Hey MissDagger! Welcome to Level 60, it’s quite the achievement, no matter how long it takes or how meandering the path may have been! Congratulations!
Happy holidays and happy studying! 
Here is some more cake for ya! 
-Nick at WK
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@Safarigirl Thank you! 
I still remember the first couple of weeks of WK, where I was sure I’d go full-ish speed (probably 7 day levels) through the whole thing. The surety that this was so simple, just follow the system and nothing will get in the way. 
Until learning kanji proved a bit more complex than level 1 through 3 suggested. There were definitely times I thought I’d never get here. Times I doubted myself because I’ve quit things in the past. I think all of my quitting decisions in the past have been good (might have forgotten one or two), but it always feels like a failure. Because that is what I’ve been taught to think. *le sigh*
So I honestly thought I’d reach that stage. And maybe if I hadn’t powered through the 50s, I might have meandered away close to the end. There is a reason people do that, I can already tell that the 50s doesn’t hold nearly as many useful items as 20-50 did. Honestly the 20s, the 30s, and the 40s felt chockfull of useful stuff. (To be fair, 0-19 also have good stuff, it just by the 20s or so, the amount of vocabulary learnt on WK reach a critical mass of usefulness, making reading feel feasible. So everything after that just feels that much more useful, because until then any one word felt like too small a bump to make a tangible difference.)
Anyway, I completely slipped into story mode there, haha.
You can totally do it.
And I have no plans to abandon the forums currently. I can’t promise I’ll always be here. (Can any of us?) But considering how good this community have been to me, I hope I get a chance to say goodbye if I ever get into a situation where I won’t visit the forum anymore.
@WaniConti Thank you Nick! Happy holidays!
That cake dividing trick is pretty cool. If only it worked in reality.
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Thank you for being honest and sharing your journey! I wouldn’t have any right to judge you if I’d wanted to. I first joined sometime in 2015 and have been absent for years at a time…
I just performed my third or fourth reset to level 1 after a very long absence and your post has inspired me to similarly relax a bit and utilize scripts. Your goal of reading more easily and not trying to memorize all of these kanji perfectly makes absolute sense to me. You have more than proved yourself by reaching your goal and beyond. Be proud.
I also appreciate your shared list of reading material and have bookmarked it for after I reach a higher level.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
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Thank you! 
The reason I shared was because I know personally I can figure out better how to do things myself by seeing how other people did it. So I’m glad that my journey helped you realize some things for yourself.
A common expression is “practice make perfect”, but I think “perfect is the enemy of good” is a much better one to aim for. Although I think I usually say “perfect is the enemy of good enough”.
The important thing is always to evaluate if you are learning, not whether others would approve of your study methods or not. For example, my liberal use of an undo script (double check) have been said by others to be the reason they reset (a few levels) because they realized they hadn’t learnt those items. So what worked wonderfully for me to learn, to keep my motivation up, propel me forward and ultimately expose me to a lot of kanji, was the very reason some other people had to reset a few levels to further their learning.
So I hope you find a path forward that works for you. Feel free to ask any question you might have. I’d be happy to share whatever I can. 
And lastly, welcome back! 
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I’m still burning leftover Kanji on and off. I just noticed that on my old laptop there was still a startpage leaderboard from back in 2019 when I was doing races. I let it update to see and it seems like you’re the only other one of the users i was tracking who made it! Congratulations!!!
Here is some celebratory Baumkuchen!
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Wow, my leaderboard disappeared quite a while ago. Can’t remember if it disappeared because I cleared cache/local storage or what, but…
Thank you!
That cake looks delicious but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Baumkuchen. What kinda cake is it? 
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It’s a type of layered cake (name literally means tree cake because it has the same kind of rings as a tree trunk) that is originally from Germany. It’s much more popular in Japan nowadays though were they call it バウムクーヘン. You can get it at any konbini really!
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I wish I was still in Japan, so I could try it. Is the inside soft or is there crunch? I might have to go look up the cake. ^^
Edit: I looked it up, and it seems it should be soft, also, absolutely no way to make it at home. 
I do not have a spit to cook cake on at home, or any spit that can rotate at all. xD
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Happy first anniversary of reaching 60!! 
I didn’t plan on replying and making this post resurface in case anyone wouldn’t like that, but you have some really beautiful drops of wisdom that resonated with me.
I just had this realization yesterday! Fighting to remember a word that I only see in SRS is just a sign that it’s time to maybe find some examples in context. There’s no sense in letting leeches annoy me when I can find better ways to learn them.
I always see arguments over userscripts and whether they are “cheating” or not but this is my sentiment exactly 
Hey, I studied with GenkiJACS in 2014 as well! 
Small world
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I think level 60 threads are probably the happiest ones to push to the front. The person who got there get a little boost and happy remembrance and if they wrote some “sage”* advice, this gets put in front of new people. 
*claiming my own advice is sage feels a bit much, so assume everyone else’s advice is sage and mine is or is not in the eye of the reader
I never actually even go looking for them. I just assume they will eventually show up and I’ll look them up at that point (or potentially just know them because having it in context can do all the difference). And if it doesn’t eventually show up? I guess I didn’t need it, so problem solved in any case. 
Yeah, I admit I don’t really get it. Like overall cheating is about tests, of pretending to know something you don’t actually. Like people might cheat at the JLPT, at least if they aren’t in Japan. But cheating at learning is a lot harder or perhaps more personal?
Like who are you cheating? If it isn’t to get a shiny gold badge at WK because they think it means something to someone else, then all those people that are using scripts to “cheat” must be cheating themselves, and how can someone else know that? How can they know someone else isn’t learning without being in their heads?
It can be a good idea to warn that it might have detrimental affects on learning, but calling it cheating and insisting that they are doing it “wrong” is just silly in my opinion. 
What? Cool! Where did you do it? I was in Fukuoka in September. I wish I had gone a month later because September was still sweltering in Fukuoka. But considering it was my first time in Japan, I barely knew it had difference in temp and climate from north to south. (You’d think I’d know that was possible considering winter have very different severity in northern vs southern Sweden. But alas, I did not automatically assume such things. )
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