Hello, everyone 
My name is Adam, a 25-year old guy living in Poland. I’ve recently hit level 60 on WaniKani after 735 days of doing it every day. When I was just starting out, I always enjoyed reading other people’s posts about reaching level 60 and their opinions, so I thought I’d also share my thoughts and my journey with you all. I’d like to apologize for any mistakes in advance, as I’m not a native English speaker.
Here are some stats:
As you can see, I was mostly consistent throughout my whole journey, only hitting a small wall near the very end during level 58, when I felt really burned out from Japanese. If not for that, I would have reached level 60 in just under two years, but oh well.
My journey
My journey with Japanese began in January 2024, although there was a brief period around 2018 when I attempted to learn Japanese “seriously” and failed miserably. Back then I didn’t know what I was doing at all, though I managed to learn Hiragana and Katakana and some basic words, which to my surprise, I remembered when I started learning again in 2024.
I started learning with the Japanese From Zero book series. In April 2024, I also started doing WK, and I’m very glad that I did, because I think that the sooner you start learning Kanji the better. Eventually, I started reading easy content like graded readers or NHK Easy News. Then I moved to Satori Reader. After finishing the Japanese From Zero book series, I bought the Quartet books, though I ended up completing only the first one. In December 2024 I began immersing in native material for the first time, and I’ve been doing that since then. I also added Anki to my learning routine somewhere along the way, which meant that I was doing two SRS systems at the same time.
Throughout my WK journey, I almost always did 15 lessons a day and cleared all reviews. There was a brief period between level 27 and level 32 where I experimented with 10 lessons a day, but I thought that it’s too slow for me so I went back to doing 15 lessons a day. I also did 6 words a day on Anki.
So far I’ve managed to complete several manga, visual novels, video games and anime entirely in Japanese. WK took up a lot of my free time and energy, especially since I work during the week and I’m also a part-time student during the weekends, and sometimes when I only had an hour to spare and I had 150+ reviews pending on WK, I didn’t feel like doing any immersion afterwards. Now that I’m (almost) free from the chains of the Crabigator, I hope to immerse a lot more for the rest of the year.
Is WK level 60 enough? Is it too much?
So, when I was browsing these forums, I came across different opinions. Some people said that even something like level 45 is enough, and anything after that is obscure and it’s not worth going after level 60. I think this will heavily depend on your goals with Japanese, but if I had to answer if WaniKani level 60 is enough, I would say:
No. For me, it’s actually not.
My goal with Japanese is to get as good as I possibly can - including being able to read obscure words that I come across in the wild. During my immersion, I found many Kanji that are taught on levels 50 - 60. In fact, I actually came across plenty of Kanji that are not taught on WK at all! Right now, there are 120 Kanji in my Anki deck and 163 Kanji sitting in a .txt file that are NOT taught on WK. Now, of course, these Kanji are nowhere near as important and they don’t come up as frequently as the Kanji that you learn in the levels 1 - 40 (in fact, some of them are Kanji that only appear in one word and nowhere else, such as 囁く), but nevertheless, I came across them and I didn’t know them. And since my goal is to catch them all, I think level 60 is not enough and I will continue learning Kanji on my own.
I also think that there is no such thing as useless Kanji. I’ve had plenty of situations where WK taught me something that I thought was really obscure and that I would never see, only to see it later that same day. I remember when I learned 之 on WK and thought that it’s stupid, only to see これ written in Kanji literally 30 minutes later. So yeah, you never know what type of thing you might come across 
Although I will say that if you’re not a lifetime member, it might be a better idea to cancel your subscription around level 50, because a lot of the Kanji you learn past that point are very specific and it might be a long time before you actually see them in the wild. You will still encounter Kanji that are not on WK anyway, so it might be better to just make your own flashcards and mnemonics past that point.
What do I like/dislike about WaniKani?
What I like:
- I like the website in general. I think that there is a good balance between learning and gamification. Unlocking new levels and new items felt very satisfying to me and it always felt like I had a goal to work towards.
- I know that some people don’t like the mnemonics, but I personally really enjoyed them. I really like WK’s style of teaching Kanji and I actually do the same thing when I make my own flashcards – I break the Kanji down into radicals and I make one mnemonic for 音読み and one for 訓読み, while trying to come up with some crazy, memorable story. WK’s approach and humor made learning Kanji fun for me.
- The community on the forums is really chill. I don’t post much on here, I mostly lurk, but most of the time everyone is very positive here. There are also threads like the read everyday/listen everyday challenge, which helped me stay consistent with immersion. I don’t post in these threads right now, because I’m too busy with IRL stuff and I can’t commit to immersing every single day, but when my life calms down a little I do plan on coming back to these threads as it feels very motivating when you read about what other people did for their Japanese learning that day :3
What I dislike:
- Given my current life situation, I wasn’t able to maintain a consistent WK schedule. Because of this, compared to Anki, I really dislike how there is no way to just force all reviews of the day into one specific hour. With Anki, it doesn’t matter when I do my reviews - they can be done at 4:01 AM or at 11:58 PM - I just have to do it once a day whenever it’s convenient for me, and it will not affect the reviews the next day in any way. With WK, that’s not the case. Sometimes I had to do 120+ reviews really late, even around 1 AM after coming back from work, which was a huge pain. (No, I couldn’t leave them for the next day because of reasons).
- Useless duplicate reviews. I will use the word 峠 as an example, since I learned it recently. WK teaches me the Kanji for 峠 – it introduces the meaning of the kanji, and then the reading とうげ, which in this case is the 訓読み. But then, when I guru the Kanji, I learn the vocabulary item for 峠 again… and it’s literally the same card, because when I was learning the Kanji I learned the 訓読み anyway. So what is the point of learning the exact same card twice? It just adds useless reviews. There are plenty of duplicates on WK like that.
- There are a lot of useless radicals that I’ve already learned as Kanji. I will use levels 38 and level 39 as an example of what I mean. What is the point of teaching me 県、思、空 or 三 where these are all Kanji that you learn in the early levels on WK, and by the time you reach level 38 you probably already burned them, not to mention that they are all very common, so if you’re actually using Japanese you should be very familiar with them anyway. I think it just adds even more useless cards to the review pile. I understand that they are introduced as components of the Kanji that you will learn later, but I just think it’s unnecessary.
- WK doesn’t teach some 音読み of Kanji, which means that even if you „learned” it, you might not always be able to read the word. I remember when I was reading 未来日記 and I came across the word 林道. I was able to correctly guess that the reading would be 音読み + 音読み, as well as the meaning of the word since it’s fairly obvious, but… guess what. WK doesn’t teach the リン reading of 林, so even though I technically knew the Kanji, it still didn’t help me in this case.
As another example, WK teaches 呪 as のろ, and doesn’t teach the 音読み ジュ、but I came across words like 呪術 or 呪文, so once again even though I technically “learned” it on WK, it still didn’t help me. I think it would be a lot better if WK taught the 音読み of the Kanji every single time, even when it’s uncommon.
Although the “what I dislike” section is like three times longer than the “what I like” section, I actually enjoyed WK overall and I would recommend it. If I started learning Japanese from scratch again, I would use WK for sure.
How good is my Japanese after reaching Level 60?
If I had to rate my level, I would say that input-wise I am somewhere between lower intermediate and intermediate. Reading a manga in Japanese or playing a game is typically not a problem anymore, although of course I don’t understand everything. Some visual novels might be very difficult or fairly easy.
Reading is unsurprisingly my strongest skill. I’ve mostly focused on reading over the past 2 years, and I’ve unfortunately neglected listening quite a bit, but I’m trying to fix that mistake right now. When I listen to Japanese, sometimes there are situations when I can’t understand the sentence at all, only to turn on the Japanese subtitles and realize that I actually knew every single word and piece of grammar, I just didn’t understand it while listening. When I watch anime, depending on the type of episode, my understanding can be anywhere between 90% (can understand almost the entire episode, few lookups) and 50% (having to pause a lot, lots of unknown vocabulary). And of course, technical terms are a problem. Recently I came across the lovely 小球性低色素性貧血 when I was watching the anime 屍鬼 as well as a bunch of other crazy medical terms that I don’t even know properly in my native language, but I don’t know if it’s worth worrying about things like that.
I don’t practice output at all, but I can construct sentences, describe things that are happening around me, talk about what I did/will do during the day or describe the plot of the anime I watched. I don’t consider myself good at speaking at all yet. I think If I consume enough input I’ll eventually learn how to speak, because this is actually what happened to me with English, though maybe it’s a bit of wishful thinking
I can write Hiragana, Katakana and around 100 Kanji. Right now writing is not my priority at all, but I would eventually like to learn how to write Kanji, since I want to write a diary in Japanese in the future.
In general, I am neither happy nor unhappy with my level. I still have a very long way to go until I’m actually satisfied, but I’m also definitely not a beginner anymore.
If you want to actually learn the language, you absolutely cannot rely on WK alone and you should use it as a side tool while prioritizing immersion.
What next?
Originally, my plan was to continue using WK for 6 more months after reaching level 60, but when I read the automated email I got from the WK team, I might actually quit earlier. After I finish all lessons in level 60, I would like to increase the amount of cards I do on Anki from 6 to 12 or 15 (haven’t decided yet), and I was also wondering if it was worth subscribing to Bunpro, since I think studying some grammar in addition to just immersion would be nice, and as far as I know, you don’t need to start from zero. I’ve read that Renshuu is good too, so I’m still wondering which one to go with.
And of course, I’d like to immerse a lot more now. Although I appreciate WK and what I was able to achieve because of it, it is a very time consuming app, so I’m glad that it’s finally over.
If you’ve managed to reach the end, thank you for reading this poorly written wall of text, and I wish you the best of luck in your own Japanese learning journey 
, I will pray for your after journey 
! i refer to level 60’s as WK gods 
. So I I’m not even doing new lessons on WK since then, just trying to clear up this mountain.
