✨ Level 60 and Beyond ✨

[maurice620]

I also posted this on my study blog here, but this will be more focused on my study habits!

I made it to level 60 this week, on Thursday!
It feels surreal that I don’t have any more level ups ahead of me, but it feels nice that now all that’s left to do is just guru these last few kanji, finish off level 59 and 60 vocab, and then burn everything. I haven’t celebrated yet, so I think I’ll get a piece of cake or something when I guru all the kanji

According to the website I made my account in late October 2024, which sounds about right - I kinda knew that if I pursued a history PhD I’d likely have to learn Japanese but had my head in the sand about it, so I’d made the account and just kind of goofed around. That is, until I actually got accepted into my history PhD program and had a meeting with my advisor where she asked if I could get to N2 by the time I reached campus and I realized ‘oh crap, I have to get really
good at Japanese really quickly’ in February 2025.

So, it’s taken me a bit over a year to get through WaniKani. That’s hella fast and I don’t necessarily recommend doing it this way, but my typical method would be to stagger the available kanji into two halves, study them about two or three hours apart, and then learn the available vocabulary within 3-4 days. Since level 42 this has left me with about 200~250 reviews per day, but for the earlier levels I’d still mostly max out around 180 reviews per day.

I’d just do my lessons/reviews whenever I felt the urge/had the time/my brain felt like it could handle doing more, and since I commute on public transit I have lots of spare moments where I could pull up Tsurukame and do things on the run.

I locked into Bunpro around the time of the meeting with my advisor last February - in December of 2025 I’d learned all of the Bunpro official decks for grammar and vocab, N5-1, and passed one of each of their mock JLPT exams N5-1. I followed a similar rhythm on Bunpro where I’d only do about 3-5 new grammar points a day (sometimes none at all), and really hone in on the vocab so I’d finish the corresponding N level decks at the same time. This left me with around 400-500 reviews per day, but the result of me doing as much as I felt like also meant sometimes I’d have up to 1,100 reviews per day (this only happened once but it was still a lot lol)

Vocab was definitely easier for me than grammar because I speak Korean, and so many of words in both languages share their origins in Chinese (particularly the high-level, formal sounding ones), so now I always sound a bit formal when I write and speak Japanese - one more thing to get better at once I find the time for that but it’s really helped me learn quickly and efficiently

Plus Korean and Japanese share a SOV sentence structure, similar particles and 相槌, and they’re both languages with grammatical formality, so that didn’t throw me when I started learning 敬語 (although it’s still not my favorite thing ever)

These similarities are why there has been so many attempts in historical linguistics to link the two together, either to Altaic languages (because they’re agglutinative, meaning you can theoretically keep tacking on particles and morphemes forever), or to each other in their own branch, or as two language isolates that just share their similarities due to historical and geographic proximity. The Altaic theory is widely discredited and the most established position at the moment is the language isolate theory, but either way:

I think that’s why I was able to learn things so quickly, because Japanese feels like Korean in a different font a lot of the time to me (albeit with really huge, salient differences), so if I didn’t have this background I think it could have easily doubled or tripled the amount of time it took me to do this.

As for the plan forward, I’ll be focusing on guru’ing all my level 60 kanji and vocab, then burning everything, and then maybe I’ll reset my progress and do it all again from scratch! More likely though, I’ll focus on my (hand)writing skills and do something like kakimashou so I can get better at going through written exams that much more quickly in my Japanese class.

Cheers to everyone on their journeys, and best of luck! I’ll see y’all around!

[Neon_Kitsune]

Congratulations! Even though I knew you were blasting through Bunpro and Wanikani because of the amount of reviews you reported in our Bunpro walking thread, it still blows my mind that you made it to level 60 already! Of course, knowing that you kinda had to do some speedrunning due to your program requirements was probably a big motivator!

[maurice620]

Thank you so much!! And right?? It still hasn’t registered yet I definitely think I would’ve gone much more slowly if I didn’t have the fear of disappointing my advisor It’s amazing what that fear will make you do lol

[budojunkie]

まず、おめでとうございます！

Out of curiosity, how fast did you learn Korean? Do you anticipate any downsides to going so quickly through WK and BP? Sorry, I love hearing about people’s experiences learning languages.

[maurice620]

ありがとうございます、武道家さん＾＾

I started learning Korean over a decade ago, so my memory might be a bit hazy but I think I learned at a similar but slower pace! I studied for about a year, year and a half before going to an immersion camp on scholarship and I got placed into their highest level, which was roughly equivalent to TOPIK 6 level (roughly equivalent to JLPT N1 but less notoriously hard). I then went back to work at that camp for several years, did an intensive course in Korea for 4 months as a study abroad in uni, and now it’s my main research language! Of course my skills fluctuate with how much I use them, so sometimes my speaking is terrible but my vocab/writing skills are relatively strong since I use those skills the most.

I think I already face some downsides because of the insane pace Again, I really only went this fast because I had to, due to my advisor and my own research, and I focused mainly on reading, writing, and vocab instead of speaking and listening. So, my speaking/listening skills are weaker compared to other people in my 4th year Japanese course in uni, but I’m still able to hold my own.

That being said I want to give myself a little credit here I’m by no means the worst either, my pronunciation is mostly ok and I’m now really focusing on bringing these two skills up to par through participating in a language table and consuming more Japanese media like podcasts and TV shows. But, I wouldn’t have to play catchup like this if I didn’t go this fast through SRS in the first place.

So if I have any piece of advice to offer, it’s just to go at a pace you feel comfortable with and do it holistically, while consuming all the media you like and trying to get out there and speak as much as you can!