Thank you, to everyone reading this.
It’s going to sound cliched, but I do want to thank this community. This forum. People reading and lurking (or liking posts). People who ask grammar questions, people who answer them. All the script writers. The Wanikani team. People who have popped in my study log to say hi. People who keep their own study logs, so I can learn from them. The people who keep book clubs (and non-book clubs) alive on the forums. The POLL thread. I learned countless things by reading people’s study logs, or seeing advice given to others on simple questions. The Accountability thread. This forum space helps me be more productive and keeps me going. 
An extra special thanks to my husband, for inspiring me to learn Japanese in the first place since I was too scared to try it alone, and for keeping me sane long enough to reach level 60.
- CPTSD is a disorder from repeated trauma events over an extended period of time. Basically my parents never cared about me, they only cared about the idea of having a successful child to complete their checklist. I get flashbacks back to horrific things my parents said over the tiniest things. It means that I’m terrified of the randomest things - phone calls, asking adults for help, needing to ask a teacher for help with a topic I didn’t understand in class, being spoken to by strangers when I’m trying to walk outside, being asked to make a decision and then making the wrong decision and being berated for it, going to a social event and trying to make small talk that somehow isn’t CPTSD related, accidentally oversharing and alienating people…etc etc. I can make a decent case that from my earliest memories when I was ~3 that I was already traumatized.
- So what does this mean for Japanese? It means I’m terrified of classroom settings. My husband said “let’s learn Japanese together” in 2019, and my therapist wanted to push me to stop being afraid of learning, so I found Tofugu’s guide to learning Japanese. I have a friend who tried moving to Japan for a while, and he also recommended Wanikani. It means there are some days where I struggle to get out of bed.
Why Japanese?
- I listen to 99% Vocaloid music and anime soundtracks. My parents banned sad music when I was 12 because they thought it would cure my depression, and I realized they didn’t look up the lyrics to any Japanese songs if I just lied about their plot. Vocaloid songs have many upbeat, fast paced songs that sound happy but the lyrics are negative. しねばいいのに is one of my favorite examples of that. If I can memorize hundreds of songs and sing them, surely I can also memorize how to translate the lyrics on the fly instead of just remembering a summary of the lyrics?
- I like anime and manga. My husband and I watch lots of anime together. I read a lot of illegally upload/fan translated manga as a teen. I thought it would be nice to legally obtain them in Japanese and read them. Fan translators always sounded desperate for help, so I assumed there were tons of manga not translated.
- I like video games. I know some of the games I really like are translated into Japanese, but there’s probably also games in Japanese that I would enjoy that aren’t necessarily translated into English. I know there’s thousands of games out there and I don’t need to be expanding my market…but playing a game in Japanese is still practicing Japanese.
- I talk about this later, but I used to be a math person and now math gives me a trauma response. This is a way to ease myself back into not giving learning a trauma response, while still going baby steps.
The WaniKani Journey
- I used Duolingo for hiragana and katakana. Simple gamification and easy to repeat. I was discouraged away from using Duolingo almost immediately by said Japanese friend, but I was also realizing myself that it wasn’t as efficient as an SRS like Wanikani.
- I got the lifetime deal sometime in the December 2019 sale. My husband was swearing that he wanted to start properly in January as a New Years Resolution. My therapist also wanted me to do some semi-structured learning in the new year.
- I read through the Genki I and II textbooks. My friend offered to do some basic conversation practice with me, and sometimes it would take me 4 hours to make a single sentence reply, and it’s not the same as doing serious homework practice, but I learned a lot. My friend mentioned I was better at kanji than him because I would go to Jisho and look up the nouns that I was looking for.
- I decided to start reading something around level 10-15. I was ambitious and didn’t want to read an “easy” book. I wanted to read a book I was super interested in. I’m a huge Vocaloid fan, and one of my favorite producers had released a new book in December 2019…so I bought it off some site that I can’t remember now. They gave me a pdf. I spent some time trying to figure out if I could highlight characters, dump them in Deepl, anything. All I could think of was to search kanji by radical. I sent a page to my friend as an estimate of “do you think I’m good enough to read this?” and he said "no absolutely not I don’t know half the words on this page. I was stubborn anyway and was fine with spending 2 hours per page. I didn’t study handwriting, but I figured out the basics of “how many strokes are there” and used Jisho to find them. I was excited any time the vocab had an associated Wanikani level. I was also excited for words like 文明 because I still had to look them up, but I knew the kanji so it was so fast.
I got stuck on 林檎. I’m not sure what I did exactly, but I have a hunch that I picked 忄 and 𠆢 on jisho instead of 木 and 𠆢 because they’re right above each other in the radical search.
- Covid hit. My husband wasn’t allowed to visit me because we weren’t married yet and living in separate countries. I remember complaining to my therapist that I went to the store to buy spaghetti, tomato sauce, and toilet paper, and came home with nothing and had to order food. My therapist kept telling me that I was technically allowed to go outside and that I should still work on walking every day, but I was very torn on this wording of “if possible, avoid going outdoors.” It was technically possible for me to order groceries, or takeout, etc. My mental health dived off a cliff because I was trying to hold on until the next time I saw my husband again, and instead of having a concrete date it was “when the border opens.”
- I got sick with something in July 2020, and I didn’t see an in person doctor to test if it was Covid because the online doctor said that it probably was just a cold or virus. I lost the energy to do my reviews. My routine of “do reviews every hour that I can” was broken.
- In December 2020, my husband was finally allowed to visit, and I realized how much I was going insane alone and I ended up flying back to the US with him and using this as an excuse to cut off contact with my parents.
- Several mental health progress steps later, in late 2023 my husband says “Okay I think I’m ready, can we try learning Japanese together this New Years?” I get him to sign up for Wanikani. He’s level 9 now.
How much studying did you actually do from July 2020 to January 2024?
disclaimer: sometimes I did lessons in 2024 on my phone. I don’t think heatmap tracks that.
I listen to basically 99% Vocaloid music. Lots of videos have kanji. Watching them (and singing along) preserved my hiragana knowledge, and some kanji. I didn’t learn new words though (because I didn’t bother looking up anything I didn’t understand). Also unfortunately a lot of the old videos are from 144p/360p days, and their kanji quality is difficult.
It’s hard to explain how bad isolation is for people. I had my laptop and was in a Discord call with my boyfriend nearly 24/7 (we even slept with the call open). But my Internet went out for ~3 days once, and I ended up getting so scared that I went outside to connect to public wifi to open Discord and frantically send a message to anyone awake that I was emotionally a wreck. My therapist increased her rates from $100 a session to $125 a session and also started saying some mean things to me, so I cancelled sessions. I talked to my parents once a month to hear about how I’m a failure for having a resume gap and that I’d surely never get a job and that if I don’t get back to school quickly then I’ll always be a failure because otherwise my parents wouldn’t give me rent/food money.
- I came back to 1000 reviews and ~350 lessons. There’s several threads about taking down review piles, but the tl;dr version is: try to build a habit of doing reviews every day, and try to do small amounts at once.
- After I started getting my reviews down to 0, I started doing lessons again. And then I started realizing that my memory really was good enough to do fast levels. I also realized that the forums here are a huge help - people ask questions and get helpful answers and I learned a bunch of things I didn’t think to ask (or was too afraid to ask myself).
- @NeoArcturus’s study log was aspirational to me. Seeing someone so motivated and excited to learn was great. I liked seeing how he was trying to work on Wanikani, iKnow, handwriting, shadowing sentences on iKnow for speaking practice, translating NHK Easy news, and his journey translating Markus’ Ascent. It inspired me to take up enough space on the forums to make my own study log.
- So I finally got into a habit of making a list of all the things I wanted to do, and checking boxes off. Next step is - using the language. I joined the Read Every Day Spring 2024 Challenge, and I did not read every day. But I started reading. I learned how to use tools like YomiNinja to grab text so I could look it up faster than searching by radical. I made notes of what kanji I looked up, and what wanikani levels they were attached to. And I avoided feeling guilty for being level 25 and looking up words I should’ve known from level 12 that I had forgotten. In the beginning it was really painful. In Elementary school learning to read in English my teacher had a rule that if you needed to look up more than 5 words per page then the book was too hard. Some of these sentences I was looking up 8 words per sentence.
- But I didn’t give up. I kept reading. I played Little Witch in the Woods (a Steam game) because I had played it through in English and time pauses for every text bubble. The intro is super long before you get to the first save point, and it took me a couple hours to get there, but I felt like I was learning a lot, and I was finding more and more words that were just a few levels ahead. This made leveling up on Wanikani easier, because I wouldn’t be learning 30 totally new kanji, I’d be learning 10 kanji I was desperate to learn and 20 totally new kanji.
- And luckily, when you play the same game for enough hours, you start seeing patterns in how many words it uses. The candies you sell have the same names each week. Since it’s a game about Witches, 魔法 and 魔女 are super common (and made level 46 really exciting!). There’s a lot of katakana words too, because they’re using fictional characters for ingredients, so I ended up relearning katakana (using iKnow, just because I had picked up the free trial that NeoArcturus helpfully mentioned on the forums once). I haven’t finished it technically, but I’m very close to the end of existing content (there’s a third expansion/area coming before the game releases for real).
- My keyboard died in early June during the Steam Summer Sale, and I ended up picking up Potion Craft because it could be played with just a mouse and it’s also in the Witchy/brewing vibe. It’s also useful because it’s essentially “here’s the story of why I have a problem. Please give me a potion to fix it” and I have to read their stories and figure out what they’re saying to figure out what potion helps. Things like “I got in a fight with a thief, and I beat him up, but then I tripped and broke my ankle and it hurts” or “I lost the key to my house. How do I get in now?” It’s been very fun, and it’s been so useful to see kanji I’m learning in the wild.
- I also joined the Beginner Anime Club, because my husband and I watch a lot of anime together, and it would be nice to slowly transition over to JP subs. He’s not ready yet, but it’s been a nice excuse for me to try watching on my own with JP subs and then again with him later with English subs to double check my understanding.
- On the morning of August 15 I read my second book. カゲロウデイズ 1 | L24 It took me 3 hours to read 167 pages. Crazy. I own the next 12 volumes in the series, and I do want to read them soon, but the heat has really been killing my ability to focus (and talk about things that aren’t the oppressive heat).
What did you learn from Wanikani?
- I learned some new English words, like yurt and morass and suspension of indictment and comminuted fracture.
- As a child (up until I turned 16), I was a model student. I had good grades, I worked hard to be an overachiever. I skipped 8th grade and started high school at 13 and ran out of math classes at 14…so I went to a boarding school so I could start multivariable calculus at 15. Unfortunately I have CPTSD, and my grandmother died a couple weeks into starting multi, and other trauma that is inappropriate to mention happened at the same time. The fallout was that my counselor was the only person on my side, and my multi teacher shamed me to my face that I was an idiot, and he told my academic advisor to never let me take a difficult math class again, and I had to have a meeting with the principal to explain that I was emotionally a wreck. I was a robot until I graduated, and then I chose a college a thousand miles away from home to escape. I’ve spent years working on the trauma aspect, learning what CPTSD is, learning how to do the functioning part of wake up every day, eat, etc. But my priority was figuring out how to live, not how to academically survive.
So a few years later, when my therapist started pushing me to explicitly try math again, and my husband was mentioning Japanese, I made it here. And Wanikani has helped me learn again. I used to have a panic attack at the idea that I’d have to ask a TA or a professor about my grades or if I didn’t understand something. I used to Google all my questions, and have panic attacks when I’d inevitably find some search result saying “I know this is the Internet, but you can’t just ask me to do your homework for you. Figure out the solution yourself.” I used to be afraid that if I posted a question that someone had surely already asked it and I was being stupid. I used to believe that if I needed to ask something, then I was burdening anyone who bothered to answer me.
WaniKani started me off with simple things to learn, so I didn’t have to ask questions - the FAQ and Knowledge Center and searching the forums answered all of them. I just had to sit down and do reviews and lessons. This year, I gained the confidence to try scary things like reading a book. It got easier with time. I just keep telling myself that I need to put more time into reading. Thank God no books start talking to me and telling me that I don’t know Japanese well enough to read them. It also helps that I’m not burdening WaniKani by not knowing what a kanji is, since I’m paying WaniKani to teach me kanji.
3. I learned more academic strategies. I learned that it’s okay to skip items I’m not confident about and come back to them later. I learned it’s okay to know 90% of something and give up on the last 10%. I used to spend 5 hours doing 90% of the homework, and then 30 hours trying to figure out the last 10%. But most of my biggest leeches from February are burned now and I have different leeches. Surely by 2025 I’ll be in a different place with what words give me trouble.
5. I learned that it’s okay to ask for help. There are some wonderful helpful people on this forum. I’m still not great at it, and I’m still in the stage of “try searching online in any space you can think of for at least two hours” before I try asking questions. But it’s better than giving up.
6. I learned kanji. I learned radicals, so if I find kanji that aren’t on WK, I’m not afraid of them.
7. I learned that SRS and mnemonics are helpful for my memory. I’m honestly sad I have to start coming up with my own mnemonics all the time now, because that’ll be slower.
8. I learned that while I may have lost my academic confidence in high school, I still have a good memory. I went pretty fast on WK towards the end, and there’s been a heatwave in my area this month, and even though I can feel myself making stupid mistakes and having a worse accuracy than usual, and that’s reflected in my apprentice count going from ~220 to ~350 at the start of the heatwave…I’m okay with this. Yeah it’s a lot of reviews. Sometimes items bounce around in apprentice for a bit. I bombed a few items from Enlightened down to Apprentice 1. I mixed up a ton of kanji. But at night when it’s cooler again I look at the new Apprentice items and say “this is easy yeah I know this.” My memory is slowly sorting itself out.
9. My parents spent a large part of my childhood telling me I was a quitter because I wanted to quit every extracurricular they put me in. Reaching level 60 is one way for me to say I’m not a quitter.
10. I learned to be a little nicer to myself. I use scripts because I want to do reviews quickly. I do reviews on my phone when I’m too tired to grab my laptop. I don’t obsess over my review accuracy (it’s useful to know if it goes from ~90% to ~50% because that’s a sign that my body has needs and that I need to take a break, but I’m explicitly not beating myself up for not getting a high enough grade). I learned to undo answers and add synonyms for things that are close enough. I try to always search up a word I’m going to add a synonym for, to make sure I’m not putting in an incorrect meaning, and that helps me understand it a bit better too.
11. I learned that my body and mind are more connected than they’ve ever been. As a kid I was taught that my needs didn’t exist. Humans are like plants - they need food, water, shelter from the elements, and sunlight. I learned on my own that things like happiness and human contact and sleep and nutrition and stress relief are all important too. Wanikani specifically taught me that my review accuracy is horrible when I’m stressed (or when it’s hot, because my body reacts by sweating and getting stressed). My review accuracy isn’t great if I’m starving either. My review accuracy is best when I’m sitting comfortably, it’s a nice temperature, nobody is talking to me, and I’m calm. This is true for more than just my review accuracy - it’s true for anything that requires me to think.
12. I learned about on screen reading tools like YomiNinja and Yomitai to more quickly search kanji I didn’t know. Yomininja will try to read your screen to give you text that’s selectable (and readable by a browser extension like 10ten). Yomitai will accept images and highlight kanji/give translations. Both have occasionally failed to read something for me - YomiNinja likes to read こ as 二 in the font for Little Witch in the Woods, and in that picture I shared above about the pdf and all the words I had to look up, I highlighted 、instead of 従い because Yomitai didn’t pick it up (I think it gets messed up by punctuation).
13. I learned that the community here has tons of useful resources for…everything. KanKan lets me search for kanji compounds where I know one kanji and break a second down by radical, which would have made 林檎 a lot easier to find 4 years ago. The clubs/reading challenges/etc are great for the comradery. It feels like when I maintain Regular status and I’m posting things about my progress and reading a ton of posts here, then I’m actively learning a lot. When I lose Regular status and don’t feel like posting here, then my learning drops off.
Stats, Graphs
On one hand, nearly 5 years can hardly be counted as “going fast”…but the last ~8 months have definitely been fast. Idk.
So what now?
- Now I don’t have to SRS 30 kanji a week
I was going to try out Anki for vocab. I’ll keep working on Wanikani to burn everything, because I have a long way to go and forgetting everything here would be sad. 飽くまでも 
- Most importantly, I have more time for
Potion makingimmersion. I have a backlog of manga I’ve picked up from the Bookwalker thread. I have to finish games like Little Witch in the Woods. - My husband has to finish Genki and get at least a little farther in Wanikani. I watch Tokini Andy’s Genki Playlist with him (which is all refresher for me), and I help him pick lessons daily (which is excellent refresher on items I burned 4 years ago), and we’re very slowly reading しろくまカフェ though we’re weeks behind (I could actually catch up on my own at this point probably).
- I wanted to go through the Quartet books and there’s a study group that already started so I can shift time to that hopefully too.
- My husband has been finding more steam games for me to play in Japanese. I told him that I don’t have time yet. Maybe by the Steam Winter Sale I’ll have progressed through the backlog a bit.
- In some ways I’m in that “intermediate plateau” that Tofugu described in the beginner article linked all the way at the beginning. My speaking is mostly nonexistent unless I’m reading something. My ability to output is very slow and involves sitting with a dictionary because I double check what I’m trying to do. I joined HelloTalk after hearing recommendations on here, but I’m still too afraid to speak and have been mostly typing (and getting lots of corrrections). Listening to anime is super intensive and requires constant focus or else I miss what’s happening. There’s kanji that aren’t on Wanikani that I still have to look up. I still look up words, both words that I should know, and words that I haven’t seen before. Sometimes there are entire idioms where I know all the kanji but it’s some metaphor I don’t realize until I’m browsing over it with 10ten.
- But I like the intermediate plateau. I’m playing games that I love in Japanese. I have a bunch of books to read that I love. I don’t have to search 8 kanji by radical per sentence! I see this question of “what else should I do besides wanikani” and the common answers are “grammar, and then after that immersion.” I have enough basic grammar to do the fun immersion! Even if there’s some new grammar point that I haven’t seen yet, I can easily isolate it from the rest of the sentence and look it up. My husband thinks I’m some kind of wizard. Most of my problems boil down to “you need more time doing immersion” which means…more games! It’s great!
- I still have to get better at the “Every Day” part of the Read Every Day challenges. Unfortunately I keep spending time with my husband or playing other games, or my mental health catches up to me and I spend hours dissecting a flashback from when I was 8 instead of reading. I think it’s reasonable to aim for “read half the days.”
- I still haven’t finished this pdf I’ve been reading for 4 years. Looking at it now, there’s only 1-2 kanji per page that I’ve never seen before, so I’m definitely diving into it ASAP.
