This morning I hit level 60 (which means I do still have one level left, so maybe I ought to wait, but I’m putting off doing my lessons) and I’m just so relieved. It’s been a lot of work. Not quite done yet, clearly, since I’m still gonna try to burn everything, but the hard part at least is over. It took me 523 days, which I don’t think is bad at all. I could have shaved a lot of time off the beginning, but hey. What can you do.
I’ve honestly never committed to anything like this before. I probably have never worked this hard on anything. I started learning Japanese 100% on a whim, having absolutely no plans to actually try that hard, and when I got my WK subscription I did so after already accepting that there was practically no chance I would ever actually finish. I didn’t think I was capable of this level of commitment, especially not toward something so rote-memorize-y.
Routine is a powerful thing. Once you get it in your head that you gotta clean out your stack every day before bed, or that you gotta do your current level reviews now so you can level up faster, or that you have to 0/0 today because it’s your only chance, then that’s it. You gotta do it. Looks like in the past 3 months, I’ve been averaging over 3 hours a day on WaniKani. I don’t think there’s one other thing in this world I could spend that much time on, but because it’s reviews, I don’t think twice. I have to do them. Maybe that’s a bold thing to say while I am currently putting off the 300 reviews I woke up to and all the new lessons for level 60. I’ll do them later.
Thanks to WaniKani, I’ve got this massive disconnect between Kanji knowledge and actual ability to speak, read, write, or otherwise understand Japanese… I’ve been learning the language about a year and a half and I’ve been in an actual class for about a semester of that. I went and changed my major to Japanese, I’d been planning on doing translation before I even started WaniKani, but doing this made me change the target language to Japanese. My University recommends a full year study abroad in Japan though, so I’m likely going to be able to do that 2022-2023, and until then I’m studying grammar pretty hard and trying to do a lot more reading. It’s kind of weird having the level 60 circle and yet not speaking half as well as a lot of people when they start WaniKani, but I guess everyone’s in different spots. I’m glad I did WaniKani when I did. And I’m excited to keep learning.
Anyway, that’s probably enough ranting about something I did that a bunch of other people here have already done, I’ve gone on long enough writing the exact same level 60 post people have read a dozen times. Here are my stats:
(That ugly bar over level 51 is when I took a break to cut down my number of apprentice items because I was getting too many daily reviews. Of course after a week it was back to 300, and I figured I may as well just accept it and keep going until the end.)
The middle one is my heatmap, it’s a userscript I added to my dashboard. Darker the color, more reviews I did in the day (the light blue is 100ish, second darkest is 400, black is 500+). It’s a cool extension, you can see exactly how many reviews you’ve done and how many hours you’ve spent on any given day, how many burns, accuracy, etc.
Feel free to ask any questions, I’ll do my best to answer concisely but I’m pretty long winded so I apologize if I shoot back paragraphs at you explaining how to finish levels faster or which userscripts are good. Best of luck to everyone else on their journey, if a notorious lazy slacker with absolutely no expectations for myself can do it based on sheer habit, I think just about anyone can. Thanks for indulging me! みんな頑張ってね！
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or is it because you buckled down and developed a routine?