Hi everyone of WaniKani, this is my first post on the forum yet, and i’m not sure if i am posting at the good place. But anyway.
I just wanted to say how amazing the progress i have made on kanji reading has been in a single week so far. I have been using duolingo for 5 months before this and learned some grammar with all the hiragana/katakana reading (my katakana was pretty bad tough), and yet i was barely able to retain anything from different categories, once i reached level 5, i would just skip to another category and barely return to it, and when i did, it was nearly like restarting from scratch.
I have been playing lot of JRPG and visual novel with japanese voice on recently ( read 2 years or so) and after finishing a game called Trails of cold steel 3 ( Sen no Kiseki 3) 2 weeks ago, i really wanted to know the ending of the saga, so i ordered my game from japan, trails of cold steel 4 (game is only out in japan yet), it was my first time playing a game totally in japanese. And what a shock it was. Even tough i was using a spreadsheet to follow the main story, I still had to navigate game menu for character management and combat, wich was full of Katagana and Kanji i didnt know about/couldnt remember. After a day or two, i was really wondering if it was worth to go trough the game like that and really questioning my own japanese knowledge, i tought i was decent enough in japanese at this point to get around. At this point, i made a decision, that duolingo was no longer suited for my need and i wanted something much better to learn ( i had heard of Pimsleur beforehand but i am more interested in reading japanese than talking it, for a short term goal).
That’s when i found WaniKani, exactly 8 days ago. I know i am in a very early stage of it as of right now, and that many hardship are still awating me, but i cant believe how much kanji and tidbits i can read by myself in the game already, and i am only level 3!.I know most of menu navigation and the Katakana that i can read much faster doesnt specifically come from Wani Kani itself, but it’s still really enjoyable to see it all coming together at the same time, because i could still tie the two together, like the na katakana being the same as the narwhal radical.
Either way, even tough some reviews are still stressful because i want to make the fewest mistake possible so i can progress as fast as possible, it’s still been an enormously enjoyable experience.And the fact that i can already see the fruit of my progress so early into the WaniKani route is priceless. The fact that there are so many exception being thrown away in the levels like the day counting makes me think that as we learn more and more vocabulary, there will be a bit less exception and it will be more consistent, building from a solid base of basic knowledge on the ground…I am even learning more about english itself with the lesson, for example, i never really realized the intransitive/transitive part of raise and rise, french being my main language.
To wrap this up, sorry for the long post, just wanted to share my experience so far and my content with the product itself, can’t wait to unlock my new kanji’s already 
I’m glad you’re gaining some helpful knowledge on WaniKani (especially since French is your primary language)
that was me!
whispers: Praise the Crabigator!