Lvl 60! Reflections and some handy habits I learned along the way

Here you go: [OBSOLETE] Wanikani Override ("ignore answer button")

Congratulations on 60!~~

for the fulfillment of the thread may be do a re-login would put your level badge to yellow 60

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:crabigator: Hooray! :100:

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Very helpful, thanks and congrats.

Thomas

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Congrats on the Lvl 60!
And thanks for the Tips, namely in the Jisho.org and the wkstats!
Didnt know that i could look up my progress with this neat site :slight_smile:
I`m at Lvl 7 atm with 1/10 of the learned Items and i´m very dilligent atm.
I will see how i fare at around lvl 20.

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No worries! I’d also recommend using the Google image search function to help yourself distinguish between kanji that are very similar and would be better understood with a picture result when you enter the kanji into the image search. For example, this thread on the difference between 跳ぶ and 跳ねる, both of which mean ‘to jump’, but actually mean different kinds of ‘jumping’.

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Thanks :smile:

Out of curiosity, what have you held back on and what made you think it would be more difficult?

congrats and thank you for the tips.

i am very very eager to know; are you a fluent speaker now?

If yes, will you endorse to say if you get to 60, there is no way at all you are not fluent.

My goal for WK is to speak fluently more than to ace vocabs and grammar.

Thank you.

No, it’s not like that. Wanikani will teach you how to read Kanji. It’s not going to teach you how to speak fluently other than indirectly by helping you to be able to learn more by reading.

However, most level 60’s are likely to have at least an intermediate level because it takes so long to finish and during that time they’ve also been studying.

So if I have understood you correctly, by intermediate you meant some fluency.

i get you that it helps with Kanji readings and not geared towards conversational proficiency. but i am just curious what level 60 entails besides the milestone?

The milestone isn’t enough?

hey c’mon don’t get me wrong. its a great feat and i truly am impressed. i know, i am laboring at infancy. but i am genuinely interested to know, in general, what a graduate of lv 60 have attained as a student? speaking fluently? able to read the newspaper? happy tokyo holidays, etc etc.

is this a wrong question to ask?

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It’s kind of the wrong question, yes.

Level 60 means that you have learned 2000 Kanji and 6000 vocab to a fairly high degree of recall. No more, no less.

To do either of those well, you would need a decent grasp of grammar and more vocabulary than Wanikani teaches.

You could probably get though some of the NHK Easy News articles with N5 grammar and level 10 or so on WK, so you don’t have to wait to 60 to start reading.

And like I said before, many people who are level 60 may be able to speak fluently and many more can certainly read the newspaper.

But that’s because they were learning other things in addition to Wanikani as they were leveling up since even a moderate pace will probably take about 2 years to finish.

So the right question to ask is “how much can I learn in two years?” And the answer is: quite a lot.

I’m not trying to discourage you; I just want to set the proper expectations. :smiley:

Learning Kanji through Wanikani is significant part of learning Japanese, if you want to read at least, but it’s not the only thing you’ll need.

Unfortunately, no. But I hear there’s cake :wink:

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this is a well thought and insightful reply.

i thank you alo for your willingness to do it.

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So, Alo pretty much explained it all. Getting to level 60 on WaniKani means that you can recognise and know how to pronounce a good amount of kanji.

This doesn’t even mean I can recall it. You can ask me what the Japanese word for ‘goldfish’ is and I might struggle to think of it. But if I see the kanji ‘金魚’ I’ll almost immediately say in my head ‘kin gyo’ and then think: ‘that’s goldfish!’

Writing the kanji is also not something WaniKani has taught me. I can recognise a picture of Nicolas Cage but I cannot draw Nicolas Cage just because I know him when I see him.

I’m actually someone who did not study much Japanese grammar or speaking while doing WaniKani. Which means that I have a big bank of words in my passive Japanese vocabulary, but would not know very well how to string them into a sentence. If someone spoke to me in Japanese, I might be able to hear a noun or verb they said, while the rest of the words they said would be almost meaningless to me. If I tried to read out loud some Japanese, it would be approximately correct but likely sound off to a native speaker.

It’s kind of like learning the periodic table. Or like learning the name of every Pokemon. Now you can point a Japanese word (in kanji) at me and I can guess decently well what it means and how to pronounce it.

There are however a few things I can do now that I would have struggled with earlier:

  • I can read hiragana pretty effortlessly by just scanning my eyes across a string of text.
  • I can read some Japanese sentence in my head and when I get to the kanji, most often I will glide effortlessly over it as if it was another string of hiragana.
  • I’ve learnt to distinguish Japanese nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs more intuitively based on how they end.
  • I have a better grasp on how Japanese people think about concepts. Especially more complicated ideas.
  • You can show me a kanji I’ve never seen and sometimes I may have a strong feeling about how it’s pronounced based on some of the patterns I’ve picked up learning 2000 of them.
  • I can kind of ‘understand’ why Japanese sounds the way it does based on the patterns I’ve picked up in Japanese phonetics. It’s hard to explain. But like, Japanese words that relate to things hitting or colliding have this ‘ta’, ‘tsu’, or ‘da’ pattern to them. Japanese words that relate to ineffable concepts are generally vowel heavy (I think because they come from Chinese). Transitive verbs are more likely to end in ‘su’ rather than ‘ru’, which is more often for intransitive verbs. You get this weird ‘feeling’ for the language after seeing/hearing so many words for so long.
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this weird feeling that she mentioned…

I think this is an excellent summary of what WaniKani will get you, as well as its limitations unless you also/eventually supplement your learning with additional grammar, speaking, and listening exposure and practice.

Can I recall the 2000+ kanji and 6000ish vocabulary with very good accuracy when I see it? Sure. But if you asked me what the specific word was for something, as well as what kanji it consists of without any reference in front of me, that’s a totally different story.

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as somebody who reached 21, suffered from an incredible 1k ish review wall and after months of pushing it off just opted for the nuke of resetting to 18… listen to this man.
What happened after the nuke was an 800ish review wall. And now that I’ve cleared that one I’m cruising through these levels because I actually still know most of the stuff and know how to use WaniKani. 20 is the halfway point. don’t you dare give up!

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Hey all, just an update after reaching level 60:

It has taken since I made this original post in January 2021 until October of 2022 for me to go from reaching level 60 to burning all radicals, kanji, and vocab from Wani Kani. That’s approximately two years to level 60, and two years since level 60. (There have been a few content additions along the way and I welcome more).

There are no real tips to achieving this beyond what I have already written up in the original post. You will need to go leech hunting more often, but simply stick with it and eventually the ever diminishing pile of reviews will reach a point when, like for me now, there are so few reviews left that I can simply commit the last stragglers to memory and just wait until burn day.

Here is what happens when you get to this point.

You will begin to forget some of the burnt kanji you don’t see very often. You will begin to forget some exceptional readings, and some of the mnemonics you used to distinguish similar meanings. It’s fine, don’t panic. They are a million times easier to relearn than when you first encountered them. You never truly forget. When you encounter one you should know, it will be like unlocking a memory rather than the daunting task of learning something for the first time. Everything is reinforced through use, and kanji is no different. You have (mostly) left the learning phase and are now in the practice phase.

On the happier side, you will find it very, very easy to learn the other aspects of Japanese, almost never have problems with other Japanese apps/systems like DuoLingo that don’t explain kanji well, and you will have in your back pocket an extensive latent vocabulary to draw upon.

Should you wish to continue learning kanji, you can always start with the N1 kanji not currently on WaniKani. Go a step further, and you can reinforce your kanji knowledge by trying to learn how to write kanji, but it’s not super necessary. Otherwise, are there like kanji word games to play?

I am now tackling Japanese learning with greater confidence that I have pushed through one of its most difficult roadblocks. Best of luck with your journey ahead. 頑張って!

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