Yeah, reached level 60 after pretty close to exactly one year, so for all of you out there it definitely is possible. I put in a fair amount of time, and will probably finish this last month out just practicing the most recently learned kanji, but am mostly transitioning into grammar practice and reading now.
I have two things to say about Wanikani:
First the SRS system is fantastic and really is better than just about everything else out there, so to the creators thank you very much.
The second one, is meant to be constructive but judging the nature of things it will not be taken as such: The community boards have a very toxic subset of people on them, itâs one of the biggest reasons I avoided posting on here most of the time I was on the site, and even reading through comments it just blows my mind how judgemental and rude some of you can be to beginners or to anyone who doesnât think the way that you do. The most egregious offenders are higher leveled users or people who have reset their level. Gatekeeping in a community designed for beginners to learn Japanese is really ironic and hypocritical donât you think?
tbf its the internet so theres going to be toxic people everywhere and its not just a wk thing, but I see your point. People like @Leebo are sussy bakas who do nothing but give me sass >:(
Many congratulations!!! Sorry to hear you didnât have a good experience in the forums. I try to take the good and leave the bad. As Vanilla just said, the internet can be a toxic place in general. There are kind people hereâŚand some not so kind but thatâs a them problem.
Iâm glad to hear it can be done in a year. Iâm averaging about your pace. I have my own reasons to want to try to do it quickly. I donât think Iâll be able to do it under a year but hopefully under a year and a half. One unusual judgemental theme I seem to see here which I donât understand is that if you are doing this fast you canât possibly be remembering or you arenât REALLY learning Japanese. Do you feel this way? Do you feel like you have adequately retained the kanji? I donât understand this idea since the SRS system almost ensures that you remember. I guess I wonât know until Iâm done.
Hope you decide to stick around and burn things. Maybe you can give the forums another shot and find some more likeminded people.
Good luck in your further studies.
congrats man, iâm trying to go at a similar speed and hope i can see it to the end like you did, your achievement is very inspiring.
honestly when it comes to toxicity, i agree when it comes to threads where people critique wanikani, things get really unecessarily heated in those threads, atleast from what iâve seen in the short time iâve been here.
but overall as a beginner i feel way more welcome here, than in reddit /r/learnjapanese or a certain imageboard, atleast coming from those places, wanikani forums are very refreshing in comparison.
then again iâm mostly in beginner book clubs, maybe the rest is different.
As long as you make it a habit you can do it, I think I pretty much averaged about three to four hours a day of practice for most of the year. I think with a proper strategy it could be done quicker but I pretty much went with a brute force approach and had fairly low accuracy until I memorized things. This approach worked pretty well for me. In any case good luck, it can be done and itâs totally worth it!
In regards to actually remembering the Kanji I think the faster you do it the better. My whole goal was to be able to maximize my ability to read most Japanese that I would encounter. A little background I actually got a minor in Japanese in college so Iâm not new to the language, but I can say the year of Wanikani made my kanji comprehension skyrocket, and I can now casually read Japanese with ease. My learning isnât going to just stop here.
The argument that going faster is less effective is silly to me, I mean, burning items is burning items right? So if Iâve burned the majority of lessons Iâve gone through and they donât even show up in my queue anymore then what difference does it make if I stretched out my learning over another year?
I get that most people canât set aside three to four hours a day to practice kanji in which case it becomes difficult to go through at the pace I have, but in my opinion the faster you can get through the set the better.
Thanks for taking the time to respond and good luck!
I can think of a certain thread you may be referring to
However, the majority of people here are great. A lot of new people come here and say how amazing they think the community is. I can see where youâre coming from though: sometimes the harshness of responses to some threads/posts are a little unwarranted.
Hope you stay around the forum. Itâs a positive place overall imo.
Congrats on hitting 60! Pretty evident that you manifested some consistent disciplineârighteous. All the best on your learning journey!
As a beginner and more-so of a forum lurker, I definitely agree to some extent. Honestly, like @Vanilla alluded to, itâs partially the nature of the internet. Anonymity behind a screen makes it easy to forget that weâre dealing with people.
You know I just want to add to this, instead of posting the completely undignified response you did to prove my point, here is how this could have gone down in an alternate universe:
You first could have congratulated me for reaching level 60, that would have been a supportive thing to do. Then you could have thought to yourself, âGee, maybe we could be more supportive of newcomers on a site thatâs literally made for people who are new to learning a languageâ
Instead you completely overlooked that and my praise for the creators of WaniKani and âread between the linesâ to construe a personal insult, you then responded with an extremely passive aggressive comment.
I have little hope that this will result in a moment of reflection for you to realize that you really are the problem, but you know crazier things have happened I guess.
I have sympathy with your position, hence I liked most of your posts. However, IMHO self-reflection goes both ways (counter-intuitive though it sounds), for as Nietzsche warned, âBeware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster⌠for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.â Iâm not disagreeing (or necessarily agreeing) with anything any individual has said in this thread (or outside this thread, either), but perhaps relating my own POV might be worth a couple of cents.
I once participated in a surprisingly good online writing-critique workshop called Critters (still alive and kicking, 25 years old, thatâs like 15,000 in Internet-years! Note: I havenât visited in ages, so Iâm going based on my past experience, not recent experience; I have no idea what the site is like now, though the fact itâs still running gives me hope itâs still healthy).
Anyhoo, among the great things about Critters was that they gave great advice about âhow to critiqueâ constructively, and I, for one, learned a heck of a lot from participating in that kind of pro-critiquing-yet-also-pro-constructivity culture. I donât think I could do justice to the principles they espoused other than to link to a prime example of it for anyone interested in the topic, with the (more-concise) subtitle of Just Honest, not Brutally Honest, by Andrew Burt.
Itâs directed specifically at writers/critiquers of short stories, but honestly I think it applies to a lot (probably even most) of online communication in general. Personally, I think itâs useful advice for just about anyone, particularly when communicating via text/writing, as a lot of nuance is lost when weâre not able to communicate verbally (tone of voice, etc.) nor with body language / facial expressions, etc. But this is all just In My Humble Opinionâ˘. Your mileage may vary.ÂŽ
Well, congrats on your level 60. I recall you posts that the system was too slow and gatekeeping early on, whats you perspective now? I saw you were experienced already and it seems like a similar sentimentâŚbut you went pretty fast so I imagine many reviews and worked out in the end.
As for âvery toxicâ for WK, I just canât agree. At worst, a little sassy that is pretty harmless. But behind that are literally hundreds of helps Iâve read where experienced users helped beginners here. But I saw your old threads just see what you are talking about and sounds like you had a lot of arguments. Nonetheless, you may be first to get their own L60 thread shutdownâŚthey are pretty aggressive to lock thread with any dissonance. If the dynamics here were not for you, that is ok. Best of luck!
Yeah this happens whenever someone creates a thread about something they didnât like at WK (which letâs be honest here, itâs not exactly unreasonable, WK was created by people and people are fallible, those experienced users totally could be a bit less harsh and not take things so personally, I get you butâŚ
âŚthis part doesnât seem 100% accurate to me. Unless itâs physical violence, two people donât fight if one of them simply doesnât want to (and even if it is physical violence, the fight probably wonât happen if the attacked can run faster than the attacker). Dumping it all on the old-timers doesnât seem entirely accurate either, even though they are part of the dynamic.
As a new member, itâs motivating to see how quickly you were flying through the levels; especially the later stages. Thanks for sharing your experience.
