My 424-day Journey to Level 60!

WaniKani
1

Ladies and Gentlemen, here is my “I reached Level 60” post!

I cannot believe I made it this quickly; my first daughter was born exactly four days after starting (last year`s March 12th) and this past year has been far from being quiet and easy for me.

While WK is obviously not perfect - nothing is - I could not have imagined going from knowing only the very basics kanji’s to reading magazine and books for native Japanese speakers, in many cases without the need of any vocabulary. Moreover, this forum has been a constant source of motivation and inspiration, and helped me through the hard times. So, my heartfelt thank you goes to the amazing WK Team.

The only advice I can give to those committed to reach the end is: be patient, go through your reviews daily, and just enjoy the journey. There will be up and downs, but consistency will allow you to go through everything!

Here is my progress bar:

Wk1
Wk11147×447 132 KB

Even though I took a couple of little breaks (mostly after long journeys), I believe I can be proud of this pace.

Now, it is really time to start enjoying using Japanese; as I am based in Tokyo, there will be plenty of chances, especially as soon as this awful COVID19 emergency ends.
Furthermore, I cannot wait to invest the time I previously allocated daily to WK (which, especially after the fast levels easily exceeded the 1.5 hr/day) to books and magazines!

Have a safe journey everyone,

Luca

61 Likes
2

Congratulations! That is incredibly fast, especially considering a small child… I have days of complete struggle and my little one is two and a half years old.

Were you in Tokyo for most of this? Do you think immersion for listening and hearing helped? or did you move to Japan relatively recently? (I am also in Tokyo so just curious - I am way off your pace, going much slower).

Congratulations!

1 Like
3

Congratulations on the birth of your daughter! Mine was born just before I started WK, and congratulations on getting to level 60 too!

2 Likes
4

Congratulations on making level 60.

You wanna talk about far from quiet… I have a daughter who recently turned three. I also now have twin daughters born March 10th. Babies cry for whatever reason then toddler tries getting in the way or goes right to crying because she just happens to want attention right at that moment.

Wife isn’t too crazy about my wanting to learn Japanese (or anything else for that matter) so I learn what I can when she’s not around or when I’m in the bathroom. Luckily WK site works well on the phone.

This has turned into a mad house and I’m about to go off the deep end. lol :laughing:

You made it and that’s a great thing. Hopefully you can pass on some of what you know to your daughter and share that together.
Take care.

3 Likes
5

Yes, I have moved (back) to Japan in December 2018.
I have actually quit my job in April 2019 and started attending a Japanese school full time (5x/week, morning classes).
The courses there are mainly focused on conversation, so, while covering Kanji’s with Wanikani I could focus on grammar and other aspects through the school.

To reply to your question, yes, being in Japan I believe it definitely helped, mostly strengthening my listening skills.

1 Like
6

That’s amazing that you’ve done so much work while also having a baby daughter, you’re inspiring! I’ve only just started a small while ago, but seeing people like you make such great progress in Japanese is really helping me fuel my fire! Best wishes to you and your family~ ^^

1 Like
7

Blockquote
Hopefully you can pass on some of what you know to your daughter and share that together.

That would be nice, but my wife is Japanese and I believe she will be a much better candidate for that!

6 Likes
8

Congratulations! Best of luck in your continued studies as well as life in Japan!

1 Like
9

congrats! Your fast leveling time at 40+ must have resulted in a terrifying amounts of reviews :sweat_smile:

2 Likes
10

I had… On most level-up days, they exceeded 500 (new level, plus old levels Guru’s).
I have been dumb enough to do all the lessons at the same time…
A much wiser approach would have been to dilute the vocabulary over the next days… Anyway, what is done is done!

1 Like
12

Congratulations!! :partying_face: :confetti_ball: :tada: :tada:

2 Likes
13

Congratulations on reaching level 60! And also congratulations on the birth of your daughter.

A question about diluting vocabulary… how many lessons one should take you would suggest? Like in a day, or in a week. I’ve been taking constant pace of 5 lessons per day, but I don’t know if it’s enough or too slow. Would like to know about your view. Thank you!

14

I was also curious about this. How many lessons per day vs. how many daily reviews were you doing?

Also did you use a reorder script to front load with new kanji?

15

Wow !!

How is that even possible to level up in 3 days considering the radicals that lock some kanjis ?

16

Thank you!!!

I actually tried completing all the lessons as fast as I could.

I prioritized (through Flaming Durtles, but only after Level 40) the level-up items (radicals and kanji) and tried to do most of the vocabulary, too, on level-up days.

For the fast levels, this resulted in 120/130 lessons on the level-up day, whose items, to keep the 3.5-day level-up time, went through the first two apprentice-level reviews, too.
As a total, those days had an average of 500+ reviews.

Looking back, I believe diluting the vocabulary over three days would have been better, especially to reach an even review load (on non-level-up days I had as few as 50-100 reviews ).

Hope this helps,

Luca

1 Like
17

See my latest reply to evanap (just posted), it addresses both your questions, too!

18

After you reach past Level 40, the number of radicals reduces significantly, and it is possible to guru 90%+ of the Kanji`s after approximately 3.5 days only.

As a drawback, in order to keep this half-time level up, the number of reviews pretty much doubles.

2 Likes
19

Congratulations!

Wow! Even thinking about 500+ reviews in a day is kinda terrifying. I’ve consistently been around 100 to 170 or so every morning with my coffee, but can’t imagine doing even twice that, much less 5X!

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the reordering scripts. You can definitely be proud of your pace (holy cats!) but do you feel the pace and re-ordering affected your overall learning? Would you have benefited from not using the reordering scripts?

No judgment intended — I’m genuinely curious.

1 Like
20

Rrewx, this is a very good question!

Actually, only time will tell… As I started using the reordering script around level 40, approximately 3 months ago, I have yet to burn all the items I have studied after implementing the script.

However, in my opinion, learning-wise, the idea to start from the new kanji’s (harder to learn from scratch), and then move to the freshly unlocked vocabulary (whose words utilize the kanji’s previously learnt) is very efficient. Sometimes you just don`t have the time to go through all lessons at once (on the fast level you get 120+ every time).

What I would definitely NOT recommend (even though I personally never tried), would be to just focus on the level-up items, delaying the vocabulary lessons several days. This would make harder and harder to remember the new words, and would build up a huge volume of lessons (and reviews) over time.

As far as the reviews are concerned, I found that - especially during the final rush after level 48 - the accuracy was slightly decreasing, but I believe that could also be attributed to the fact I was really getting tired and almost overwhelmed…

To summarize my approach: given that my final goal was to learn as many kanji’s as possible in the shortest amount of time, leveling up as fast I could has been perfect for that.
The idea behind it was to expose myself to the greatest amount of new items, knowing that learning them all without forgetting any would have been somehow impossible.
For this reason, not reordering the items would have been less efficient.

Now that I have reached the goal (no more new items), I am taking my time for the reviews and committed not to undo any item anymore, to make sure I really learnt every item.
So far, the accuracy is still pretty good, magic of SRS!

Hope this addressed your question, if you would like to know anything else, please ask!

2 Likes
21

First of all, congratulations!

I strongly agree with this. There are some kanji in the level 50s that don’t have vocabulary associated with them and the reviews after guru for these kanji are a real bitch sometimes

1 Like