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

Made it to level 8! *happy dance *

I also started getting my first items to Enlightened during level 7. Currently a very satisfying to look at 222 items are at Enlightened.

Level 7 took 15 days. I did intend to slow down a little, but not this much. Going to see whether I can stick with two weeks per level from now on.

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September stats update

:point_down: a bit late this month but here we go :point_down:

Some cool milestones were reached past month:

  • The Skytree climbers group has more than 800 members! :tada: :tada:
  • For the first time more than 100 members have surpassed the first observation deck!
  • The animated gif now includes a full year of data! (Sep 2020 - Sep 2021)

wk_skytree

Stay safe and keep on reviewing! :blush:

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I have reached level 6 almost 4 days ago, and should unlock the second half of my radicals and kanji at 7pm tonight! I need to figure out how to correctly space my reviews as even if I get all my items right at the moment, leveling up in less than 7 days doesn’t seem possible (not that it matters too much, I’m in no hurry, just curious!).
I also got my first :sparkles:Enlightened :sparkles: items, and I find it so motivating! 41 and counting.

I’ll log back in once I pass this level, super excited for what’s next!

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Well, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this, went from 30 to 36. My leveling rate had taken a hit in the last 10 levels, probably due to all the leeches making me not want to do my reviews so much so I’ve kinda implemented a new strategy for myself.

It’s been a year since I’ve started learning japanese, and most of that has been studying. It was starting to get old. I’ve been wanting to spend more time with reading and listening practice, but I got a bit bogged down with srs stuff, so I decided that if a vocab makes it to guru 2, from then on it will get passed if I remember it or not. I don’t do that with kanji though, I have to remember those. To some, that might be cheating, but I find that it has worked better for me these past 4 levels. I think my retention rate has improved on the new stuff now that I don’t have those leeches constantly bouncing around apprentice 4 and guru 2, along with speeding up my leveling. If I don’t learn those words through wanikani, I’ll either find them in the wild or I didn’t need them to begin with. My main goal with starting wanikani was mostly for the kanji anyway, without knowing those it makes it a lot harder to look up unknown words.

Since I spend less time on the srs I’ve been spending a lot more time reading manga and playing games in Japanese. I was never really big into the switch, but its region free games make it really easy to just play stuff in japanese. I switched its language to japanese and have been playing a lot of pokemon mystery dungeon and a few other games on it. I’ve also started just reading harry potter in japanese. I’m really not a fan of the fan base, but I used to like it as a kid, so reading it again has been interesting even though it has been slow.

So yeah, screw leeches. I just want to know the good stuff so I can get on with the fun stuff.

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Haven’t checked in in about a month, but I’m still here! It’s been a bit of a whirlwind the last month as I jumped on an internal recruitment opportunity for an entirely different department at my company, whilst simultaneously dealing with an awful tooth infection. I’m through to the second interview stage for that, which was surprising as I had my first interview whilst in a significant amount of pain because the antibiotics hadn’t kicked in yet. :joy:

Anyhow, I haven’t missed a single day of reviews as I didn’t want to lose my 650+ day streak, but I started getting a backlog of reviews building whilst I was in too much pain to do much more than 10-15 reviews a day. Hoping to shave off the bulk of that backlog this weekend and then once I’m through interview two I can pick up lessons again!

Glad to see familiar faces still climbing up the ranks! :sparkles:

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i levelled up today, back to level 22, about 4 weeks since starting to tackle my 1500 review pile.

took me a few days longer than planned, i had some very active days, on which i wasn’t able to do much progress. indeed at one point my review pile had increased back to almost 1100. but with the current strategy of ordering reviews by srs level that wasn’t a worry. of the original pile, i’ve got about 50 master level items left, and the pile of items to burn has grown to almost 800. with any luck i’ll be burning items on sunday :smiley:

besides WK, i’ve been doing a lot more reading, which is fun :smiley: (but also hard work). been feeling a lot of progress there. i ought to do some more grammar, at least to formalize the stuff i’ve kind of picked up from reading and exposure. i’ll get there eventually :smiley:

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It’s like a virus. A beautiful, beautiful virus.

As always, I really appreciate these so much.

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100% sure I won’t get to level 60 in spring 2022. My memory just sucks when it comes to Kanji :sweat:
I can memorize books and books of dry computer science theory in a short time but my brain doesn’t like Kanji apparently.
I started almost 2 years ago and I am halfway through - I hope I finish this until 2024.

(The break in level 29 was due to an university exam.)
I just feel stupid reading people going to level 60 in 1-2 years and here I am studying every single day this app and it takes a long time until it sticks and something moves from Apprentice to Guru.
I study every day after work but well, apparently it’s too less, idk.

But it can’t be helped so I hope I get through it sometime.

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Best get back on the climb…

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i think 4 years is a good time to learn 2000 kanji. of course some people have a lot of time and can go super fast. but when one has many hours available every day, that’s (comparatively) easy. i really admire the people who can stick to learning kanji over many years.

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I suspect that most people who go through all this workload in 1-2 years are, usually, either very young (so they memorizing mechanism is still a bit more flexible) or already finished school and university (meaning most of them don’t need to learn other stuff along with Japanese). Plus we don’t know how much time these people dedicate, it may well be something like 5 or 6 hours per day just because they can.

That being said - don’t be too hard on yourself for your speed. You’re doing okay.

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I wouldn’t make sweeping assumptions, especially considering 5-6 hours a day for kanji alone is a lot. I spend less on my entire daily routine of WaniKani + Anki + reading + grammar. That being said, finishing WaniKani in around a year to me feels extremely challenging :smiley: .

It might just mean the approach you’re currently following is not necessarily suitable for you :slight_smile: . It’s also worth spending some extra time on figuring out how to improve one’s learning method. Is it because the WaniKani mnemonics don’t work for you? Is it the sounds of the language that are somehow “alien”? The lack of context which comes with flashcards?

Some people around here for instance draw cartoons about kanji, because that helps. The extra time spent on drawing is fun and helps in retaining information for longer :slight_smile:

I myself don’t really believe in mnemonics so sometimes I literally have to fight against WaniKani to get those cards anywhere above Guru. Brute-forcing them into my head through WaniKani + Anki helps, but what works the best for me is actually reading, because that adds the missing context and subjectively I retain words and kanji better when they come from reading materials.

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5-6 hours was certainly an exaggeration. :sweat_smile: That said, even 2 years is pretty fast, and going from personal experience of observing classmates in Japanese classes (which I did attend to long before WK when I was in university myself, and am attending to now, again), for most people it’s a bit… not exactly impossible, but very hard to do, especially when combined with studying at school/university or learning something along with new language - classmates who were also regular students struggled the most.

Either way, any speed is better than none at all. But with that being said I also agree with what you said later about learning method probably simply not being suitable. Sometimes it is, indeed, the case.

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Definitely! Absolutely agreed! I would say Japanese is fairly hard as a language. Kind of one of the reasons I’m studying it over, let’s say German or French, but it’s far from an easy journey.

There is this scene from Bojack about doing that one thing a bit everyday, because while hard, it gets easier the more one does it :slight_smile: .I think it’s also one of the things Arnold Schwarzenegger said in one of his over-the-top pep talk style presentations. I’m honestly impressed his body managed to keep up with that pace, because it was inhuman :sweat_smile: . To elaborate, he was studying, going to the gym and on top of that doing acting classes late in the evening. Everyday. T.T

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i have read posts by speedrunners who said that when they got to the fast levels they were doing 6 hours a day on WK. so that is not necessarily an exageration.

i wouldn’t make any generalisations about the age of speedrunners. i was doing about 8 days per level before my time-out, and i’m closer to 50 than 40. but all speedrunners have plenty of time to commit to WK - i was doing up to 2-3 hours daily (and neglecting other aspects of study). many speedrunners say that they neglected other aspects too.

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Capture
This is the first time in 24 days I’ve been under 100 lessons. School has completely taken over my life, and since I’ve been transitioning into life in a new school, it’s been difficult to do lessons (and even reviews sometimes.) I did make an attempt to do my lessons, but then school distracted me as my workload suddenly got very heavy. Now that I’m finally starting to cope and get my stuff together, I thought it was safe to resume the lessons that I’ve been neglecting for so long. I’ve done 20 so far today, and I’ll do another 10 later. Tomorrow, I’ll be doing the last 23 lessons I’ll have from level 17 and the various content updates over my hiatus. Then, throughout the week I’ll be getting my apprentice back down (I’ll have over 100 apprentice by the end of Sunday) and then on the weekend I’ll start my level 18 lessons. Thanks to my Japanese class, I’m also being forced to study grammar, so here’s to quick improvement! :muscle: :clinking_glasses:

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Level Up!

I’m 32 now. Just came hear to celebrate.

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I totally understand. I learned levels 1-20 pretty quickly, because I actually used the kanji pretty often, but level 20-30 was much harder and they didn’t stick well, and I rarely come across them while reading. That’s why I don’t care about leveling quickly anymore. Yes, I could rush to 60, but I would be overwhelmed, hate kanji, I wouldn’t remember anything, and I wouldn’t even be that much better at Japanese. A fun anecdote though, I was reading something that was supposed to confuse our class on purpose and I actually had a pretty good idea what was going on thank to WaniKani.

So… slow and steady is better than nothing, and I’d argue it’s better than rushing to. Good luck to us both.

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If you have a hard time to remember kanji try to write them by hand. It is much easier to remember kanji that way.

As for me I never spend more than 3 or 4 hours on wankani usually around 2.

Indeed when I was trying to reach level 60 on wanikani I was too tired to even finish the Genki books. Therefore I stopped working through them while doing wanikani. Once I reached level 60 I got back to the genki books and finished them.

I don’t want to scare anybody here, but what comes after wanikani is even worse. The intermediate level is really hell.

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Can absolutely agree. WaniKani is just the beginning :smiley: .

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