Warning: quite a long post. Skipping it might bring consequences that are as bad as skipping your vocab lessons. It finally happened! :six: :zero: :tada: :fireworks: Thank you for being on this journey with me :heart: [image] I’m finally level 60! I just want to start this post by saying that I’m very grateful for every single one of you. Whether we talk every day or whether we never talked before, thank you for being here on this journey with me :heart: One of the best things about Wanikani is that this community exists. We’re all part of the same tribe. We’re all here to thrive together. I wish I could thank you all individually in this post, whether you’re an user or part of the WK staff. I’ve simply made so many friends in here that it would be impossible to tag you all. So again, if you’re reading this, thank you. How do I feel about finally reaching lvl 60? I remember my first days on Wanikani. I was so excited by the fact that I was learning so much in so little time. My gamer instincts were calling for me. I felt like this is what Education was supposed to be all along: a place where you are fully allowed to mix fun with hard work. Believe it or not, I’ve always been a procrastinator. Not with Wanikani though. This changed the game. It reminded me that following my instincts and choosing to dedicate my time on what I believe leads to success. Society tells you that following the rules and forgetting about your “selfish” dreams is the only way to succeed. I disagree. Go after what you want, but make sure to give everything you got. The truth is that I don’t feel in any way more excited than I’ve felt 10, 30 or 60 levels ago. One would think otherwise, right?! I mean, I finally reached the last step to Crabigator’s heaven! Well, now that I am up here, I see that there are still a lot of stairs left to climb. It’s okay. I loved this journey, so I’m very much sure that I will enjoy the next ones too. The lesson here is that I’m grateful for having reached this far and for still having a lot to go after. A lot of people feel like they lost their purpose after reaching their goals. Please don’t. Whatever comes next, it’s yours to grab. Is the cake real? :cake: Yes. gives it a bite Was WK hard? Total time to achieve level 60: 368 days. [wkstatsyay] Graphic extracted from www.wkstats.com. Thanks for developing this lovely tool @rfindley :slight_smile: Obs: The first level actually took me around 4 days. I created an account, but only did the first lesson on the 6th of June (18 days later). Life is simple, but not easy. I think the same thing applies to Wanikani. You don’t have to think about being here every single hour or wake up at the middle of night just to do reviews. There’s also no ultimate trick behind being successful on Wanikani. It’s all about showing up and do the work. The #1 reason people reach level 60 is precisely that. They aren’t any smarter than you nor have they discovered the Holy Grail of memorization. They just come back every day to do what they have to do :slight_smile: I’m just starting. Is Wanikani worth it? Yes, because there’s cake. Not enough of a good reason? :slightly_frowning_face: Let me try again… It is definitely worth your money and time. Is it perfect? No. Is it the best tool to learn kanji? Yes. Don’t get me wrong, the more I progressed, the more I’d notice the aspects where WK could be better. But the thing we need to take into consideration is that this is a product that the WK team is still working to improve. If right now it is the best tool to learn kanji in the market, just imagine the potential that has yet to see the light of day. :sun_behind_large_cloud: :arrow_right: :sun_behind_small_cloud: :arrow_right: :sun_with_face: :100: Why did I start learning Japanese? One thing that I’ve been passionate about since my teen years has been self-development. At the time that I was 20 years old, I was listening to Tim Ferris’ podcast and I simply loved it! I knew Tim had studied in Japan when he was younger and that he had learned Japanese in the past. Eventually, I saw a TEDTalk that Tim did a few years ago. He talked about how he managed to learn Japanese and to swim when he was no longer a kid. Now, this was my first trigger. Why? It’s funny. It’s because I still don’t know how to swim. I always convinced myself that it was too late, and here was this dude trying to convince me otherwise. Since he also talked about Japanese, that idea of learning a 3rd language kinda came connected with the swimming. Nothing happened though. Eventually when the summer vacation arrived, I wanted to rewatch Pokemon to get that childhood nostalgia. Then I started watching Naruto because why the hell not. Then I discovered My Anime List. At this time it was too late to go back: I was stuck in this 2D world. Because anime became a big part of my daily life in 2015/2016, I eventually started learning more about Japan and its culture. Everything seemed different from what I knew and I was loving it. That’s where I started developing an interest in learning Japanese. Well, the thing is… I learned hiragana and that was it. Study? What’s that? Can I eat it? I ended up convincing myself that anime was helping me learn the language, so I didn’t need to do anything else. Saying that I was learning Japanese was cool though (oh, the ego). At this time though, I was already using HelloTalk to get some Japanese frriieeeeends!!! (purely in English… Yes, I was one of those…). Saying そうです was like saying “I’m soooo goooood omggggggggggg” to myself. facepalms the table while writing this Oh innocent boy. At least, I wasn’t one of those guys that only used romaji. I’m forgiven, right? Right??? Eventually in June of 2017, I’ve found myself entering Summer vacations and I needed something to do. That’s when I’ve found WK. Now here I am :slight_smile: What is moving me now to keep improving my Japanese is the thought of travelling/living there for a while. I’m 22. I need to experience life. I need to go on an adventure. Japan is the place I chose :v: Will I subscribe again to WK? [sub] Yes, I’ll be subscribing for 1 more year. Gotta burn every single turtle, right? :v: Also, 1 year isn’t enough. I wanna see all the things that the WK team is preparing for us. Better to support the project then! :slight_smile: What’s next? Well, now that I’ll have more free time, there are some things I want to focus on: Learn how to hand write kanji - I realized that sending handwritten postcards/letters to Japanese friends is the best thing ever. Read, write, listen and speak more Japanese. Push myself to be ready for the JLPT N2 in December. Launch an online business. Get my ass in Japan. Am I leaving the forums? For some reason, everyone is asking me this question. No, I’m not leaving. I still have a lot to talk to you guys :heart: I’ll definitely reduce my time here, but that’s more about fixing the excessive time I spent in here sometimes. Extra - I’ve built the Ultimate Guide to Wanikani. As a way to thank you for this past year, I gathered all the best lessons this journey has taught me into one single post. My goal is not to substitute any of the already existent and very well made Guides, but to upgrade the one I’ve made 4 months ago. I wanted to have it ready today, but life happened. So, I’ll leave you with a list of the things I’ll be talking about. COMPLETED :tada: Obs: the Guide will be in post right under this one.

[image] Saida: Good luck trying to beat out Ronaldo! Though you’re at least more famous than him on these forums, at least :stuck_out_tongue: ! Gotta start somewhere, right :grin: :smiley: :slight_smile: :confused: :slightly_frowning_face: :frowning_face: :sob: [image] :heart:

[image] romero0001: question: if you go as fast as possible, would it be possible to not get an overnight review? You would have to if you want to do 6 days and 20 hours. Honestly, I would just not do it and go for 7 days and 0 hours per level. There have been already people going 6d20 throughout WK just to be the fastest person to reach level 60. Plus, it won’t save you that much time, just around 5 days in 1 year. I’d rather have the routine of doing lessons always at the same time and not having to wake up during the middle of the night over reaching level 60 5 days earlier :slight_smile: How’s Wanikani going for you? [image] ronsel_de_lume: It feels as if I’m going faster but with less effort. Rightt?! I do try my best to make sure that my guide isn’t just about “going full speed”, because the later is just literally 1 chapter of it. Everything else is about making your Wanikani journey easier and more pleasant. The speed increase that most people obtain is just a natural consequence of them using Wanikani in the best way possible :slight_smile: I’m very happy to see that you’re getting great results out of it :grin: And honestly 9 days is pretty amazing. I’m sure your brain is loving all this new info :stuck_out_tongue: One question if you don’t mind, do you think that the guide could be improved to make sure it’s not just about speed? I think it’s missing a way to teach how to better plan to level up every let’s say 10 or 14 days (over just teaching the full speed of 7 days per level). Appreciate you leaving a comment :heart: Let me know if I can help out with anything else!

[image] MeisterMike: Should I feel overwhelmed by then, or notice that I lose more and more motivation doing my lessons and reviews at that point, I will probably either go with a 10-lessons-per-day schedule or just stop doing lessons every day. [image] MeisterMike: have joined the “absolute beginner book club” here on WK (thanks for your recommendation btw), but even their really slow schedule is still too fast for me and there is a lot of grammar stuff and conjugations I just don’t get yet. For a single page, I usually take a whole hour, and it’s not smooth sailing but actually very exhausting. I think that the moment I reached level 40 was when I realized that I had kanji pretty much mastered (as in kanji was no longer a problem while reading). My suggestion is to slow down to 10 lessons/day and focus on grammar and then reading. I’d say finishing Tae Kim’s guide will put you in a nice position to start reading on book clubs. Until then, you might want to give yourself a try to easy NHK news. The Book Clubs might say “Beginner” or “Ultimate Beginner”, but all that means is to be a beginner at reading, not in Japanese. If you’re up to give another try to Book Clubs, I’d suggest this one that’s starting soon: [image] Teasing Master Takagi-san squinting_face_with_tongue ・ Volume 1 Book Clubs Welcome to the Teasing Master Takagi-san Book Club! [71srV4KOH+L] Summary Middle school students Nishikata and Takagi sit next to each other in class. Takagi, who is in love with Nishikata, enjoys teasing him with embarrassing pranks and jokes. In response, Nishikata creates plans to get his revenge, but they always fail when she identifies his weaknesses and capitalizes on them. Who should join We’re reading this as the Absolute Beginner Book Club. This book club aims to help readers who … I’ve read the manga, and the grammar is pretty much N4 level, vocabulary is relatively simple and uses kanji (which is good for someone that’s learning through Wanikani). [image] MeisterMike: That said, I am not so sure anymore if I actually wanna go with the 2-Year plan or not. [image] MeisterMike: 20 lessons per day are very manageable at the moment How many lessons are you doing every day? Because 20 lessons a day has you reach level 60 in around 1 year. 10 lessons/day should put you around the 2 year mark, which would still allow you to reach level 60 before your 2 year deadline :slight_smile:

I’d say finishing Tae Kim’s guide will put you in a nice position to start reading on book clubs. Until then, you might want to give yourself a try to easy NHK news. That actually sounds pretty good and helpful. I took a quick look at NHK easy news and pretty much the only “problem” I have with it is the furigana. I mean, generally furigana is pretty helpful for kanji you don’t know yet, but I feel like it hurts more than it helps for people learning through WaniKani or Anki. Most of the time, when I try to read stuff with furigana my eyes just wander to the furigana instead of looking at the kanji itself to then think about what the reading is. It feels like doing a test with the answers already filled in. That’s also why I actually kinda prefer reading actual manga or japanese text (like tweets or internet articles) because they usually don’t have furigana and it feels like better practice, even if I don’t get all of the grammar or have to look up some words. But yeah, I will definitely bookmark it and look by then and again. I didn’t even know an “easy version” of NHK exists so that’s pretty neat. Thanks ^^ How many lessons are you doing every day? Because 20 lessons a day has you reach level 60 in around 1 year. 10 lessons/day should put you around the 2-year mark, which would still allow you to reach level 60 before your 2-year deadline :slight_smile: Like I said, I’m usually doing 20 Lessons. As you can see on the screenshot of my Lesson-map (the green one), I’m not actually doing them every day for reasons mentioned there, but when I do them I usually do 20. That means I am taking around 10 days, if I am fast around 7 or 8 even. WIth 10 days/lvlup I’d take 600 days to complete it all, but since I am probably gonna take one or two more bigger lesson breaks (like I did around New-Years) it’ll very likely take a little longer should I go through with this schedule. That’s not really a problem though as long as I can finish in 730 Days or less.

[image] MeisterMike: That actually sounds pretty good and helpful. I took a quick look at NHK easy news and pretty much the only “problem” I have with it is the furigana. You can turn off the furigana if that helps: [YZDy8zOqw6] There was a reading news’ app called Tangoristo that would display furigana depending on your Wanikani level, but the app is no longer available. There are some apps like Manabi Reader (iOS only), Todai Easy Japanese News, and Jareads which seem to be popular, so you could check them out.

@MeisterMike There’s also a userscript which hides furigana based on your Wanikani level. [image] [Userscript] NHK Easy Practice With WaniKani (or any website that uses ruby) API And Third-Party Apps warning This is a third-party script/app and is not created by the WaniKani team. By using this, you understand that it can stop working at any time or be discontinued indefinitely. I created this script as I like reading news on NHK easy, but I wanted a way to be able hide the furigana for kanji and vocabulary I already know. Currently anything with a Guru I level or higher will have its furigana hidden. It is way to easy for me to read the furigana unintentionally. This script was inspire…

@jprspereira Oh damn, that’s both very helpful. I’ll look into it! Thanks Guys ^^

[image] jprspereira: One question if you don’t mind, do you think that the guide could be improved to make sure it’s not just about speed? I think it’s missing a way to teach how to better plan to level up every let’s say 10 or 14 days (over just teaching the full speed of 7 days per level). I think that most of the people who come to this guide for the first time, probably think it’s just about going faster, because of the reputation you have. But once they start reading the guide, they’ll see it’s more about efficiency (although it actually took me a while to realize that, but don’t mind me… xD). In my case, knowing you as “the guy that got to level 60 in 368 days”, my brain couldn’t process that you weren’t actually talking about speed. And I was reading your guide out of mere curiosity, but then it was like “yeah this makes a lot of sense”. Now that I read it again I can see you make much more emphasis on the efficiency than on the speed, and you don’t even encourage to go faster. So the only thing I could recommend is maybe trying to present it more as an efficiency guide, with a disclaimer in the beginning or something like that (???). Because I find that the content is indeed very well explained and once you read it you realize you can get advantage of it even if you don’t care about speed at all. But for that, it needs to be read first. If you have ideas about introducing a plan for leveling up in 10 or 14 days as you said, it could be great to have that too. Your guide is already extraordinary tho, and almost everything you explain is also applicable for people that go slower. I think they just have to do the work of extrapolating data. What I’m trying to say is: I think it would be great if you’d incorporate tips (maybe for people going slower) that are not already on the guide. If your concern is about presenting the same information but in a different way, I’d say not to worry too much about that. For me, it was just the general idea I had of this guide in the beginning that made me think it was only about speed. I can only talk from my experience so I don’t know. I hope everything I said makes sense and that what I tried to explain is understandable xD. I’d say: go modify the guide if you feel like it. If not, it already is an amazing resource. I guess you’ll always feel like you could go deeper in some parts but it’s also fine if you don’t. To explain everything really deeply you would need to write a 500-pages book. And also, thank you for your response! Reading your kind words helped me get more motivated :heart:

[image] jprspereira: I would just not do it and go for 7 days and 0 hours per level. [image] jprspereira: I’d rather have the routine of doing lessons always at the same time and not having to wake up during the middle of the night over reaching level 60 5 days earlier That. I did that for a long time and it was perfect. I knew every time when kanji would appear. The downside was that I missed one particle or kanji one time and my entire schedule has gone down the drain. That was really unpleasant. [image] jprspereira: Kanji is hard to learn using traditional methods. A lot of people graduating from Japanese struggle with kanji. I checked my Uni a few years ago, and their program would only start introducing kanji 3 semesters later. It is a big problem within those not using amazing tools like Wanikani. Yeah, I tried 3 other things before finding WK. None of them worked. Wani Kani was what propelled my learning forward in a great leap. It’s always scaring me when Japanese teachers do not introduce Kanji at the beginning. It’s so long to get them all that starting late is a huge waste of time. I mean they are vital to a good understand and need to be learned at a regular pace for a long time why only at the end? You slowly incorporate kanji so that they get used to it and not just cram them all at the end. Even in Japan, I believe they learn them for 9 years or so. If you used only Kana for three years then it will be hard to get used to kanji. Imagine learning vocab without kanji then after a few years relearning everything but this time with kanji. This would be a run killer for me. I just ranted again. Edit: Just thinking a text in Japanese without kanji seem like purgatory. I hate it when some kanji are missing, one because it’s harder to understand and read, and two because it’s better to have the kanji. It exists for a reason. [image] jprspereira: Gotta start somewhere, right Good luck with your… ambitious project

[image] jprspereira: How’s your learning going when it comes to watching 潤羽るしあ? Do you feel like you’re starting to understand some of her stuff? :grin: The most pleasantly shocking part of this journey has been listening comprehension! I only recently started grammar, and plan to start reading very soon, yet despite this I’ve experienced a noticeable and extremely consistent rise in comprehension. Every week I notice that I’m understanding more than I could the week before. It’s been just individual words here and there, but I recognized level 1’s 入り口 and level 2’s 月 within a week of learning them. I’d like to give a shoutout to 電波 for being the first WK word that I heard Rushia use the same day that I learned it. I finally started learning grammar in earnest. I figured there are plenty of words that I’m missing because I only recognize their base forms. Surely enough, after learning how to use negatives yesterday I opened her stream today and within 10 seconds heard 怖くない、which I definitely wouldn’t have recognized a day earlier. I think I’m on the cusp of comprehending entire thoughts and sentences with the frequency that I could spot individual words in the first few weeks. I think it’s helped that I watch at least little bit of Rushia every day due to the fact that I can’t sleep without doing so. I had really bad insomnia for almost 10 years which I guess was anxiety-induced, because watching her stream before bed completely cures it. As I ramp up my immersion regiment I’ll need to diversify beyond the pool of Vtubers that currently monopolize it, but I’d say being denied the option to skip even one day of listening practice has really done me a lot of favors.

My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 )

WaniKani Level 60 Celebration

ekuroe April 5, 2021, 12:00pm 597

@MeisterMike
There’s also a userscript which hides furigana based on your Wanikani level.

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My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 )

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