Hi folks,
Today is a great day for me! I reached level 60 on WaniKani 8 days ago!
As you can see on this progress chart, the 8 days period is a characteristic of my WK journey.
I am so glad I found WaniKani more than a year ago. I was just starting to learn Japanese and the huge task of learning kanji was really daunting.
But then WK came to the rescue and gave me a solid routine to follow. Thanks to the community, and particularly to the useful guide made by @jprspereira, I could understand the functioning of the SRS system and set up a consistent routine.
I wanted to be as consistent as possible, and it was the case with the routine I progressively adopted. WK became part of my life and I did at least one review session in the morning and one in the evening.
The level up routine looked like that:
Day 1 (morning): Radicals and kanji batch 1 (Lesson)
Day 1 (evening): Radicals and kanji batch 1 (Apprentice 2)
Day 2 (morning): Radicals and kanji batch 1 (Apprentice 3)
Day 3 (morning): Radicals and kanji batch 1 (Apprentice 4)
Day 5 (morning): Radicals and kanji batch 1 (Guru 1) + Kanji batch 2 (Lesson)
Day 5 (evening): Kanji batch 2 (Apprentice 2)
Day 6 (morning): Kanji batch 2 (Apprentice 3)
Day 7 (morning): Kanji batch 2 (Apprentice 4)
Day 9 (morning): Kanji batch 2 (Guru 1) > Level up
During all the other review sessions I obviously had a lot of other items to review.
This created an 8 days cycle with which I was happy.
Actually, during the fast levels, I used the reorder script to slow down my progress and intentionally did all lessons except a few kanji which were acting as a batch 2. I would do them on the morning of day 5. This allowed me to keep the workload manageable for me.
Otherwise, I used rather classic methods, doing between 15 and 20 lessons a day, and keeping the Apprentice count around 100.
As a result, I reached level 60 in 466 days, which was a very satisfying progress for me.
Now that this goal is reached, it sure feels good and I look forwards to my next goals!
Until now, WK has been a large part of my Japanese learning routine, and I did not get as much reading practice as I would have wanted.
My grammar level surely lags behind my kanji level. I finished Genki 1 and 2, as well as N5 and N4 on Bunpro. I would say I have a weak N3 in grammar.
Most of my reading practice came from graded readers, web articles, a few video games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon, and also some WK book clubs. I would have wanted to participate in more book clubs but I only got involved in the Shirokuma Cafe and Chiiās sweet home book clubs, but I definitely plan to get involved in more of them in the future!
I also have further objectives, like trying to delve into the two Great Ace Attorney games Iāve always wanted to play.
I also have to improve my oral comprehension, as I donāt watch or listen much Japanese content. Iāve been trying to watch Shirokuma Cafe without subtitles and this is rather challenging so far.
Finally, I would also like to practice speaking more and more, so Iāve been using italki to reach this goal.
WK really helped me to grow confident and showed me how I could learn seemingly unreachable things. As a result, Iāve recently started to learn the piano, as Iāve always wanted to do. This is leaving me with less time for Japanese, but itās another great learning journey!
To conclude, I would like to warmly thank the WK staff for creating and maintaining this wonderful tool which is helping us to reach some of our dreams.
I started learning Japanese mainly out of curiosity. I wanted to know if I could be able to understand a few video games and movies through their original language, and I gradually got interested in the japanese culture and history. I definitely plan to visit Japan someday. It wonāt be before a few years, but then I have time to improve in order to enjoy the trip even more!
And last but not least, I would like to thank the WK community for creating this stimulating environment on the forums! Reading about your trips to Japan, the learning resources you use, the anime you watch, or just following your crazy conversations has been a great source of delight and motivation for me! Thanks for being part of the journey!
I wouldnāt be able to leave such a wonderful community now. I still have to burn all those turtles, and I would obviously miss the great atmosphere of the forums!
I definitely plan to stay around and participate in a few activites, like book clubs as I said earlier, so see you soon, and letās all keep enjoying learning Japanese!
I must say Iāve been thinking about it for a minute. That would be a nice challenge indeed. For the moment, iāll stick with English since I found very nice online resources, but then who knows?
