Iām back to complete your äøę challenge, or äŗę in my case. It got longwinded. Sorry about that. The experience of learning this language has been very passionate and emotional for me. Itās essentially the first time in my life that Iāve ever wanted to achieve a goal of any significance. Anyway:
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This is the most important thing anyone has told me about Japanese. Kanji and the hype around them create the facade of this insurmountable barrier to the language. I was already dealing with so many barriers and so much doubt. Iāve never learned a second language to fluency, and Iāve never tried to teach myself a language before. I was overwhelmed and just wanted to know which resources to trust, what approach to use. And I canāt even use native reading materials for so long because Iāll be hit with a wall of illegible scribble characters until I put in thousands of hours of study just to read basic material (so I thought). The first month hit me with a series of reality bombs as I came to understand the extent of what this undertaking demands, and I canāt say for sure that I wouldnāt have given up without those words from you.
But itās actually soooo much better than just that. I knew that WaniKani orders Kanji based on visual complexity, and assumed that somewhat implies a continuous rise in difficulty as well; like itās some progressively harder gauntlet which culminates in the final boss of the last 10 levels. But actually it seems like ākanji difficultyā essentially reaches its peak by level 10. Iām still writing my answers by hand for every recognition review and itās really paid off. 88% of Kanji by level 30 is great, but whatās soooooo much more important is that at this point Iām level 9 and I seem to recognize ~100% of strokes.
I decided to learn Japanese now, rather than any language that doesnāt use Chinese characters, eventually because of ę½¤ē¾½ććć. When I started, her name may as well have been written in Klingon for all I knew. Yet today I looked again at ę½¤ and realized that in addition to recognizing every component in it, I also knew, not guessed but intuitively knew the stroke order just by looking at it. Thatās a level 51 item and itās no more difficult to learn than a level 9 item. I also encountered é which has so many strokes itās barely legible at this font size. Hang onā¦ hnnngggg
much better.
This has 24 strokes, which to my understanding is close to the limit for Kanji. I looked at this and also knew the correct stroke order before looking it up to double check. I also recognize and have already written every stroke here dozens or hundreds of times when writing other Kanji, and actually learned 3 of itās Kanji components from WK at level 2
So to my point, I thought I would need a year minimum to even get close to beginning to actually read this language, and that trying to skip ahead and learn new words which use Kanji ābeyond my levelā would just be an insurmountable, inefficient, pointless use of time. In fact at the very beginning I actually thought I would need to finish the 60 level quest before it would be worth even trying to read anythingā¦ or you know, learn and practice any grammar. But on the contrary, I feel like in less than 2 months, Iāve already progressed to a point where the difficulty of the memorization aspect for all new Kanji is exactly the same as, nay even less than the difficulty afforded by å£ on day 1. And Iām free to toss anything I want into my vocabulary SRS tools, and direct my learning wherever it naturally takes me, just as I could in any language which uses a purely phonetic writing system.
So basically I since you asked for feedback. TLDR
1. Langauge learning has a high dropout rate as it is, and notoriously Japanese even moreso. The difficulty of Kanji is way overhyped which exacerbates this.
2. I bought into that hype, got intimidated and felt hopeless to the point of wanting to give up (several times over several different things but always with this looming predominantly overhead.)
3. I learned that this was just a fantasy, a BIG OLā LIE, and Kanji cease to be a major barrier in less than 2 months. In fact Iāve come to love them. Theyāre my my best friends besides ććć and theyāve begun to make learning this language easier rather than harder albeit slightly more time consuming but only slightly somehow. So basicallyā¦
The Actual Feedback: I think you should mention this 
. By level 10 youāll be ready for all the visual complexity the script has to offer, and donāt need to tiptoe around Kanji to facilitate learning. Kanji arenāt going to put a years long roadblock between a beginner and the start of their actual learning, and theyāre not some insane 5D chess game preventing anyone who canāt already speak Japanese from learning to read it. I feel like itās within the scope of your guide because this misconception seriously warped my understanding of the role WaniKani would play in my Japanese learning process. I wouldnāt want anyone to potentially give up based on a falsehood.
TIL my browserās spellcheck recognizes Klingon but not facade. 
!
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I can feel the emotion that youāve put into it, so it made me passionate with your journey and with the issue of kanji being seen as something impossible to learn 
