It might also help to keep in mind level 38 is the equivalent to like a 7th or 8th grade level, and is more than half of the kanji that a 9th grader in Japan should know.
If you ask me, learning more than half of the Kanji a 9th grader should know, in less than 2 years is an amazing feat.
When I was arround level 25 I decided to spend the next many month just doing review and not learning new kanji, in that way I was able to burn a lot of material. Now im level 40, and waniKani is super fun, and chill, most days, I have no more than 50 reviews, sometimes little more than 100. I started in mid 2017, including many holiday breaks. I´ve been doing my masters degree meanwhile, so I was not able to focus all my attention on Wanikani. But I believe this slow pacing is more fun.
I don’t think that because of marketing, but because of the calculations I did myself. If you allow 7 days for the normal levels and 3.5 days for the fast levels, (plus levels 1-2), that comes to a total of 18 * 3.5 + 42 * 7 = 42 + (18/2) * 7 = 51 * 7 = 51 weeks, which is just under a year.
In a small ramen bar in Kyoto, you and Yukiko-san talk about work.
The sun is shining and the wind carries the scent of the old town lightly on its way through the room.
As Yukiko-san excuses herself to go to the restroom, you glance to your right and see a woman with a kanji tattoo on her ankle.
A distant memory returns.
Ken the samurai… WaniKani! Wow, I remember using that. How these fifteen years have flown.
Yukiko-san returns, you pay the bill and leave.
As the sun begins to set, you both take a modest stroll to your favourite after-hours spot for a digestif.
Life is good
It’s better to go slowly and finish than run and give up out of exhaustion.
Of course you’re exhausted; you’ve been trying to finish it as quickly as humanly possible, and while some of us on here have done that, thousands of us have not. Take myself for example. It took me seven years on Wanikani before getting to level 60. Just pace yourself. It’s terrific to have a goal, but if it isn’t essential you reach it, then don’t stress over it, and certainly don’t give up what you’ve worked so hard on.
Fair enough. My suggestion is that If you still want to learn Japanese, it’s better to slow down than to quit. Kanji are important. WK seems to be a very efficient way to learn them, but it only works if you don’t quit.
By now you should be able to start reading. If WK is getting you down, slow down. Keep up with the reviews, but reduce lessons, and shift your priority to reading instead of kanji grinding. Sorry if it’s tiring to hear that advice, but I do think that it is good advice.
I think that a lot of folks have a hard time transitioning from their initial break-neck speed to a more maintainable speed for the 30s and beyond. I did, and I wasn’t going for the fastest time possible. Just realize this: kanji grinding is far from the only useful way to study. I found that prioritizing reading (I still have a hard time prioritizing it), talking to folks (I chat with people regularly on discord in a language exchange server), and listening (terribly difficult for me) also helps with my WK as I make connections between the kanji, vocab, and my other forms of study too.
Hope you stick with it! Good luck.
I’m on level 38 as well. I’ve been doing WK about 18 months. It takes me about 16 days per level. I generally do 10 lessons a day. I usually have about 100 reviews in the morning, and 100 in the evening. Each time it takes about an hour. My accuracy various between 60% and 75%. I am awed by people who do levels in a week, and who have near 100% accuracy. On the other hand, I saw a statistic (I may not have this exactly right) that seemed to show that about 28,000 people were doing WK, but only 973 had reached level 60. So maybe a lot of people drop out. And it could be because they get overwhelmed, by doing it too fast. As others have said, it may be good to slow down, do less lessons, which then gives you less reviews, and not worry about “finishing” WK.
I personally am not yet as far along as many others who’ve responded here, as I’ve started using WK during my Christmas vacation (it was a gift to myself 
) but I’ve been at it every day since. I also do BunPro daily (around 4 month-ish). But, and that is why I’m adding anything to the conversation, I have also started to read (painfully slow, I’ll admit, but getting better) about a month and a half ago. And that is why I keep doing the WK/Bunpro combo daily. It is, after all, why I study Japanese. To read and watch things that interest me. And not because I feel the need to reach level 60 of WK. WK is just a tool to help reach the real (personal) goal. Not trying to put the crabigator down or anything, but he’s not the reason I do this. My love for the language and the culture is. What is your reason?
One of the worst, most destructive things about this website is the way they advertise it as something which can be completed in under a year, or two years for that matter.
Just because it’s technically true doesn’t mean it won’t make your life hell and end up hurting your Japanese journey more than helping it.
It’ll help your sanity a huge amount to value consistency over speed! I try not to spend more than 50min a day on lessons / reviews, I feel like there’s a threshold after which your retention rate just drops drastically due to stress / exhaustion / lack of focus /etc. and by then it’s just not worth it to fret over the SRS stuff anymore.
Those pretty numbers going up won’t mean much if you’re not studying in more organic ways as well!
As your 先輩 for likely a pretty brief amount of time considering you’re speedrunning it and I’m going at a pathetic 7-8 days per level, I will take this opportunity to encourage you as a good 先輩 should! (That is, in a long, intimidating block of text that literally no one is going to read but I promise contains some encouraging words!)
Learning languages in general kinda sucks. That was a given from the start. Especially Japanese, which is among the most difficult languages in the world. So having a difficult time, especially with Kanji, which is already one of if not the most difficult part of learning it, is completely normal and expected. In fact, considering you’re speedrunning WaniKani, which is in and of itself a pretty cutthroat, extremely fast-paced program, you also happen to be doing even that in one of the most difficult ways possible. So don’t be surprised if you’re feeling like you’re on the verge of burnout. It’s not a reason to give up though. You’re approaching 2/3 of the way through the 2,000 necessary kanji for literacy. Congratulations! Japanese schoolchildren do that through years of intensive study. You did it on a website online with no immersion practice in less than a year for 10 dollars a month.
Having difficulty now is absolutely normal and expected. I mean, it’s not easy to do what you’re doing. You’ve picked up one of those hobbies that make other people say, “What? Why? Isn’t that really difficult? God, I could never do that.” But you’re doing it because you want to go to Japan and have an interest in the language, right? Well no one expected you to finish WaniKani and be perfectly functionally fluent before your trip. That’s insane. Learning languages takes thousands of hours of dedicated study, which won’t even really be set in until you’ve actually been immersed in the language and culture. Learning languages is difficult. My question is, why stop now?
You’ve been on this program for several months already and have learned some 1,300 kanji. Your goal is 2,000. You’ve figured out what works for you, you’ve laid the groundwork for learning the rest of them, you already have done over half and can read the majority of kanji you come across. To finish WaniKani, all there is left to do is a few more months of exactly what you’ve already been doing. Sure, it’s not easy, but it isn’t challenging, either. It’s rote memorization. Learning grammar takes time to wrap your brain around and get used to understanding and using in the correct situations. Learning Kanji takes sitting down and doing your reviews on time. That’s it. You’ve been doing that for months.
The lifelong benefits of buckling down and finishing this now are so much greater than the actual effort you’d have to spend doing it that I honestly don’t understand the logic behind quitting. It’s been harder than you thought it would. You’re struggling to do your reviews on time. Sure, but you’re still in full control of your review count. Do your lessons slower. Complete the program slower if you must. But don’t give up. Because why would you? You’re saying that the rest of Wanikani just sounds so difficult, but really it’s the opposite. You’ve already done the hard part. The hard part was settling into the routine, dedicating yourself to do it, figuring out what style of learning works for you, and, of course, doing the first 2/3rds. The vast majority of people on Wanikani are on levels 1 and 2. They didn’t even finish the unpaid levels. Look where you are. No, you can’t use Japanese functionally. That takes years of dedicated study, no matter how you tackle it. But all you need to do in order to make that happen is to keep going. And even if you aren’t where you thought you were in time for your trip, that trip is in and of itself a learning experience. That’s the immersion practice that’s so important when it comes to learning a language. You’re past the point of no return, that is, past the point where people quit in droves because they’ve learned that they cannot, in fact, learn Japanese in 6 hours by watching this YouTube video. You’re at the point where you’ve sunk hundreds if not thousands of hours into WaniKani and your other learning tools. Quit now, and remember the time you sunk into this hobby only to give up when the finish line was in sight, or keep going, and obtain a skill that will benefit you for the rest of your life and the ability to brag to your friends that you learned one of the most difficult languages on the planet. They’ll ask you if it was hard. You’ll say, “Uh, yeah, of course it was difficult, what were you expecting?”
(I apologize for this extremely ugly block of text that no one’s going to read, I get carried away sometimes)
The thing is that for me, the consistency is because of the speed. The fact that I’ve sunk so much time and effort into my current streak is a large part of what keeps me coming back every morning and evening without fail, even when I’m feeling tired. If I break my streak even once, it will be a lot harder to maintain that motivation.
I think I understand how you could get burned out when you set a goal for yourself and may not be able to make it. By end of next week, I’ll have been on WK for a year. Only on level 10. “Life” happens that keep me from doing more but I’m still going for it.
I’m looking forward to getting to a higher level like you are. I’m already excited I can recognize some characters “in the wild” but still have a long way to go to really understand it. I’m looking forward to learning from native materials when I get far enough.
Hope you get your motivation to keep going. I’m sure there’s plenty more to learn after this.
At your level Genki and Bunpro qualify as reading.
I comment on this frequently. I strongly think that WK’s marketing materials create false expectations. And they make normal people feel like failures when they can’t live up to WK’s marketing hype. And then the first thing new users do is come onto the forums and run across one of the famous “How I did WK in one year” posts and that just reinforces the feeling.
The only way the math works above is if you have 95%+ accuracy in your reviews do all your lessons as they appear and never skip a day on either. Anything less than that and it’s impossible. And that’s really a superhuman effort.
Most of us are just plugging along. I reset in Feb to level 2 and I’ve recently reached 200 straight days of reviews. And yet I’m only level 14. And that’s fine. I’ll be here another 3 of 4 years. But I’ve accepted that Japanese will simply be a life-long hobby. And the only failure on that path is quitting.
Hmm… I think I understand where you’re coming from, I’ve dealt with a similar problem in the past.
However, what if you start thinking about this time and effort as something which was spent on learning Japanese in general, and let yourself distribute your SRS time across other areas of study?
Maybe that perspective will help you stay motivated enough to do like, 25 minutes of SRS stuff and then 25 minutes of something else (immersion, graded reading, whatever works for you). Continue to think of your routine as a very dedicated / diligent one (which it is), but start distributing your time more evenly with other types of study, in order to optimize efficiency, reduce tiredness, etc.
The pragmatic truth is that missing one day of (or just spending less time on) SRS stuff to do a bunch of reading / immersion is really not too bad for your language learning at all… It’s definitely bad for the numbers which help us stay motivated when they go up (or down), but we can still have that for other areas of study by setting up some time-tracking or something:
So you should still be able to motivate yourself when thinking I’m learning Japanese versus thinking I’m learning Kanji. This change in mindset (ugh) actually improved my overall disposition when studying.
Don’t mean to be preachy or sound like some Lifestyle Coach, just giving my two cents lol
It only requires you to have high accuracy on apprentice level radical and kanji reviews, which isn’t that hard if you put your mind to it, especially if you give extra attention to learning the kanji for the current level. To date, my average accuracy across all reviews is only 84.6%. Over the last two weeks, my accuracy has been just 82.2%, and yet, I have yet to miss a single level-up on schedule.
For illustration, here’s my current accuracy stats to date, broken down by type and SRS stage:
radical:
Overall: 96.11650485436893% (3465/3605)
Apprentice 1: 97.78270509977827% (441/451)
Apprentice 2: 99.77477477477477% (443/444)
Apprentice 3: 99.3576017130621% (464/467)
Apprentice 4: 99.800796812749% (501/502)
Guru 1: 95.66037735849056% (507/530)
Guru 2: 92.62135922330097% (477/515)
Master: 91.68591224018476% (397/433)
Enlightened: 89.35361216730038% (235/263)
kanji:
Overall: 93.55708441799925% (10063/10756)
Apprentice 1: 93.17241379310344% (1351/1450)
Apprentice 2: 97.97101449275362% (1352/1380)
Apprentice 3: 98.13953488372093% (1477/1505)
Apprentice 4: 97.91282995702885% (1595/1629)
Guru 1: 92.87410926365796% (1564/1684)
Guru 2: 88.82314266929652% (1351/1521)
Master: 87.27114210985178% (1001/1147)
Enlightened: 84.54545454545455% (372/440)
vocabulary:
Overall: 81.84354104278623% (39902/48754)
Apprentice 1: 78.37924923473497% (4865/6207)
Apprentice 2: 90.31932773109244% (5374/5950)
Apprentice 3: 87.29841082989994% (7416/8495)
Apprentice 4: 86.40798729294305% (7616/8814)
Guru 1: 76.24743264467803% (6311/8277)
Guru 2: 75.807774315237% (4622/6097)
Master: 74.88372093023256% (2898/3870)
Enlightened: 76.62835249042146% (800/1044)
Overall accuracy: 84.65499485066941% (53430/63115)
If you don’t maintain a higher accuracy level at Guru+ then your terminal velocity pile is higher. That’s fine if you can handle the reviews, but to keep reviews manageable, at least in my case, and I suspect for the majority, you have to throttle lessons if you can’t keep accuracy percentage in the high 90s.
I had 205 reviews yesterday, and 117 waiting for me over coffee this morning, and that’s just too much. My plan is to power through my current level, and then slow way down until my apprentice count is under 70.
That’s basically the situation I’m in now. Sometimes the review pile gets to be too much, like the morning that made me seriously consider quitting and start this thread in the first place.
Honestly, I think that’s a consequence of the pace you’re setting. My stats are worse than yours:
And I rarely have more than 150 new reviews a day:
That’s at a pace of around 10-11 days per level, 20 lessons per day, and keeping Apprentice around 100.
Is shaving an extra 3 days off of that pace worth the effort? Honest question.
Great post, I agree with everything except the above. Of course, Japanese is not a game, but approaching Japanese can be similar to how one would approach a game, and that should not be an issue. Of course the caveat here is it depends on the type of game, bet let’s suppose I am talking about a story-driven masterpiece like Red Dead Redemption 2 or something.
The issue is, unsurprisingly, this:
It’s how one chooses to play the game that matters.
We should not really speed-run through most things (of which the purpose is not to speed through), whether it be cooking, painting, eating, sleeping, kissing, breathing, reading, studying, etc. etc. Especially if it causes us to not benefit from/enjoy that activity in the intended form.
As Miyamoto Musashi says, “From one thing, know ten thousand things”.
