This isn’t a real support group, I just want to complain about the ridiculous difficulty spike after level 50 again. At first I thought it was just the new kanji that were more random and obscure than before, like HOLLYHOCK. I had to look up what the hell that was. But now there’s also more random and nonsensical vocab than ever before.
I was looking forward to these late levels since they have less vocab per level, but now it’s turned into a real drag. SIGHHHH. Time to power through it. I started in June 2017, and I’ve always been on schedule to reach leve 60 by June 2019, and I’m gonna stick to it.
I totally know what you mean At first I was excited because I thought “shorter levels! Now I can reach the end in half the time!”.
I think my strategy will be even if I can level up every 4 days, to spend another 4 days just doing the vocab after the kanji.
Also yeah, almost all the helpful patterns and such seem to completely fall apart in these last levels >_< It feels like the way of reading everything just got super arbitrary for a lot of kanji
I was on track to finishing around the beginning of 2019, but in preparation for the crazy winter holidays, I put WK on vacation mode, and then had a slow start to the year. I restarted WK mid-January right before a huge conference and then getting the flu, but I slowly whittled down my reviews and lessons, finally getting to 0 lessons last week (??). However, since I Guru’d most of the kanji for this level, I now have more lessons…
But overall, I’m glad that I decided to take it slow. Knowing I passed N2 last December helps, and it’s been nice to take the kanji at a slower pace to match the pace of my life right now. Hopefully I’ll be able to remember the kanji better this way, and I can start KaniWani or Bunpro after this. We’ll see though, I’m looking at some huge life changes in the next… several months and I wanted to start learning Cantonese this year so… We’ll see. One of my goals for this year was to reach Level 60, and I will definitely keep going to the end, just not at max speed. xP
(Although hypothetically, I realize I could unlock a ton of vocabulary and just make it to 60, and then do the vocab later… But my reorder script isn’t working, and where’s the fun in that?)
I’d much rather they’d spaced out the radicals somehow so that we’d still have to unlock kanji to finish the levels. I go at Wanikani with an all or nothing attitude but the having radicals really helped me pace out my levels.
Horse Chestnut… I mean… now I’m learning botanics in my L1 to figure out a word in english to get the meaning of a new Kanji… sweet
Well, tbh, there’s lot’s of Kanji I’ve bumped into quite often while reading and I’ve seen in level 50 and above wondering if I truly haven’t reviewed that before… So far it’s been a mix, super easy levels where I’ve words already and are sticking really well… and those hollyhocks, horse chestnuts and whatever might still come this last week.
In my experience, if the meaning of a kanji feel truly outrageous, it’s because they need it to teach a common vocab. Like I feel horse chestnut 栃 is probably taught almost entirely for 栃木県 (the prefecture), and hollyhock 葵 probably almost only just to teach 山葵 (wasabi)
In the same level there is also 鎌 sickle, and I remember thinking why the hell is wanikani teaching such rare word… only to realize in the vocab section that the true purpose was to teach kamakura 鎌倉
Yep, 50+ tis the time where you run out of vocab to make any reasonable sense of the kanji. You also might as well start searching in the Chinese dictionary too if it makes any more/less sense.
WKStats says I spent 29 days 9 hours on level 51. When I finally got to level 52, I got the automated email from Koichi that started like this:
Hi MosbyNeko,
You’re Level 52! These last ten levels go fast, don’t they?
Are you mocking me, WaniKani?
It’s tempting to just go all in and try and sprint to the finish from here, but I’m going to stick with being slow and (somewhat) steady. I rarely do more than 9 new lessons in a day, but there are some days that things are so busy that I just don’t get around to taking on any new lessons at all. (I always do all my reviews, though.)
Honestly, at this point my kanji level is so far ahead of my other Japanese skills that I’m getting way more benefit out of time spent studying grammar or practicing listening. It’ll probably take me most of the rest of this year to get to level 60, but that seems like a fair tradeoff for keeping myself sane.
That’s a fair thought. You do learn all the kanji needed to write every prefecture’s name in Japanese (and, aside from 近畿地方, all of the regions too), though only three of them have their final kanji taught in the fifties. Another five are taught in the forties.
I confess to a little bit of curiosity as to why they teach 桑 - how many of us are the expecting will become silkworm farmers? 桑原 is the 209th-most common Japanese surname, and there’s a bunch of other surnames further down the list which also use the kanji, but only a few fairly minor place names.
Sorry I don’t get it, wanikani define 桑 as mulberry ? It doesn’t seems that bad to learn the kanji of a few common fruit like 桃、梅、梨、杏… (My theory is wk want us to be able to read all the 〇酒 at the local bar )
At first I was excited because I thought “shorter levels! Now I can reach the end in half the time!”.
