It’s a pretty frequent topic of discussion. I personally don’t think you need a particular level in WaniKani, because whatever you read, you’ll encounter a lot of unfamiliar words and kanji at whatever level. There are 3 things you need to start reading manga, from my experience:
- Get really familiar with looking up unknown kanji and vocab on something like jisho.org. Even after reaching level 60 you’ll still encounter new kanji and unknown vocab that you need to look up, so you might as well get used to it sooner than later. At level 10 I think you have a good enough foundation to get started
- Learn grammar. Grammar will be your limiting factor as far as reading comprehension goes. It’s significantly easier to look up unknown words compared to unknown grammar. I’d say, if reading was your goal, try to put more focus on grammar studies than on kanji studies. I’d say, to read shounen manga confortably you need to be at least lower intermediate, and be familiar with slang and casual speech patterns. WaniKani doesn’t teach any grammar, so you’ll have to do this studying outside of it. If you search for “resources” on these forums, you’ll find a lot of useful info.
- You need patience, and this is probably the most important thing. It will be hard, you will feel extremely frustrated, you’ll want to just smash something because what the hell does 日本まで来んでも良かったんじゃないんか even mean for crying out loud. So arm yourself with patience, and if you can’t figure it out on your own, find someone to help. Ask on the forums here, or on reddit, or on something like lang-8. There will be days where you can’t progress as far as you’d like, and you need to persevere and push through, because it does get easier with time, even though it might not seem that way at first.
Sorry for the wall of text. TLDR; is “don’t worry about the WaniKani level, focus on grammar instead if you want to read. It’s much easier to look up unknown words (especially if the manga has furigana, which most shounen does), than it is to look up unknown grammar”.
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