Well, a few days ago, after a crazy grind and on the verge of burning out 
, I hit level 60 
. Having Guru’d the final set of kanji today, I thought about perhaps sharing my experience, as seems to somewhat be the tradition 
. When I first began WaniKani, lvl60 posts helped motivate me and helped me set my own goals, so if anything I have to say can motivate or help someone else, I’ll call that a win 
. So I’ll just go ahead and write about stuff like why Japanese, why Wanikani, why do it the way I did, how did I do it, did it work, what’s next, etc.
(I guess this is where I just show the stats and the graph… maybe… )
Ok, now that that’s out of the way, I’ll try to organize my thoughts the best I can 
Background and why Japanese
I’m currently 34 years old, having graduated with Bachelors in Physics and Mathematics, as well as a Masters in Medical Physics. Unfortunately, due to covid back in the day, my life and plans were thrown for a loop and I find myself just going with the flow since then. Somewhere along the way I met someone very special to me who just so happens to be Japanese, born and raised in Tokyo for all her life and the same age as me. We really want to start a future and family together but I’m a Canadian citizen and she is Japanese. So, someone needs to bite the bullet and move… well, that would be me 
.
As far as Japanese is concerned, I never imagined having to use the language. I never had any goals of going to Japan or reading manga or watching anime. I am a huge fan of video games though and I do love jrpgs. So, my only real “exposure” to anything Japanese would be from my favorite video games and food.
But now I find myself thrown into a completely new environment with a language that I don’t completely know, with traditions, rules, and customs that I need to learn, and I need to find a place for myself here so that I can create the future that my partner and I want to share.
However, I’m not completely out of my element here because I have done this all throughout my life. I was born in Ukraine and have lived in several countries like the US, Switzerland, Germany, and Canada, as well as travelled a lot. I’m used to arriving in a new place, learning the language, and getting settled into a new life. I’m currently only a Canadian citizen, having lived the second half of my life there after all the travelling, and I have only kept my fluency in English and Russian. Although, I was completely fluent in Italian and German, and I was decent with Spanish and learning Mandarin. But unfortunately, even languages and fluency can be lost and forgotten. However, I have a lot of experience with various languages and I know what I personally need to do to learn and use them and what works for me.
So, here I a currently am in Tokyo, on a visa that only allows me to work part time for now, trying to learn the language as quickly as possible so that I can get a stable job leading to full time employment and a place for me in this country. I arrived in the country in July 2024 with zero knowledge of Japanese, and thus began my adventure .
Learning a language and why WaniKani
From my past experiences and successes with other languages, I have my own “philosophy” I guess as to what I personally need to do and what works for me. This is something that’s tailored to fit me, so it is absolutely not my intention to tell others to do this or think this way. For those who are curious about it, I’ll let you freely judge it and form your own opinions and methods from it if you’d like .
For me, the absolute best way to strongly and confidently learn a language is through immersion. Everything from vocabulary to grammar, pitch/tone to accent, fluency to naturalness, etc., can and will be sorted out and learned from immersion. I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that, but the way that some people describe immersion can sometimes be pretty misleading. I’m not talking about “just talk to people”, “just go live in the country for a year”, “listen to podcasts while you drive to work or sleep”, etc. . My view on immersion is actively consuming native material as well as producing your own material. So obvious things like reading while translating, listening while comprehending, writing and speaking, etc. But the biggest challenge is how do you even begin to do these things if you simply don’t know the language. You could spend 2 hours translating and learning one page of manga, but that’s not exactly efficient or productive sometimes, and can be exhausting. Well that’s where a tool like Wanikani comes into play .
An SRS program like Wanikani can pour hundreds and thousands of items into your brain’s circulation, which can drastically increase and improve the quality of your immersion. This can significantly improve your efficiency with native material and allow you to get more out of it and get through more of it.
However, this is where my views on Wanikani get a little… weird or odd… I guess . You see, I don’t believe in its promise. I don’t believe in “burning” an item. I disagree that through SRS you can know a word so well that you will never forget it. For me personally, the fact that I was speaking fluent German for 3 years and now I know nothing about the language anymore because I haven’t heard or spoken a sentence of it in 20 years, reinforces this belief. So, since I don’t completely believe in Wanikani’s promise or method, I don’t want to play by its rules .
This is where I diverge into the “do it in 1 year” group. I don’t believe that taking my time or playing by Wanikani’s rigid rules and levels will lead to “burning”, so my intention is to get everything into circulation to increase my efficiency of immersion. In other words, I’m not looking to become a kanji scholar, I’m looking to have seen and reviewed as much as possible so that I can work through and sort everything out better through immersion. If I can already understand 70% of a sentence after Wanikani, I’m not worried about the 30% I didn’t understand because I can quickly and immediately review it when it comes up, and chances are I have seen that 30% before in Wanikani so my reaction upon looking it up would be “oh that’s right I remember” or “I’ve seen this before” rather than “what the hell is that” .
So then why exactly do WaniKani? Well, because I actually really like its organization and how it introduces Kanji and Vocabulary . I also do like the spaced repetition, even though I didn’t use it 100% as they intended. And 2000+ Kanji and 6000+ word review in 1 year is something that is still useful to me, even the way I did it. I also loved the accountability that Wanikani provided. The routine of doing my reviews and constantly making progress kept me on track and drastically improved all the other things I did.
How did I do it (Wanikani)
I began Wanikani last year at the end of July. I actually ended up not using any userscripts and stuck to the default Wanikani experience . Keeping in mind that I was solely interested in constantly making progress through the levels and adding more and more reviews into circulation, this basically meant not making “mistakes”. Since every item that I might not remember or get wrong would lock me out of progress until several days would go by for me to try again, I would just need a system to “try again” without marking things as wrong.
The method I chose was just refreshing the browser . In other words, if I came across an item that I couldn’t remember, I would enter the wrong answer, check/remind/correct myself of what the right answer was, and then refresh the browser to “undo” some of my reviews and keep going again. So, I wouldn’t just mark it as right and continue, I would just toss it back into the review pile like you would with flashcards . I would then be reviewing other items and the one I got wrong a moment ago would pop up again and I would have another shot at trying it again. And so, I would do this until all reviews were finished.
So the routine became something like this:
- Unlock new level
- Choose the advanced lessons and select all to give myself every available lesson
- Spend about an hour doing every possible lesson available
- Set my alarm for when reviews would come up and do them when I could
- Once things were Guru’d, either the next batch of lessons or next level would come up
- Do all lessons at once
- Continue to do reviews until more new lessons
- Rinse and repeat
Now I know this is crazy, and it’s a huge workload, and I’m reviewing with an undo button that throws reviews back into the pile allowing me to try again several minutes later… but it is what it is . That’s the method I tried to follow for a year and I have no regrets .
Also, as a side note, as long as I stayed consistent with promptly doing reviews, it would never get too out of hand. I think the most reviews I might see in one rare day would be between 200 and 300 and it would take me roughly an hour to get through 150ish reviews. I would also have days with 0 reviews so I was able to take some breaks too. It wasn’t just only Wanikani 24 hours a day .
Although, I will say the last like 10 levels were brutal because there are basically no radicals, so I was unlocking levels in like 3-4 days which did have a bit of a cascade on the amount of reviews to do for a few weeks .
And lastly, I think I need to mention that my memory is pretty strong. I have somewhat of a photographic memory so it’s usually easier for me to memorize things quickly and for long periods of time. Because of this, I actually didn’t use Wanikani for any of its mnemonics. I simply relied on my rote memorization skills to go through Wanikani’s lessons and reviews as just flashcards. I know that not everyone can rely on an ability like this, so please find and use what works best for you. It’s not my intention to advocate doing things like I did .
What else did I do
So Wanikani wasn’t the only thing I did, believe it or not . After moving to Tokyo in July last year, during the first few months I worked through Genki 1 and 2, which I highly recommend as a great foundation for Japanese. I dabbled with Quartet 1 and 2, but honestly didn’t feel like finishing it. I was doing other JLPT specific flashcard decks on Anki and I was trying to read manga and watch various tv programs like the news and stuff on TV.
This culminated in me taking the JLPT N2 in December which was quite the challenge because although at that point I could reasonably read and comprehend spoken Japanese, I couldn’t do it fast enough at a rate that would have me complete the test within the given time limit. So I was simply too slow. I got a score of somewhere around 40-50% , but hey, from no Japanese to that score on the JLPT N2 in like 4ish months, I’ll take it 
.
Then, since the new year, besides sticking to my Wanikani routine, I’ve been doing lots of reading, listening, and speaking with whomever I have a chance to practice with. I am particularly enjoying playing through Person 5 Royal at the moment completely in Japanese, and I highly recommend it! The way the game logs most of the dialogue allows you to select various lines of spoken Japanese to repeat over and over with a click of a button. It’s perfect to not only read the subtitles, but to close your eyes and just listen to sentences over and over again to work on your comprehension and listening speed. You can also shadow the dialogue by trying to say it yourself along with the recording, which is great practice for speaking.
I also highly recommend ChatGPT . I know some people might roll their eyes on this, but it has been instrumental for me. As long as you know how to use it and what kind of questions to ask it and what kind of responses to be a bit skeptical about, it can function as a free personal tutor. Just asking it to translate and break down sentences that you feed it from manga, video games, etc. can give you so much insight into the language. You can also discuss and probe it with all of your questions on grammar, and you can even roleplay full conversations with it. I think it’s worth at least trying it once to see if it can help you.
Other than that, I also did more “real life” stuff. I’ve been on the job hunt here in Tokyo, interviewing with several companies in Japanese, filling loads of applications in Japanese, emailing in Japanese with various companies and recruiters, and even doing some aptitude tests in Japanese. It has honestly been quite stressful and quite the ride .
Did Wanikani work and what can I do
Keeping in mind that Wanikani is not all I did and I have had the opportunity and time to do all kinds of immersive activities that I mentioned in the previous section, I believe Wanikani was incredibly useful and I’m very grateful for its help.
My method of doing Wanikani kept hundreds and thousands of kanji and vocabulary floating in my head that I was routinely recognizing and practicing daily. It drastically improved my efficiency and capability of immersing myself into what was around me and it opened up a lot of opportunities for me as my confidence increased.
So for me personally, even though my approach was unorthodox, Wanikani absolutely worked .
As for what I can do now, I’m reading things around me, I’m picking up on what people are saying, I’m remembering and pulling words out from the Wanikani bank when I’m trying to speak. To be clear, I’m not 100% fluent and a natural speaker of the language yet. And I’m not able to 100% read absolutely everything I encounter or understand what I hear. But, if I were to give it a number, I’d say I’m around 70% fluent. In other words, from everything I see and read, hear and listen to, or try to say myself, 70% of it I understand and can use. The other 30% of it is usually not even necessary for me to at least understand the “gist” of things and I can very quickly look up that 30% on the spot and learn/review it for the future.
I’m basically in a position now where after a year on Wanikani, as well as other things, I can almost entirely rely on immersion to push me the rest of the way to fluency.
What's next
Well, being a completionist, I will continue what I have been doing to just “burn” the rest of the items. The extra review won’t hurt and I like to see things through to the end . I think by the end of the year everything should be burnt and I can move on.
I might put all of the Wanikani vocabulary into an Anki deck and just keep up with that on the side as a means to maintain some SRS, but I’m still undecided if that is necessary.
I still have a variety of things I can do here in Tokyo to keep up with immersion, and if I’m able to settle into a company, I will have more opportunity to work with the language.
I will be trying to get my redemption on the JLPT N2 this December and I’m feeling pretty confident about it. I’ve tried some practice tests both reading and listening and I’m keeping up pretty well. So hopefully the test goes well and I can add it to my resume if I’m still hunting for jobs here in Tokyo .
All in all, what’s next is just using the language and letting immersion sort out the rest .
Alright, I hope that I didn’t ramble too much or say anything too dumb . For anyone that took the time to read some of the things I wrote, thank you for listening to my story/experience. I’m sure that some of the things I wrote not everyone will agree with, but that’s ok. I think that at the end of the day what’s important is that each individual discovers what works best for them and comes up with their own goals and strategies . Please do what is best and feels right for you! 
I would also like to conclude with a sincere thank you to Wanikani and its team. I truly appreciate this service that you have all provided and it has been an instrumental part of my Japanese learning journey. I also really appreciated the lvl60 discount on the lifetime sub .
Good luck everyone on your journeys! I’m proud of everyone’s progress and hard work, no matter what speed or method you choose! I hope we can all reach our goals together!
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