Hi, mini Lvl 3. User here just starting out. And after being on this forum for only a couple minutes I realize that the level 60 users are just legendary! Me who has just started is just wondering how long did it take you to reach that high level. I hope to someday make it there and make my Japanese even better!
If you were to add in all your new Radicals and Kanji the second they were available, continually check in and do your reviews immediately upon coming into the cycle, never really making any mistakes, and going full-steam-ahead with full consistency the entire time;
Levels 1-45 would take roughly one week to complete each, and levels 45-60 could be optimized to around 4 days. In total that would equate to almost exactly one full calendar year to go from beginning to end
That said, I don’t think anyone here would encourage that type of workload- you’d be glued to the site all the time with hundreds and hundreds of daily reviews, it’d probably come at the expense of practicing other elements of the language (non-Kanji vocab, grammar, reading comprehension, speaking/listening, etc.), and it would probably be less efficient in the long run rather than leaving some time to make natural error and actually absorb the material. Theoretical, but pretty impractical
The truth is that there is no singular answer to this and the time-to-completion is very variable-heavy. Life is unpredictable, the content here is unpredictable, and the way people learn as individuals is very unpredictable. Above all else I think what you can personally manage + feel is providing a tangibly meaningful experience is the goal, regardless of what the accompanying timeframe may be
I think the more accurate loose estimation to someone who is putting in a strong, dedicated, though maybe not robotic effort would be ~10-12 days per level, and probably around 1.5 years at minimum. But see what works for you- if you can manage higher daily lesson counts + review pools, you’ll end up going faster. If you can’t, then it’ll slow down. As long as you’re learning, that’s much more important than site milestones
Hope to see you reach level 60 someday and am glad you’re here with us in the meantime!
It took me just over 2 years, and I’ve still got a good number of months until everything is actually burned. The middle 20 levels took the longest by far as the reviews piled up. I’d say that pace was fairly quick though.
I’m aided by the fact that I’ve been studying Japanese off and on for over 20 years, so I had a decent existing vocab to tie the new memories to and knew most of the kanji from the first ten or so levels already. I was slowed by having two young kids, one of whom was born around when I hit level 30.
It gets very hard to find time to keep up with the reviews when they pile up to the hundreds a day, but I stuck to a rule of not going to sleep with any remaining reviews each day and only broke that rule once or twice in the two years. When reviews due gets above 100, it gets really hard psychologically to attack it, so my advice is keep on top of them religiously. If it starts getting too heavy, stop doing new lessons and just do reviews till more of them move to guru and enlightened to cut down the daily load. I did that around level 40 - a full month of no lessons, and it really helped me on the final third of the program.
A similar thread popped up recently elsewhere that I responded to so I’ll post my replies here. Feel free to check out the rest of that thread as well for some insight into other lvl 60 user’s experiences.
I can’t remember what I said in my level 60 post, and I haven’t checked because the truth is it’s not important.
What is important is being consistent and using WK as a supplemental tool for your journey.
When I got to level 60, I wasn’t doing enough reading and the rate that I forgot kanji once I put WK and Japanese down was shocking.
Don’t do what I did, stay consistent and read some real Japanese every day. I’m slowly easing myself back into this after having kids but five years ago, Japanese.io was my go-to app for reading.