detail, it’s a really inspiring amount of consistent effort and dedication you’re putting in. I really hope there are no more delays with you getting to the language school this time.

I expect updates!

そんな女神は?! I don’t get this feeling with any of my teachers :sob:

Seriously, I really love to hear that she accommodates for your needs!

Excuse me prying… what programming do you do? Are you a web developer by any chance…

Yes, it’s the same one! Sorry I should have linked it before I have no idea why I thought everyone automatically knows about this now.

Thread by @jonmoxley here that explains everything: https://community.wanikani.com/t/improve-your-conversational-skills-with-asao-language-school/50599

I’m not really using anything fancy at the moment. I’ve not touched Wanikani properly since reaching 60 to be honest (I dip in and out for about 2 minutes at a time) and I don’t use any other flashcard systems. The schedule I made for myself went out the window, all I am doing is grammar studying (via textbooks, homework my teachers give me, and through reading) and reading a physical book (still Penguin Highway, currently on page 142) and lessons via iTalki (Skype) and ASAO (Discord). It’s been like this for a few months. I have been watching lots of Japanese films/shows though, not that it really counts!

I am more than happy to hear about what you are using, though. At some point I’ll have to switch up my routine, and there are many later-level kanji that are slipping from my brain as we speak so I’ll have to put some time into WK sooner or later :smiley:

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Finally leveled up to 38 after 26 days, 12 hours. It took me a little over a week to catch up after my vacation and now I hope to stay on track for the next six weeks or so.

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Level 52! Now I’ve spent as much time leveling up in this thread as outside of it (I entered the thread at level 26).

Among other news, I’ve started to cheat a bit, by using the reorder script to level up kanji first, and then going for the vocabulary once an hour has passed. I feel like this is the only way to deal with the levelling up, when, if I tried to do it all at once, I would first get >100 items to level up (or not), and then >100 new lessons - all in an hour. It would just take too much time, and I fear I would end up going over the hour anyway. I just don’t like the margins.

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Didn’t level up yet just wanted to share this achievement


Hint: 3.5k burns💥

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Hit level 34 after being on 33 for over 19 days, way off my usual pace of 9-ish days. But at least I got it eventually.

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Well I guess it’s time for my occasional update, level 30. Half way there. The last 10 levels have been kinda slow, so I changed up my methods a bit. I only do wanikani via flaming durtles, so fat fingering shit has been a common occurrence, along with abusing the undo button when that happens. I got tired of that so I disabled any reordering I had and turned both reading and meaning to anki mode. This should speed up reviews a bit, along with doing 15-20 lessons a day should allow me to get my level up time back under 11 days per.

Besides that I started getting more into satori reader and some legally questionable site for streaming anime with japanese subtitles to try and get my reading comprehension up a bit, and that’s been pretty fun. Between those, I kind of want to start sentence mining for kana only words, but between wanikani and bunpro, that’s just not going to happen yet.

At this rate I wonder if I’ll get to level 60 by the end of this. Probably not. If I don’t, whatever I guess.

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hit level 33 just two days ago! Vocabulary items still toooooo many :no_mouth:

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Hey uh :point_right: :point_left: someone interested in a little stats update?

Okay, here we go:

wk_skytree

We have had 15 new users in June which makes this the month with the least people joining the climb so far. I guess because many feel like time runs out… even though there is still 10 months left. Although the thread reads “level 60 in spring 2022”, you can always set a goal that suits you. It is better to reach a goal you set yourself than fail on a goal that you feel is definitely not managable to do in the time left.

Also, another three climbers have reached the top! Congrats, really cool to see you up here!

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Congratulations!

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Congrats! You just flew to the top!

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In the midst of extra busy work week I reached level 45 and almost forgot that it means the SECOND OBSERVATION DECK!!!

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