First off, I have enough false humility to keep it out of the title, but I won’t wait for someone no notice it in the screenshots. I accomplished this in 346 days. I’m proud of that fact and I will pat myself on the back for it.
Now that that’s out the way, here’s all the advice I have from my journey
Keep a regular schedule. Mine was a seven day cycle. I did the same thing at the same time of the same day every week. This allowed me to go so far as to set weekly phone alarms to make sure I didn’t get into something and forget.
You may not be as masochistic as me on pacing. Maybe your schedule involves a ten day cycle or just spending X minutes a day 5 days a week. Whatever your schedule, make one and stick to it religiously. Make it such a strong habit that it feels wrong not to do it. I tried the do it when I feel like it with Bunpro and that lead to bursts of heavy work followed by burnout and stopping twice now. Regular schedules really are the way to go if your life can handle it.
Mnemonics are the key to everything. When studying, make sure you work hard to develop mnemonics that work for you. I have a whole list just related to these.
Whatever WaniKani tries to do, don’t use the same mnemonic for more than one pronunciation. For example don’t use the same word for both ほう and ほ or try to use gone for both ごん and がん. That way only leads to confusion and mistakes.
Keep a list of all the pronunciations you’ve run into and what mnemonic keyword you used so you can try to re-use it. If you consistently use the same word than the common ones will instantly pop the right pronunciation into your mind no matter how weird the mnemonic.
Always use a mnemonic! Don’t trust WaniKani when it says "you already learned these pronunciations so you should be able to read this. Even if it is the primary on’yomi reading of all kanji involved without a rendaku in sight, I make sure to include “simple” in the mnemonic I use for meaning to remind myself that the pronunciation has no tricks.
For all those common reading tricks like rendaku or when かく become かっuse a consistent mnemonic to remind you of that. For example, I include separate in the mnemonic in the second case, change for rendaku, and completely change for a は to パ scenario.
If words use secondary pronunciations or kun’yomi reading when it looks like it would normally use on’yomi, make a reminder for that in the mnemonic too.
Tie similar kanji together in stories when possible. For example, I have the kanji 帥 continue the story from my 師 mnemonic while referencing the lack of ground in its mnemonic so I can more easily keep two similar kanji straight from each other.
Try to think of how you’ll read the radicals in the kanji after months of not seeing it. If your mnemonic requires a strange ordering for reading and stretches the meaning of a radical or two, it may work when the kanji is still fresh in your memory, but you’re likely to blank come enlightened/burn. As much as possible try to build a mnemonic that follows your natural reading/parsing of the kanji.
Common advice, but they do know what they’re talking about when they tell you to read. You absolutely should spend as much time as you can spare reading in Japanese and reinforcing what you’ve learned.
For those who do want to push through on a once a week level like I did, my extra piece of advice just for you is to pre-study kanji before the lessons. Don’t do this with vocab as it will mess up SRS of the kanji it’s based on, but being able to breeze through all the kanji lessons is a huge help when you’re hit with a pile of lessons and mountain of reviews twice a week, especially when you get to fast levels.
Do you consider you already can understand japanese and read basic stuff after coming this far?
What is the next step for your japanese learning?
We all know Wani Kani is not magic but I always wondered if by level 60 the language grasp becomes clearer. I’m still in level 5, but when I encounter and understand a Kanji I already learned I found it encouraging to keep continuing.
I’m not the best marker for that. I was already reading manga in Japanese when I started WaniKani, but I found my knowledge of Kanji far too lacking to handle games where there was no furigana to help me.
That said, WaniKani has helped immensely, and I find that while I’m still very reliant on a dictionary, I can now play those same Japanese games and enjoy them without the kanji lookup being a huge pain.
It’s even helped a lot filling out my vocabulary and made me more efficient at reading material that I was already reading before.
My schedule was tons of time Friday mornings and Monday evenings. Since I did not only my lessons but all reviews at that time, I would have three full sets of lessons. The ones I was getting to Guru 1, a set that was getting to Guru 2, and a set getting to Master.
I also did the first set of reviews for new lessons Monday evening and the first two sets on Friday. Tuesday Morning, Wednesday Morning, and Saturday evening were the rest of my apprentice reviews.
I didn’t set alarms for Enlightened/Burned, and was less religious about doing them immediately, although I rarely went a day without clearing out my queue. With the way it worked out, that meant that Thursdays were mostly an off day for me. All I really had were the random reviews popping up at odd times because I’d got them wrong and now they were off the usual schedule.
With the fast levels, I was spending about three hour chunks of time Friday Morning/Monday evening, but it was pretty much an hour or less of time on any other day.
Congrats dude ! Now that is one of the most regular progress charts I’ve seen, good job keeping that schedule. How are you finding games now, btw, just out of curiosity?
As far as reading goes, it’s fine. I still make heavy use of a dictionary, and there are the occasional phrases that stump me, but I’d say I can get 90% comprehension taking about 3 times longer than if it were in English.
Still plenty of room for improvement, but it’s not a chore to play them and I actually enjoy the time I spend. It took me over 200 hours to get through Zero no Kiseki, but I spend 30 hours on that before I even started WaniKani and I’ve improved enough that assuming Ao no Kiseki is a similar length I’m hoping I can finish it not too far above 100 hours.
Games with too many cutscenes that don’t pause for each line might still be too much for me, especially if they’re voiced only with no text to read, as my listening is not at all up-to-par with my reading.
I’m sort of the other way around. My listening comprehension is pretty good, but my vocabulary knowledge is really behind it, so I’ll hear the sentence, understand the grammar, but not know the words
Whatever WaniKani tries to do, don’t use the same mnemonic for more than one pronunciation. For example don’t use the same word for both ほう and ほ or try to use gone for both ごん and がん. That way only leads to confusion and mistakes.
Can’t stress this enough. きょ and きょう btoh use kyoto as default mnemonic, I mixed those words up counless of times.
How did you manage 7d per level tho? Did you just never get anything wrong? Even with >90% accuracy it takes me 9-10 days per level.
How did you manage 7d per level tho? Did you just never get anything wrong? Even with >90% accuracy it takes me 9-10 days per level.
WaniKani Override and WaniKani Reorder Ultimate are the two key addons you need to make sure you can maintain pace.
Reorder lets you do all the Radicals and Kanji from the current level first when doing lessons/reviews to make sure you finish them as quickly as possible.
Override lets you to ignore incorrect answers and try again. I have used it to make sure a mistake didn’t derail my schedule, but do not abuse this. It might sound weird coming from me, but the goal should be to learn the material.
If you cheat apprentice level kanji/radicals to stay on schedule, that probably doesn’t do any real harm if you’re honest about it once you’re through and let SRS do its thing. Still, don’t cheat yourself out of learning beyond that.
And don’t slack on learning them in the first place just because you know you can cheat. You should still put the effort on in for your lessons/early reviews to try to need to cheat as little possible and make sure they’re firmly in your memory and more likely to stay there.
Reorder lets you do all the Radicals and Kanji from the current level first when doing lessons/reviews to make sure you finish them as quickly as possible.
Sound like a heavy load, thanks for the advice though, maybe i’ll try it for a lavel.
Great post and a great example for new users I’ll say. I’m about to reset all the way to level 1 and was planning on doing a fixed schedule, aiming for a 7 day level-up. Good to know it is possible and that it works!
! Now that is one of the most regular progress charts I’ve seen, good job keeping that schedule. How are you finding games now, btw, just out of curiosity?
