Level 10 progress check + questions for the community

WaniKani
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Hey, I am new to the forum. It seems to be thriving community, so I am trying my luck to start a thread summarizing my journey after 10 levels.

My Progress

  • I started with 0 knowledge of Japanese. I don’t watch Japanese media much to a have a basic feel for the language like many do.
  • Finishing WaniKani Level 10. That is 123 days, about 12 days per level. This speed is about average and I am glad that I am not skipping too many reviews.
  • Started working on N5 grammars on Bunpro.

How I feel:

  • Reading is extremely difficult - reading a sentence from which I know all the vocabulary and grammar points is still a struggle. I have to mentally translate each part of the sentence first (especially the pronunciations) and then read it out loud together.
  • Listening and understanding at regular Japanese talking speed is impossible. The speed is just too much for my brain to process.

Unexpected findings:

  • Learning Japanese is fun - studying vocabulary is a great way to fill in fragmented free time throughout the day. In fact, I have been traveling much during the period, but I have rarely miss a single day of study.
  • Learning enforce memory: recalling vocabulary often brings me back to the physical situations I was in when I first learn the word (especially on travels).

Questions for the community - how to progress?

  • How do yall structure your learning journey at this level?
  • Are their reading material or online tools to help me internalize grammar and learned vocabularies?
  • Do yall use or need another site for vocabulary? IMO, WaniKani vocabularies focuses more on “smooth Kanji progression”, rather than teaching you everyday common phrases.
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I live in Japan and I’ve restarted WK a few times so my case is quite different to yours, but your approach so far sounds solid to me.

Graded readers. There are a lot of fans of Satori reader on the forum, but I haven’t used it personally. I have some physical books I got at my local bookstore which were a good starting point for me. I also looked for recommendations from people here. Check out the book clubs for sure if you want to get into reading!

WaniKani teaches kanji, not really vocab. The vocab that’s included is there to help with learning the kanji readings and to get a better understanding of how they’re used, this is how we end up with so many “famously not useful” vocab items and why very common words and phrases might be absent.

If you’re reading/otherwise consuming media, you could use something like Anki to make flashcards for new words you want to remember. There are also sites like jpdb.io which have decks made various media if you don’t want to make something yourself. A lot of people also use a textbook like Genki or みんなの日本語. As you’re already on Bunpro, they have vocab decks as well now which are probably better for including the common words and phrases that WK lacks.

You seem to be off to a strong start! 頑張って！

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Welcome to WaniKani and this community! catwave
We have a very nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaice commeownity and I really hope you’d like it here! love2

Well, there is a great site called

It is not free, but it is arguably the easiest way to get into reading and listening. It also has a lot of notes on grammar.

Also, here’s a great YouTube channel:

I know a lot of reading resources, but these two are arguably the easiest for a beginner.

Anyway, best of luck with your studies! wricat

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Might be helpful:

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Welcome to the forums!

Same. Well, I learned the kana before WK, but that was it. I knew maybe… three-four words before?

That’s not a bad pace. Some go faster, some go slower, but you do whatever you’re comfortable with. :+1:
Not sure what you mean by “not skipping too many reviews” - if it’s about not doing reviews as soon as they become available, that’s not a problem IMO. Some people prefer to do them in large daily batches. Just don’t let them pile up over days and days, as it might be discouraging (and exhausting) if you see a mountain of hundreds pending one morning.
You probably didn’t mean this, but just in case: I’d say do not skip vocab lessons just to progress through the levels. Vocab is there to reinforce the kanji learning and later on you’ll eventually run into all this (maybe apparently “useless”) vocab in reading native content.

That’s completely normal, and it will be tough for a while yet. Maybe not a consolation but I’m L34 now and have several books behind me now and I still “translate” internally rather than taking in the Japanese as is. But this doesn’t mean it will be the same for you, you may reach a point where internal translation is no longer required a lot faster!

What a conicidence! :face_with_hand_over_mouth: However, it’ll slowly but surely get easier. And, as above… each of us has a different speed in learning the language and in processing it, so don’t be discouraged, you might get there faster :slight_smile:

That’s cool! Although it might become difficult to retain this “method” once you get to 20-30k vocab :rofl:

Currently:

  • WaniKani at a pace of two-weeks-per-level, learning all items. That means 11-12-13 lessons per day - another coincidence :slight_smile:
  • Grammar: I started grammar at WK L7 if I remember correctly, Genki 1+2 with the corresponding Bunpro decks and TokiniAndy videos. But just skimming through the books to cover the basics. Later I decided I don’t want to continue with Quartet or other textbooks, but I did continue with Bunpro’s decks and am now about 2/3 into N2 lessons. My review choice is Reading + Review&Grade as I’m not interested in production (at this point in time, anyway).

I can’t stand graded readers :man_shrugging: But diving straight into novels wasn’t realistic so… thanks to the community here I discovered Satori Reader, and it was a thoroughly excellent resource, in preparation for tackling native materials. Okay it’s not free, but I’ll always highly recommend it to anyone :slight_smile:
There’s also stuff like NHK Easy and various begginer podcasts for listening - others will surely post some links soon.

I’ve picked up a fair bit of vocab from Satori early on, nowadays I’ll just add to SRS (Bunpro or JPDB) a few cool (to me) items from my daily reading sessions.
Bunpro has N-graded vocab decks (bear in mind there’s no official classification), JPDB has decks created from books and anime and could be useful for pre-learning before reading or watching something.

Oh and when you’ll feel ready to start reading native content, Natively can help you pick something based on your knowledge level. Also, visit the book clubs here for dozens of ideas.

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Based on what I’ve seen on these forums, I would say that it’s rather fast in fact! Don’t undersel your achievements! Anything faster than two weeks per level is in the fast category IMO.

Yeah, that’s normal, it’s the “solving riddles” phase of Japanese and it’s going to last a little while. In fact it’s going to last a very long while: I’ve read dozens of manga, a couple novels and played through a few videogames and I’m still regularly puzzled by complicated sentences and I have to break them apart to understand them. But as you improve it happens less and less often.

You seem to be doing well, keep trying to read but don’t make it too frustrating. It’s fine to focus on WaniKani at this point because it’s going to teach you some very common and important kanji over the course of the next 10 to 20 levels, that’s going to boost your reading ability a lot. By the time you reach level 30 you should find that your recognize the overwhelming majority of the kanji in simple manga for instance.

To give you an idea a while ago I listed all the kanji used in the introduction of Final Fantasy VII (original version) and how long it would take to learn them on WaniKani:

stats FFVII

Basically you can see that at WaniKani level 10 you would “only” have about 50% kanji coverage, but by level 30 you’re at almost 90%.

Keep reading. Nothing better IMO.

I have used Bunpro rathere effectively for elementary grammar (N5~N3) although I find that it becomes a bit frustrating when you reach more advanced constructs.

Other than that I find that the most effective way to go with these things is to “mine” the content that I read and make my own flashcards based on what I encounter in the wild. This way this is tuned to what you actually need at the moment.

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Just to point it out in case you aren’t aware: according to wkstats.com (where you can see more juicy numbers about your account), you’re 2/3 of the way to knowing ALL of the JLPT N5 kanji, and 3/4 of the way for N4! That’s impressive! After only a few more levels, you’ll have beginner kanji on lock!

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If you’re an English native, Japanese really trips you up when trying to understand sentences, and moreso when you try to form your own. Flipping the verb and object just short circuits your brain for some reason. To get quick with it, it’s simply a matter of time and practice. You’re basically rewiring the way your brain thinks thoughts. It takes time to build those new pathways (and in my case, a really long time). As everyone else will say, “It’s a marathon, not a race!”

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Should be ‘nearly 100% of N5’. But overall: fully agree with your post.

And it’s nice to see fellow Japanese learners around lvl 10. Let’s get those beginner vocab down!

I have a feeling it takes a lot longer to pass the ‘now you have enough beginner vocab’ treshold with Japanese than with other languages though:

  • Lot’s of words you need to learn more than once (transitive pairs, KUN + ON for the kanji, having to learn Kanji + vocab at all, or actual multiple vocab items for the same concept.)
  • Can’t use knowledge of latin languages to make educated guesses

I’m confident I can get past those hurdles though. Just have to keep chipping away at the review pile, one day at a time.

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First of all, WaniKani is indeed for Kanji you should know well, but the same can’t be said for vocabularies. You need more vocab that might be acquired indirectly or directly, say, for listening/speaking or reading with few lookup.

You might learn listening and regular Japanese speed by learning grammar, doing exercise, and putting to practice. If you can’t sit still or deny studying so much, there might be some apps or other ways. Those could also be options when the study is at a deadlock.

Reading is like grammar and listening, in essence, but with less speed demand and being easier to repeat. It also gives more time to analyze from any position of the sentence. (Though I think, the more you read, or the faster you read, the more visual vocab are required than auditory pickup.)

For Kanji studying, you might (1) rush with WK Kanji and study more vocab later (and risk forgetting some vocab before you see them IRL); or (2) take time with studying Kanji in WK while keeping in mind that you need something outside, even in Kanji and vocab aspect.

First 30 levels are more useful than the latter half. (say, N4 requirements.) 2 weeks per level is roughly 1 year to level 30. It’s common for people to 2-3 years to get to a fair level of Japanese, so this pacing is actually faster than that, so it’s within (1) for Kanji studies. (ofc, in worst case, even 10 years might not get to a significant language understanding. Exception exists; say, a few months or a year goes quickly.)

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For sure, within mainstream, popular languages Japanese is very hard mode. Arguably even worse than Chinese. It takes a long time to bootstrap language at a basic level. The good news is that, once you’ve figured all the basic stuff out, I actually find it somewhat easier to progress towards high-intermediate level compared to the other languages I’ve studied. The grammar is fairly simple and regular, the phonetics are pretty straightforward and the kanji really help dealing with even fancy literature and advanced vocab.

I’ve studied Russian for a good decade now and while it’s a bit easier to get started, it kind of remains hard all the way in my experience. I understand the language reasonably well these days but I still make grammatical mistakes all over the place when I write/speak because Russian grammar is a beast filled with dozens of declensions, conjugations and hundreds exceptions for everything.

I find Japanese a lot less error-prone and while my overall level is still quite low, I feel much more confident stringing basic sentences together.

The first 30 levels should bring you to around N3 level actually, using the traditional JLPT kanji lists (which are not 100% reliable). More importantly it will bring you to 80~90% coverage for most texts, probably well above 90% for simple material like NHK easy and graded readers.

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Erm… wouldn’t that be “of the kanji” rather than “of the vocabulary”?
Knowing the kanji does not automatically mean you also instantly know all the associated vocab, WK will only teach subsets. And there’s also kana-only vocab.

BP has 1100 vocab items for N5, 1100 for N4 and the numbers go up onwards. And besides, a fair bit of WK vocab is from the upper N-levels.
Current vocab stats on Bunpro with WK L34 just started (out of those I have ~400 non-WK vocab added):

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WOOPS you’re totally right :rofl: I definitely meant to say kanji instead of vocab. Edited!

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This is such a wonderful community!

Thanks, everyone, for the encouragement and helpful tips. It’s encouraging to know that other people are having the same struggles.

I think WaniKani is really helping me build a solid foundation. As you all pointed out, I need to shift my focus a bit to vocabulary and basic reading (those resources are super helpful!) when I finish up N5 grammar points.

Hopefully, one day I’ll have a breakthrough moment and can come back to share my journey/ study plan with the beginners here.

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