Hi there, as many of you probably know already I reached level 60 yesterday. It has been a long and exhausting journey but so very worth it. I’ve spent so long at WaniKani it feels almost unreal that I’m actually at the end. Here is my level up timetable
This seems super impressive, until you look at the fact I wasted nearly a year on WaniKani and had to reset to level 1 a while back. I was discouraged, demotivated at the time, but what brought me back was pure determination. I said to myself, “I started this, I’m no quitter, and I will see this to the end, no matter what” and so I began the climb back up and here I am now. With that out of the way here’s the good stuff:
The beginning
It’s funny, the thing that originally got me started had nothing to do with Japanese or Japan in the slightest. I was in a Discord server for Red vs Blue (an animated web series) and I guess the owner was a friend of the owner of another Discord server and made an announcement for others to join. This was a Japanese learning server, and that’s how it all began. I was a little curious since I consumed a lot of Japanese media at the time, though nowhere close to how much I do now. So I figured I’d join and give it a shot, and it all spiraled from there. When I joined one of the first things I got introduced to was Tofugu’s hiragana and katakana guides, and from there WaniKani.
Getting to 60
In order to not fall in the hole that I did before I made a promise to myself, always do WaniKani at least once a day, even if it’s just a few reviews. That was to make sure that I never fall behind again, and I did so much more. Eventually, I think maybe around level 15 or so I began to get into a bit of a schedule and really figured out the SRS system and how best to utilize it for me. I decided to start doing 20 lessons a day, every day and never go to bed with reviews not done. It worked amazing for me until around lvl 50 which I’ll get into soon. What’s important is maintaining a consistent schedule that you can stick to every day except for extreme cases.
Now starting from lvl 49 it’s nothing but fast levels, this is why it’s so difficult. If you attempt to go for less than 4 day levels all the way through it’s really going to be hell. In order to keep up and not have lessons remaining on level up I had to do 40 lessons a day nearly ever day for well over a month. Due to the nature in that the reviews piled up as well, I had 300-400 reviews a day almost every day during this time. Unless you have an absurd amount of free time, I wouldn’t recommend it, I even started regretting it myself about halfway through. I’m someone driven by determination though so I wasn’t going to stop so soon and drove myself forward as painful as it was.
Special note here: if you want to get to lvl 60 as fast as you can, check out this wonderful guide by our very own @jprspereira
My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 ) - #2 by jprspereira
The entire thing’s great but I think in particular sections 4-7 are most relevant for this topic.
What now?
Now that I’m level 60 I do plan on continuing WaniKani, but only until my subscription runs out which is on December 30. I personally believe that with my current financial situation WaniKani has provided more than enough use and at that point I can start investing my time/money in other resources for improvement. I will still be here in the forums to chat and whatever. I’m planning on investing a lot of my time into reading going forward.
My plan as of now is that I’m going to read all the books I currently have with floflo to help me get started with reading and really build up my vocabulary. After that I plan to use Kitsun for future material for all the new words I find that I believe are noteworthy. There are 6 books I have which are in floflo so I’m hoping to increase my vocabulary by a lot before I’ll have to start making decks on Kitsun myself for the other books. That way, at least I’m hoping, I won’t have to add like 10 words per page. I’m going to be participating in the 時をかける少女 book club so that will certainly help a lot for reading my first novel start to end. After I feel like my reading level is at a comfortable level I may try to work on listening/speaking since I’m particularly terrible at both. My primary goal is reading so it doesn’t bother me that much but still I think I should improve on them sometime.
If there’s anything I missed or you want to know something I haven’t included feel free to ask and I’ll answer as best as I can.