Background and Overview
Hi everyone! This is my first actual post in the forums but I’ve been lurking around here for a while now. I reached level 60 about a month ago but I’m only posting this now because I was planning on posting after Guru-ing out the level 60 content but then I learned that the review data dump endpoint from the API that I was going to use for some of the charts and visualizations in this post had been disabled so I reached out to support and they helped me gain access to my data but it took some additional time.
My Japanese language learning journey began way back when I was still in high school when I had some friends who got me into anime and manga so naturally that led me to having some interest in the language. I ended up using the Dr. Moku app to learn Hiragana and Katakana in a couple of days, although the Hiragana stuck with me better than the Katakana at the time. I would then go on to join the anime club in college where my interest in the language would continue to grow. Then senior year covid hit. It was during the 2020 lockdowns that my WaniKani journey began. At that time I did just over 6 months of “vanilla” WaniKani on PC and made it to level 15. When I got my first full time post college job WaniKani progress was totally derailed and I ended up taking a long break. A couple years and two trips to Japan later my interest in studying the language was re-ignited, so I gave WaniKani another try. But quickly realized that I had forgotten a huge chunk of what I studied so I reset back to level 5 and proceeded from there. In Fall of 2023, I enrolled in a local university’s Japanese 101 class which I had a lot of fun attending but I ended up having a very hard time balancing the course work alongside WaniKani and working my full time job so I ended up failing out that semester. It was also during that time I went to Japan for a third time. I set myself the goal of achieving level 60 by winter comiket 2024 (when I’m planning on returning to Japan), and ultimately went on to absolutely crush that goal.
How I used WaniKani
Starting after my reset back to level 5 I started using WaniKani’s unofficial mobile app Smoldering Durtles exclusively. I did all of my reviews Anki style because it’s much faster and can be done while doing other things like eating lunch or working out. I used the vanilla SRS intervals but I customized the review queue order to show current level radicals/kanji first and to always quiz subject reading before meaning. Ultimately, I believe the reading is more important than the meaning because the reading is exact but the meaning is an approximation. If I was within 90% of a correct meaning answer I’d add it as a synonym and mark it correct. I assume I’ll eventually learn the meaning a lot better anyways but just consuming lots of Japanese media. I graded reading questions extremely strictly though. Showing the current level kanji/radicals first also meant that it was easier to keep level progression on track even if I didn’t have time to fully clear the review queue. If I knew I had current level kanji/radicals in the queue I would do extra study of those subjects multiple times until I was pretty confident that I’d be able to get all of them right before attempting them in the review queue for real. I also configured the app to display On’yomi readings in Katakana and Kun’yomi readings in Hiragana. I think this seriously helped my Katakana reading skills and helped with distinguishing the reading type. Another thing I found helpful was copying all the phonetic hints from “The Kanji Code” into the corresponding radical’s custom notes section. I ended up being able to guess the On’yomi reading of characters that I’d never seen before quite often especially in the later levels using these hints.
Workload
The workload started pretty light but eventually got into the 200-400 reviews daily range for a long time. The workload fluctuations towards the end was probably caused by a few weeks where I wasn’t terribly consistent with my reviews and a dead sprint to level 60 over the later reality levels.
Here were my top 5 highest single day review counts:
- 2024-09-02 1366 reviews
- 2024-10-23 1106 reviews
- 2024-08-03 1022 reviews
- 2024-11-02 1008 reviews
- 2024-11-03 989 reviews
I was able to average about 200 reviews an hour. So most days I was doing about 1-2 hours of studying. Overall I probably spent about a thousand hours doing reviews and extra study to get to level 60.
Accuracy
I was averaging a bit over 85% retrieving both meaning and readings individually but since you have to get both correct at the same time for a subject to advance my actual combined average success rate was about 76%. I had the best success when testing into Guru 1 which could probably be because of the extra study of kanji and radical subjects I did to keep level progression on track. But then reviewability trended down the higher the interval was.
There seemed to be a noticeable increase in difficulty around level 15 but that could be at least partially explained by the fact that I worked through levels 5-15 twice. Level 54 appears to have been the hardest level for me.
Leeches
42% of my total reviews were for my hardest 20% of subjects.
My top 5 worst leeches were all vocabulary words:
- 納まる reviewed 128 times
- 収まる reviewed 124 times
- 現す reviewed 113 times
- 取れる reviewed 109 times
- 行列 reviewed 109 times
Here are my top 5 kanji leeches:
- 住 reviewed 75 times
- 技 reviewed 73 times
- 替 reviewed 71 times
- 列 reviewed 70 times
- 黄 reviewed 67 times
How I kept motivated
I incorporated doing WaniKani reviews into my daily routines. When walking on the treadmill I’d do reviews with a controller using Mantis Pro to tap the correct/incorrect buttons while working out. While eating lunch at work I’d eat with my right hand and do reviews on my phone with my left. Every Saturday I’d head to Starbucks and get a tea and sometimes a snack and spend many hours doing reviews there. Sometimes if I wasn’t feeling like doing reviews I’d go to a restaurant and nibble on food while doing reviews.
What I liked and didn’t like about WaniKani
Things I liked about WaniKani:
- The level progression system. I like how strict the level up criteria are so I’m not tempted to go faster through the content than I should. The level up emails that come about once a week really did help keep me motivated to keep pushing forward too. The bragging rights that come from leveling up are very nice too.
- The mnemonics. These are top notch. This saved me a lot of time and effort from having to come up with them myself.
- The API. The documentation for it is amazing and the API is very intuitive to use. (It would be nice if the get all reviews endpoint was still functioning, though!)
Things I didn’t like about WaniKani:
- The SRS algorithm. While being super easy to understand how it works it’s not great at scheduling subjects that are harder or easier than average. I also sometimes end up forgetting subjects that have been moved to the “burned” stage and haven’t been reviewed for a long time. It also wastes a lot of time by quizzing the meaning and reading together even if you are able to recall one of those much easier than the other.
Did it work?
I see patterns everywhere now in kanji. I’m still very slow with reading but I can read practically any character I come across. WaniKani has absolutely made my strongest JP skill kanji recognition/reading. However, my grammar is still extremely lacking so there is still a lot that I don’t understand. And the nuances of what I’m reading almost always go over my head.
Future
As much as I’ve enjoyed learning Japanese as a hobby I’ve been neglecting other important areas of my life to do so. After my upcoming return trip to Japan in a month I’m planning on putting my Japanese studies in maintenance mode for a while (probably at least a year). I’m planning on trying to export my review history from WaniKani into Anki to take advantage of FSRS for that. But there is a good chance that I’ll still hang around the WaniKani forums and might even try to participate in another book club or something here in the future.
