I decided to take on learning Japanese as a significant hobby starting in the late summer of 2024 due to having a fairly significant gap between jobs. I found myself with lot of free time that I wanted to fill with something that I felt was both meaningful and that I could use to set structure and goals with my time.
After using Duolingo to learn the kana over the course of a few days (and then hiding away the app), I researched a number of different online offerings for kanji and gave Wanikaniās trial levels a shot. I enjoyed the slick interface as well as the double-sided required correct input review process, which I think has instilled significantly deeper retention versus standard usage of Anki flashcards (I know that there is near-infinite customizability possible with Anki if you really get into it but I liked that WK just provided a nice pre-rolled product) or multiple choice apps. I went on a monthly subscription and promptly purchased the lifetime subscription when it went on sale at the end of 2024.
For the most part, my usage of WK has been fairly stock; the only custom third-party script I utilized was Jitai in order to get exposure to more esoteric or artistic fonts. Probably about half of my reviews were done on the Tsurukame iOS app, of which I didnāt utilize any of the custom features with one exception (which I will mention in the discussion of the fast levels later in this post). As a mobile interface for WK I found it really quite excellent (and free to use on top of your subscription) and helped me a lot with flexibly keeping up with reviews while not at home.
I found myself to be in quite a sweet spot for Wanikani; I had no previous kanji or Japanese knowledge so there was no wasted time in the beginning (as the SRS is strict and you cannot skip forward) and I also was willing to consistently put in 30-60 minutes daily on it, spread across a few different times over the course of the day. I can definitely see how it would be less efficient to start for someone who has already acquired some Japanese learning already.
After deciding to go through with the program, I set a goal to go as fast as I reasonably could and to see if I could stick with it. In the end I was able to achieve fairly close to that. I see that some people have achieved reaching lvl60 in as low as 350 days; it wound up being around 380 for me.
The late āfastā levels (43+) were tough as they effectively doubled the quantity of work; in order to keep leveling up as quickly as possible, this amounted to roughly 35 lessons a day to keep the work about uniform over time. The content in later levels is also more abstract and uncommon compared to earlier which compounds the mental work here; I would generally not recommend this speed of progression unless one had the same degree of free time and flexibility as I did.
Starting around the end of July this year, daily reviews (which I had estimated before, but the newly released heat map dashboard makes it easy to confirm) went from around 180 to 350 or so. I enabled the feature in the Tsurukame app to order reviews by ascending SRS stage in order to keep the speed at which I was progressing through new kanji as fast as possible, as I wouldnāt always have the time to zero out my reviews at the start of the day. I did set the goal of (and mostly achieved) going to bed each day with zero to-do reviews.
Looking back, I am extremely happy with what the app has done for me probably through the late-40 levels. After that I think the gains have been quite diminishing; most of the kanji and vocab in the later levels are much less common and there are a lot of names, very formal words, and medical vocab that I imagine are going be a lot less useful for me who is just targeting ability to speak and understand commonly used Japanese (although perhaps I will be proven wrong in the near future!). Regardless, I decided Iād push ahead even though it was probably no longer the most efficient usage of my time because I wanted to reach the milestone of completion, so this would up being probably about of month of time that, were I trying to be max efficient, I could have dedicated more to immersion listening and reading. As a personal aside, I did quite enjoy when Iād occasionally finally get a kanji writing for a common term that is usually written in kana (ćććć in level 60 is the most recent one in my memory).
Overall thoughts on Wanikani? My experiences were overall very positive for my usecase. As for criticisms however, like I mentioned earlier I can certainly see how the inflexibility of the SRS would make some of the process quite inefficient for someone with some prior knowledge. It wasnāt a huge deal for me but I know the lack of an undo ability is another common complaint; I tried to be quite careful when typing the readings but Iād typo every once and a while (more frequently on mobile) and this was a minor annoyance when it happened.
I did find a marked decrease in the usefulness (in my own opinion) of the later vocab and Iām probably going to wind up forgetting a solid chunk of the content after level 45 or consistently fail to burn it as I wonāt come to see it in my real-world exposure, but thatās ok with me as I am aiming to achieve conversational and literacy competence for common everyday usage, rather than specifically any kind of āwinningā WK. Though I do admit that I pushed through to the end in the last month for the feeling of accomplishment of seeing all the material.
Now that there is no additional content coming from new lessons, once my daily reviews begin to fall below 150 as most of my items move to the master level or higher I plan to reduce my WK cadence to once a day and shift much more time to reading (currently spending time in Satori Reader, NHK news, and dabbling in JP language wikipedia articles), grammar study (Iāve read through Tae Kim and Yokubi and am currently using Renshuu for grammar practice), and listening (I quite enjoy Japanese with Shun).
I donāt have any intention of taking a standardized exam like JLPT but for the sake of comparing against a common benchmark Iād esimate Iām probably a weak-N4 on listening and a mid-N4 on grammar at the moment. I find that the strength of kanji knowledge and vocabulary I now have from 60 levels of WK certainly makes studying those other facets much more enjoyable and fluid feeling than how things felt 6-9 months ago for me. Always happy to hear suggestions for more sources of content, and thank you for reading to the end of this post if youāre still with me.
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