Level 60 - A Year of Speed

[TsukiNiMite]

@sobayama

How the hell did you manage this? Do you do reviews as soon as they become available every hour or something? Surely you must have been doing at least like 4 or 5 review sessions a day…

Rather than doing it as soon as I can, I did my reviews at the same time everyday. Sometimes an hour early or late. I did reviews up to 4 times if I did lessons that day, or 2 times if I didn’t.

@Humin

IIRC, this is just one day more than the max theoretical speed. Absolutely insane.

The fastest time level 60 has been reached was actually 344 days, believe it or not. Pretty crazy.

@anniceris

congrats! that is insane breakneck pace. i started just a handful of weeks after you for comparison, to see what taking it slow looks like.
couple questions,
1)How much Japanese experience did you have going into Wanikani?
2) How is your reading comprehension now on things like manga/novels/news articles?

1. A little bit. Before this I had been using Duolingo for a couple years. Wouldn’t recommend it, but it did give me my start. A grammar article here and there. I’ve learned a lot more in 2022 than I had before.
2. I’d say my reading comprehension is pretty good. Comfortable for me, anyway. I do have to consult a dictionary often, but knowing kanji has certainly made looking up words much easier. I’ve also been using BunPro the last year, which has been very useful.

Japanese starts making a lot more sense once you start engaging with native content. It is very difficult to start, but it gets easier for sure, if you keep at it. I wouldn’t worry about going fast on WK, reading will probably be more helpful, especially once you complete the first 20-30 levels.

@Musouka

Wow, dude! Congrats. Did you have a life outside WaniKani?

P.S. I don’t like the way the WaniKani ads on the more recent Tofugu podcasts say you can reach Level 60 in a little over a year. Yeah, if you sacrifice other things in your life. The older ads with Koichi and Michael at the helm were far more realistic saying that people who finished in a year were outliers and that a more typical usage was something like 3 years.

I didn’t have to sacrifice anything for this, most days I spend 30-60 minutes on WK. The fast levels were a bit tougher, maybe 1-2.5 hours a day. Still plenty of time for other things. I do agree saying you can learn 2k kanji in a year is a bit dishonest, given how rare it is. It is doable though.