I finally reached level 20 after 13 months. I’m thinking about pausing ( just doing reviews and burned items) and allocating the freed up time to work on grammar (Bunpro), reading (Satori) listening (YouTube, etc) and speaking (Italki).
I originally thought I could keep pressing on through more WK levels AND do those other things, but if I’m honest with myself, I just don’t have enough bandwidth. So, everything else suffers as I memorize more kanji.
Does anyone have any thoughts on if level 20 is sufficient to take a break and then use that time to diversify my learning?
Sure, that’s a legit strategy. I don’t think there’s any better or worse pause points, if that’s what you’re asking. Level 20 is as good a spot as any, especially if you’re reading. You’re still going to learn the most frequent kanji, just a different way.
I’d only suggest doing it in stages, not all the way to zero. Doing 10 or even 5 lessons a day is a pretty low workload. Almost “take a couple of minutes before I do my real studying” kind of low. And then 2 years from now, just doing that little amount, you’re done instead of at level 20, hardly trying. (Will that matter to you in 2 years? Probably not. But maybe.)
That’s the key point here. Wanikani should aid you with everything else not hinder.
At level 20 there’s a good chance you understand kanji as a concept and learning new ones and recognizing them within your study material is not a big deal. If that’s where you’re at then putting Wanikani on the back burner would be the better choice.
Idk how many lessons you’ve been doing a day and what amount of kanji you learn every day, I can tell you that from my experience it makes a huge difference. I don’t do all the radicals and all the kanji that open with a new level, I keep it pretty low and that way the load doesn’t interfere with my grammar, reading and listening practice.
Not having to deal with the kanji memorization part while learning new grammar points helps me focus on the grammar, so I like the fact that I can divide those into different apps.
It is my second time around on these levels of wanikani, and if it is your first time learning all of this material I can see how it can get too much, especially on those levels (the highest I got was to level 24 iirc).
At the end of the day the important thing is to keep engaging with the language no matter how, just choose what suits you best at this point. Burn out is not worth it, and from what you’ve described you are doing a lot on several platforms.
If you’re at a beginner level with all the rest, it should be for the time being. You’ll be able to recognize most beginners level kanji and the ones that are higher on wanikani (with the last levels update they’re implementing I’m not sure how many of those were left on higher levels) it’s not a lot of new items to learn in the wild.
You’ll be able to tell if you reach a point where you feel like you need to learn more kanji because having to learn them from dictionaries is too much comparing to using Wanikani.
Just to tell you about my experience: I quit Wanikani last Spring because i wanted to spend time reading childrens novels and see if i could learn kanji by looking them up as i came across them rather than SRS-ing them. I found out that that didnt work for me and the only Kanji i knew after 9 months of looking them up every time i came across them were the ones i had learned on Wanikani.
But i didnt regret taking a nine month break from Wanikani because when i came back i was all the more committed to it. However after attaining another 5 levels on Wanikani i am thinking of slowing down a lot to maybe a level every 20 days because I feel that my wanikani/ reading Japanese novels is too far weighted to Wanikani time
I continued learning new kanji by just creating flashcards containing words, not isolated kanji. (I do this when I encounter new words in context - ‘sentence mining’. I was using first JPDB and now Anki, but either is good! or even the Satori built-in SRS or something else, there are a lot of options out there!)
I think I’m at about 1000 known kanji now. I haven’t noticed any difference in retention for the kanji I learned on WK vs elsewhere. And I’m glad to have flexibility about which words I study and in which order. I am able to tackle native media without feeling like I need to wait for a given WK level.
I’ve recently had similar thoughts, but I decided to slow right down but not stop completely. I am using NativShark and Satori Reader as core resources with Wanikani and YouTube as extras. I am currently keeping my apprentice items at 30-40. This doesn’t take up too much time. I remember a time when I felt ‘controlled’ by Wanikani, now I have it in its correct place.
You can also just slow down to a fraction of the lessons you were doing previously but still continue at a much slower pace.
I definitely think it’s a great idea to slow down on WaniKani and focus on other things (and in particular, just reading) at your level, but it’s also true that that levels 20 to 30 still contain a ton of very common and useful kanji. Skimming WK kanji page for these levels I see a ton of kanji I encounter on a daily basis and very few kanji I would deem superfluous at this stage.
But if you’re really time-constrained I certainly think it’s well worth taking time away from WK and learning other aspects of the language. Level 20 is around where I started seriously studying grammar and reading (or, at that point, deciphering) real Japanese, but I was lucky enough to have enough free time to do that on top of keeping my WK pace.
I’m of a similar mindset, at around level 30 I toyed with the idea of stopping and spending my time on the reason I decided to learn the language, reading books, but decided to slow down and carry on.
However just yesterday I took the plunge to put on vacation mode. Wanikani does really help me but my god has it become dull and a major grind for me all of a sudden. I’m not interested in taking the JLPT and study for fun in my spare time, I’d much rather spend my time doing something I enjoy.
Good luck on Satori Reader too, I read through all the stories before starting my first book. It really was helpful in making that transition.
It is dull and it is a grind. What motivated me to keep pushing was looking up the unknown kanji in the stuff I read on WaniKani and see at what level it would appear. That gave me short-term goals and made WaniKani feel more real and practical in a way, I knew that the stuff I was learning was actually going to be useful.
It also felt rewarding when I would finally reach a kanji I kept encountering in the wild at a higher WK level (and I would very easily remember it as a result). Like 魔 at level 46 that I kept seeing in all sorts of contexts long before I even reached level 20.
That being said at level 33 you have effectively gotten most of the value of WK already, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to move on and learn kanji more organically from that point onward.
I’m of the opinion that WK would benefit a lot from relaxing the level structure past 30 and let the user pick and choose what they want to learn since by that point you really ought to be reading and therefore you can let the content you consume guide your studies.
Yes you are correct, there are a few Kanji that I search on to see at which level they will unlock and its a beautiful thing when you start a kanji lesson only to be super familiar with it due to it showing up in immersion so much.
I’ve seen mental bandwidth mentioned on here and with a family and a job there is only so much I can commit too. I’ve read grammar guides/textbooks up to N2 and guess I just want to be ‘let loose’ a bit with the language.
How did you manage to balance this through to Level 60 and remain engaged when there is a feeling of diminishing returns that begins to creep on the further you go?
But basically I pushed at one level/week until level 40 (but by that point I was really starting to burn out and wouldn’t recommend it, I probably should have slowed down earlier) then I reduced lessons heavily and focused on other things (but still did ~5 lessons a day for a while). Then eventually I hit level 50 and by that point all remaining levels are “fast” levels that you can do in 3.5 days and I was getting really, really bored of WaniKani by then so I thought I’d get it over with and rushed the last levels in 5 very intense weeks.
I just wanted to get to level 60 for the sake of getting to level 60 but frankly I feel like I could have dropped WK around level 40 and then reallocated that time to just reading Japanese and “mining” content on Anki and I wouldn’t have missed much I think. Many of the kanji and words I learned in those latter levels have yet to come up in the stuff I read.
I think that’s a pretty good time to shift focus onto other things, especially if you haven’t focused on other things for a while.
Grammar and vocab are good options for SRS. Reading is always king, of course.
If you haven’t done much reading yet – or even if you have, actually – I would recommend checking out the Tadoku site with its philosophy of ‘extensive reading’. See Our Vision | NPO多言語多読, and if you find it interesting, you can find free readers of different levels at: Free Tadoku Books – にほんごたどく
Great thanks for the reply. I really enjoyed reading your Level 60 post, lot’s of good information put across well. Thanks for putting the link up. You have tempted me to give it another whirl but just take my time even more so with it.