WK is not a way to learn Japanese, only kanji. You need something else to help ou learn grammar, conveersations, etc. I’ve been with RocketLanguage.com. It has all those things, reinforcement activities, conversation practice, and more. It is a paid site, but they have huge sales around holidays. The 4th of July sale will happening soon. And you need to do more immersion, such as reading. Graded readers at 0 level will help.
I also started out in DL many years ago but I eventually decided that I wasn’t learning much from it. It sounds like, unlike me, you take the time study the kanji and its context and perhaps even reverse engineer the sentences to learn grammar from it as well. If so kudos to you!
All i was doing was trying to memorize sentences which is impossible without photographic memory. So I went to WK and later to Bunpro as well. Now that i have a better grasp of kanji and grammar, I still do my daily DL, but now I use it to try and apply what I learned from my other resources. In essence, DL has become my version of ‘reading’ Japanese in the ‘wild.’
The bottom line is if you want to be able to understand what you read/hear in Japanese, you have to know kanji, vocabulary and grammar. If my assumption of you is correct (what I stated above), then perhaps you can get away with just DL. But in my mind, I’m thinking it will be way harder and longer than using multiple resources to learn Japanese.
Given your limited time, ONLY you can determine the correct answer to your question. Good luck to you whatever you decide…just don’t give up on learning Japanese 
I think that WK teaches Kanji as a bottom-line. WK can help with listening, but you also have to read quite a bit alongside, and learn additional Kanji-bearing vocabularies from reading (and Kana-only words / unexpected loanwords also).
If you don’t have enough basic grammar for reading, or listening, down yet; you might as well be postponing WK. tbh, when time comes, you may even use something else for Kanji. – Or nothing for Kanji at all, if you don’t feel Kanji is a part of the bottleneck.
In a way, focusing on WK is like focusing on vocabularies first, not ordered by frequency or scenario, but it may be useful in the far end (if you survive and progress like in many months and years 
). Getting basics in, at all, doesn’t assume as much of survival and not burning out.
I don’t think WK is the best tool for vocab. Only that it could be the SRS tool that works for vocab, for some people, me included (so I modeled Anki settings from WK).
Nonetheless, this SRS is not using reading/listening context.
I agree with what most are saying about Duolingo. I also tried it for awhile several years ago and was disappointed.
Someone here said that they don’t know what your goals are for your studying. It would help us provide you with thoughts and ideas if you let us in on it.
When I started I didn’t have a firm idea of what I wanted. I fell in love with WK out of the joy of the whole site and wanting to be able to read Japanese. Over time, though, that love faded as I realized that in the shorter term I want to be able converse in Japanese, even far less than fluently, and WK wasn’t going to get me there.
Long story short I’m very happy with Pimsleur. It also takes diligence, like daily study, but that can be done on your drive to work. They say that you can do a new lesson/day or after learning 80% of it, but that’s silly. I have my own SRS for it that’s helping me a lot. Also, I’m writing short stories with what I am learning (in kana) to help reinforce.
All that said I intend to return to WK next year, either after I’ve finished Pims or near the end of it. I think WK will be a lot more fun for me then because I’ll be building on a more solid foundation of basic Japanese.
I havent used duolingo so can’t comment on it’s effectivness. however I can recommend bunpro which is another SRS system for learning grammar. Good thing is your WK account can be linked to bunpro, and bunpro pulls guru’d Kanji and vocab from WK and gives you useful sentences with those exact words to learn and practice. i would recommend starting with a Level 5 Bunpro deck to begin with.
Given you are at level 6 and like many here say, theres still a lot more levels(and kanji, and vocab) to go before you hit diminishing returns. I believe context testing is whats causing you frustration. If youre ready to give it another go i think you should give bunpro a go. they do offer a free trial period…
Hi! I also work a full-time job. Wanikani is primarily to learn kanji and vocabulary. I think it is a very good tool for that. But it is basically fancy flashcards. Vocabulary is really important for understanding a foreign language but like many people have commented, you also have to study grammar and build listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills.
As for Duolingo…if it is working for you that is great. My experience was that it was helpful to review things I had already learned, but it was difficult to learn new things. I wouldn’t use it as my main tool for learning Japanese, but if the choice is between 10 minutes of Duolingo or nothing then I think Duolingo is a better choice. If Wanikani isn’t working for you, then find a better tool for yourself. Many commenters have given great suggestions. Check those out and see what you like.
Now I am going to contradict myself a little. If Wanikani isn’t the right tool for you then don’t do it, BUT vocabulary is REALLY important for learning a foreign language. I dropped Duolingo and invested in Wanikani. My recommendation is that you stick with Wanikani and find something you like to do where you see kanji being used. Some people read manga, some people like readers, some people read news. There are a lot of options.
If I don’t have energy, I watch a Japanese tv show/movie and put Japanese subtitles on. I live and work in Japan so compared to my other skills my listening is high. Watching tv with the subtitles on is kind of like someone reading a picture book to you, lol. I often see Wanikani vocabulary when I do this. This is a passive way to study kanji readings and notice how vocabulary is used in context.
My advice is MaruMori
This is my first WK community reply, but I had to respond because I can identify with you.
My job involves reading Japanese rather than speaking it (I receive production files from Japanese clients secondhand, so I don’t really talk to them), so WK has been extremely helpful in that regard. If you don’t really need to read, it has limited usefulness.
My Duolingo streak is upwards of 2100 days. DL definitely has a plateau in the quality of its instruction, as it seems to prioritize vocabulary over grammar. These days I’ve stopped doing the lessons and only have worked on kanji study in the app, and even now it’s only because of the habit for keeping the streak going.
With that said, both programs are supplemental rather than a premier course of language instruction. After years of Duolingo I bit the bullet and bought an actual Japanese textbook to learn the language. There was a wonderful week where I studied an hour every day from the book, and learned more grammar than in 6 years of the Duolingo app.
Ultimately, your needs are going to dictate what tools you use. If you want to learn the language, I’d say dedicated courses and/or textbooks are best for actually learning the language, with Wanikani and Duolingo being good supplementary programs. Between Wanikani and Duolingo, I’d say that WK is better at what it’s meant to do. If you don’t have a lot of time, Duolingo is going to be the best option because at least you’re going to able to learn something.
I think the problem that OP has is using WaniKani to learn everything about Japanese.
Instead it is just one tool to build your proficiency in the language. For example, the following apps/websites/methods all build different aspects of Japanese
WaniKani: kanji and a decent vocab base
BunPro: Grammar SRS
Pimsleur: Listening and Speaking
Satori Reader: Reading
Genki: traditional textbook style learning- a good bridge for all the other methods.
Watching anime, reading manga, listening to podcasts: real life immersion.
You don’t need to use all of these methods to learn Japanese, but using a combination of them will certainly help far more than using just any one in isolation.
Duolingo in my humble opinion, tries to combine everything, and does a pretty bad job at it. It is decent for European languages, but very underwhelming for languages like Chinese and Japanese.
Would you recommend it over Bunpro? I was planning on getting Bunpro soon. What are the pros and cons?
Get Bunpro ! It really helps with the context understanding of grammar points
Marumori is all in one. But wk + bunpro is fine, also wk + tae kim is fine. wk alone not enough. I recommend marumori partly out of spite. There were disagreements between me and wk staff in the past
Set them on Fire, uhh…wait, don’t actually 
wait atleast till i am lvl 60
So I’ve tried both, and I chose MaruMori. I can tell you a bit about the differences and also my opinion.
MaruMori is a gamified all-in-one stop-shop. Which is what I loved about it, to be honest. It has bite-sized “tiles”/readings on grammar in their Adventure mode, which when you finish one, gets converted into a lesson which then goes into your SRS pile, and then you do grammar SRS similarly to SRS you do for vocab. As you progress through Adventure mode, you unlock kanji and vocab words, which then turn into lessons that go into your SRS pile. The SRS in MaruMori is incredibly similar to what WaniKani does, which is also what appealed to me. You could learn Japanese in one website/with one resource only, which is MaruMori, as opposed to having several resources for different things (like WK for kanji, Bunpro for grammar, Anki for vocab, etc). They have extra content on top of the tiles and SRS, things such as minigames and conjugation drills, which I find super helpful. They also have mock JLPT exams.
Bunpro on the other hand is a more specialized resource. Bunpro does SRS for grammar only, and the SRS system is also similar to what MaruMori does. But it’s a lot more textbook-like, it’s not gamified, and relies on external references a lot to explain grammar points to you - meaning you find yourself clicking third-party links a lot to read about whichever grammar point you’re currently learning. The pro about it (that I’ve heard anyway, as I never got there), is that it’s got an extensive grammar database, covering content all the way up to N1. MaruMori also does that, however, and they’re constantly updating the website with more content.
I also heard that Bunpro has a good community, with forums similar to WK. MaruMori has an active discord server where you can chat directly with the team that made the website.
All in all, I personally preferred MaruMori, both for the all-in-one aspect of it and for the gamification, which I feel I need in order to learn Japanese. But Bunpro can 100% be a valid choice for someone who feels they want to stick with WK and separate resources for separate things.
FYI, Bunpro’s SRS includes vocabulary as well.
MaruMori does not cover N1 content yet
You should just read stuff to get that Wanikani knowledge into practice. There are a lot of resources out there, but I have used Satori Reader in the past and I recommend it. It’s an application that offers stories in Japanese for different levels, and you can hook it up with Wanikani, so it will automatically hide the furigana for those kanji you already mastered in WK. It also explains the different grammar points for each story and level.
Another thing I always recommend… Try to do stuff that you enjoy in Japanese. There must be a reason why you started learning, maybe manga, anime or videogames? Just do those, but in Japanese.
WK can be a big time sink, so I definitely get it. I went through the Genki textbooks first, then started listening to Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners podcast every day, and also WK - if I had to kick one to the curb due to time constraints, it would be WK, as I feel listening to the podcast is much better for learning vocabulary and speaking patterns.
I also do Duolingo, but only one lesson a day to keep my streak alive, and I should probably quit.
I used both duolingo and wanikani for 30 minutes everyday.
I recently completed duolingo and posted my review here Completed Duolingo
- Duolingo takes too much time, imo. It can be good, but I haven’t found it efficient in the past, either as a test of my skills or as a way to progress and build your language skills beyond the “Tomoko-san’s dog ate a big tomato” type of weirdness. I left Duo for a while after learning hiragana there and when I came back it was a frustrating experience trying to get it to assess my actual level accurately. Too much jumping through hoops and graphics and ping-ping noises and ads.
- WaniKani could be done at a faster pace, imo.
- WaniKani is best when used as a tool so kanji isn’t a barrier for other texts (textbooks, books, articles, etc.)
- Both use game-ification
It’s fine to stop WK if you’re not motivated by it. Try Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji, or Kanji in Context, or a vocabulary book, if you’d prefer. Or try Tobira, Genki, or Minna no Nihongo.