Just doing wanikani will not give you reading fluency. wanikani only teaches you kanji and words. You have to actually read content to gain reading fluency. There is so much more to a language than just alphabets and words
What a brilliant way to describe it. ![]()
perhaps it’s helpful to put WK in context with the total amount of work it requires to learn japanese.
there’s a variety of numbers available on the internet. the american foreign service mentions 2200 hours of classroom study, a guide for the jlpt (random from google) states 3000-4800 hours for N1, starting with no kanji knowledge. these numbers are quite representative of others i’ve seen.
if we assume that WK might take about 1000 hours to finish (e.g. speedrunning with 3 hours per day for a year; that’s probably the upper limit for time needed), and compare that to the numbers above, we see that learning kanji is less than half of the work needed to learn japanese, and might be as low as a quarter.
so if you just do WK, you could reach level 60 and be incapable of reading anything. but if you do WK, and all the rest of the work needed to learn japanese, you ought to be able to read pretty fluently* by the time you reach level 60.
if you were hoping to use WK as a kind of magic bullet for learning japanese, then that is of course depressing. but for myself, seeing it as just one aspect of learning japanese, i’m very happy with how far it’s brought me even now.
*with the caveat that you will continue learning kanji for the rest of your life
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