I’d initially wanted to speedrun wanikani, since I had a ton of time on my hands and wanted to get through it as fast as possible. I don’t recommend doing that, at all, even if you have the time.
I think wanikani is an amazing tool, but if you have the time to speedrun, I’d recommend just slowing down a little, and spending more of your time focused on grammar, reading, listening, and all that stuff. I’ve pretty much been doing hours of lessons and hundreds of reviews every single day for almost a year and a half. Personally, doing reviews could be pretty tiring, as a result, I’ve neglected pretty much every other aspect of learning Japanese. I did start grammar at one point, but fell out of that habit after getting a job.
The reason for failing my speedrun was also because of this job. Around april this year I got a job as a covid tester, which was a physically and mentally demanding job, where I worked 3-5 days a week, and 10 hour shifts. Getting home after that and having hundreds of reviews piled up was very hard sometimes. For morning shifts I’d wake up, go to work, get home, do wanikani for an hour or two and have some free time for a couple of hours. For the afternoon-night shifts I’d wake up, do wanikani while eating, go to work, get home, do wanikani while eating, go to sleep. This was exhausting, so I stopped grammar, and I stopped doing lessons, as you may be able to see from my stats.
Eventually as people stopped getting tested, our test sites got closed down and I was back to having a bunch of free time, and now I’m finally at level 60.
So I would recommend not neglecting all these essential parts of studying like grammar, unless you’re one of the few people who both have enough free time and energy to do both hundreds of reviews a day as well as studying grammar.
I’d also recommend being careful with user scripts, specifically the ones that let you change your answer to correct or let you retype your answer. Don’t fall into the trap of getting an answer wrong and thinking “ah, I knew that”, and correcting it to the right answer, when that item comes back in a couple weeks, or months even, chances are it’s gonna be the same thing, you can’t really recall it, but once you see the answer you think “ah, I knew that” again. Don’t cheat! You’re only cheating yourself.
Other than that there are some great userscripts out there, like the ones that show pitch accent info, or give you a list of similar kanji for a kanji you’re looking at.
My time to get to 60 was 528 days.
Good luck to all of you, I believe in you! Just put in the time and it will pay off. Stay strong.