My Experience & Advice: For Those In No Hurry

WaniKani Level 60 Celebration
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How’d I End Up Here?
I started May 2022 and hit 60 February 2024. I’ll be using the app until mostly everything hits Master then I’ll be signing out, never to be seen again around these parts! I burned out around level 35, took 2 months to catch up on reviews because I was moving too fast, then paced myself far better for the second half.

My motivation was mundane. Video games, anime, the usual. Ohio isn’t exactly a hub of activity, and my work is lucrative but fairly boring. I had tons of free time, especially in a post-covid and post-girlfriend era. But I’m happy I stuck with it because the adjacent cultural and entertainment elements have been very entertaining and interesting. I can’t say I’d ever want to live in Japan, but I’ll be making several trips in the years to come.

How Good Am I at Japanese?
I feel confident I could pass the N4 test and will work toward N2 proficiency by the end of year. I may take the test to put it on my resume, but don’t really have a need for it. If I had to give myself stats (at N4 level):

Vocab: A | Reading/Grammar: B | Listening: D | Writing: Kana Only | Typing: A

What Other Tools?
Just Bunpro for grammar. I’m through N4, though I haven’t started the SRS for all of it and have been using it more like a textbook since the previously mentioned burnout. Probably will add more reviews to it now that I’m done with WK to help with listening, reading and grammar and press on to N3/N2.

There’s a lot of ad hoc stuff I could recommend depending on what you need, so feel free to ask.

Advice for Those on the Grind
Here’s some advice to those who come after me. If you’re like me and move quickly, but aren’t rushing for the finish line, I think you’ll find it helpful.

1 - There’s a lot of bad advice out there. I wish I didn’t listen to a lot of it early on, but I feel I lucked out by believing in the Learn Japanese: A Ridiculously Detailed Guide post. After sending it to several others in real life, some who had given up after trying earlier, I feel even stronger about it. In short, get to level 10, then start grammar.

2 - Most of the bad advice comes from Youtube, and much of it from Japanese natives teaching Japanese. Do not learn like a Japanese baby / elementary school kid. You’re an adult. You’re bigger, faster, stronger than a child. For example, for me personally, hiragana only reading was a huge waste of time. It just came naturally after learning more vocab.

3 - Don’t overthink things. Do your reviews. You’re not going to become a professional learner, so no need to dive into pedagogy. Instead of spending those 15 minutes looking up SRS “cheat codes”, just do the SRS.

4 - Can’t finish your reviews? Stop learning more. Do your reviews. I burned out one time during my 60 levels of WK. Took 2 months to recover both mentally and to start learning new stuff again.

5 - Stop learning new things 1-2 weeks before major life events. This is my personal apology to level 47 which I had to relearn a couple times.

6 - Writing… so… yeah… Kanji is unnecessary for the most part, but I would recommend learning to write hiragana and katakana. It’s actually quite helpful for reading speed and getting over the シ ツ ソ ン confusion early among other common mix ups between similar looking characters.

My Message to WK
Most of my feedback for WK is positive, but I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest that you find a way to get N5, N4 and Kana Vocab into your app. The beauty of WK is in the structure and pacing. I find myself struggling to set a good pace learning grammar in Bunpro because there’s always a “learn 3 more!” button available to click. Knowing what an average pace is would be very helpful. It’s too late for me to use it, but I’m sure others like me would appreciate it!

What’s Next?
As mentioned above - Bunpro N3/N2 and maybe the N2 test. In addition, I’ll be looking for a tutor to practice speaking and listening. My next book is 本を守ろうとする猫の話.

If this thread resonated with you for some reason, I’m happy to answer questions here. If not, well…

さよなら

Year Later: Passed N4, Slow burn on writing (N4 Kanji), Listening N3ish, Reading N2ish, Grammar N3/N2, Speaking N4ish with N1ish vocab (thanks WK)

Returned to re-study 52-60 and a few other odds and ends since I have started to encounter these kanji a lot more, want to be reading for N2 at the end of this year. Be back next February!

And no, learning to write kanji hasn’t helped at all for me, but it’s fun to scribble during boring meetings at work :slight_smile:

Two Years Later:

Passed N2, finished redoing 52 to 60. In Bunpro, I’m working through N1. Listening is improving with immersion, but slowly, scraping N2. Reading is on solid mid-N1 footing, but every 3-4 sentences I realize my 理解語彙 is still a bit lacking.

I think I can accurately articulate where the gaps in the Wanikani + Grammar (Bunpro in my case) method collapses when it comes to full immersion.

  • I made an entire deck of kanji that show up in Bunpro, but not WK here: Ebikani, Beyond Warakani | Bunpro (locked behind bunpro paywall) and noticed a few things while doing it
    • There are some clear gaps in WK, but some like 舐める and 賑やか have been closed over the last year.
    • Bunpro overdoes Kanji a bit for learners
    • There’s still a gap in scaffolding between learning common, kana words but still sometimes kanji words like カバン・鞄 and これ・此れ
  • Listening / Speaking is best paired, but there’s little opportunity to do this outside of tutoring
    • Tons of scammy sites teaching “listening”
    • In my mind, there’s literally 0 well scaffolded material for this and this is a big opportunity for someone to capitalize on
    • It needs to be separated from Vocab / Grammar
    • Obviously I still came out OK, but lack of scaffolding increased time by a lot
  • Speaking - Marugoto books are very good. This is my new companion to WK/Bunpro Kanji/Grammar pair. I’m using them to teach some young learners and it’s clearly having an impact
    • Listening here is actually well scaffolded, but the lack of kanji and solid grammar explanations makes WK / Bunpro pair required. Good for WK/Bunpro, but not a good mark for Marugoto :sweat_smile:
  • Writing - still mostly useless to me, so no comment - doing a bit of it hasn’t helped retention, but still recommend learning to write kana
  • Typing!? / Output!? - still mostly useless to me
    • Random side note - my typing speed and how I write makes people think I’m posting AI now, so I’ve had some psychological damage over the last year :frowning:
  • I also made a deck for learning Kana which I mentioned was a gap in WK above (2 years ago! haha). Bunpro N5 Vocab - Kana Only | Bunpro again, locked behind the Bunpro paywall, but I plan to make a N4 version of this deck too.
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Thanks for posting. There is some good advice in here. As someone who has been doing SRS systems to learn all kinds of things for a very long time (most of my adult life), I 100% agree with the bit about not overwhelming yourself and, most importantly, to stop doing new lessons and do your reviews when they start piling up too much. SRS is genuinely an incredible tool for retention, but it can’t magically dispense with reality. This is probably the most important thing to understand in order to maintain doing it long term.

I see so many posts all over (here, anki forums, etc) from people who are constantly complaining about reviews piling up when life happens and they don’t do reviews for a while for whatever reason and then wanting to cheat reality by not having the SRS give them so many reviews. Unfortunately, you don’t magically stop forgetting things just because you went on vacation or had other life commitments.

When that happens, just tackle the reviews in a methodical manner as follows:

  1. Stop doing new lessons/cards until your backlog is caught up
  2. Do about 25-35% more reviews per day than the number of reviews you were doing prior to accumulating the backlog while ensuring that you’re doing enough for your daily reviews to trend down. It might even take a slightly higher percentage for the first few days depending on just how long the backlog has been accumulating (and hence how much you’ve forgotten).
  3. For the ones that you can almost remember, don’t really worry about studying them again too much, since you’ll very likely be able to recall them on the next SRS without too much issue.
  4. For the ones that seem to be completely gone as if you had never even seen them to begin with, take the time to study them a bit, as if you were redoing the lesson.

You will eventually catch up the backlog and can resume learning new material.

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Congrats on level 60! Good luck for the rest of your studies :tada: :tada:

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Thank you for writing! I have also found that writing the kanjis helps me a lot with retention.

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I actually recently hit 13 and decided just to do reviews only and once those get low enough do x amount of burned items per day. Beta Testing Nihongo Quest N5 so really focused on learning my grammar from there and adding those grammar points to MaruMori’s grammar SRS. Any vocabulary I feel iffy on/don’t know/not on WK I put on MaruMori’s vocabulary/kanji SRS list.

Excited for the full release of Koe and Shujinkou to continue my language learning journey (particularly with learning grammar the fun way). I’m hoping Wagotabi becomes well know and successful as it gets into immersion of reading Japanese only very quickly. Their current plan is just N5-N4, but if success they will go up to N1. :tada:

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Congratulations on reaching level 60! :partying_face: It’s a big achievement to get this far, and we will miss you when you get those items to Master and then leave us forever!! :sob:

Good luck with the next stage of your Japanese journey!

-Nick at WK

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I updated to include my experiences 2 years after finishing Wanikani.

I’ve been checking in as I’ve referred several people who are actively working through WK now (Levels 3, 8, 12 and 34 and a few others who haven’t told me levels). The content updates and scaffolding changes have been superb, so thanks for keeping on top of it.

I wanted to leave my original post intact to see just how different my thinking is 2 years later. Turns out, not a whole lot.

Still tons of bad advice out there, and AI has made things a bit worse. Would revise my Level 10 recommendation to level 7-15.

While I still think “learning to learn” is a deeper rabbit hole, I would add that etymology and some radical background can help some have deeper understandings. https://www.joyokanji.com/radical-notes/1-one-radical-一 is a personal recommendation of mine! 肉 = 月！？

Final thoughts?
I should have gotten a tutor 2 years ago, and still haven’t. I’m an introvert, so taking group speaking classes help me blend in a bit better!

I rushed 51 to 60, thus the reset I mentioned. I reset before I realized that it was easier to relearn these Kanji through immersion instead.

This may be my last update, or I may give another one after taking N1 at the end of this year. I plan to not specifically study and just see how I do so I can just focus on immersion and having fun (currently, playing the 空の軌跡 remake… damn you, 琥珀, 翡翠 and 紺碧… ). Plan to make a real attempt at it in Dec 2027.

Learning really is as simple as doing your reviews - instead of reading and making these posts :slight_smile:

改めて、左様なら