He leveled up from level 7
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As mentioned by others, Wanikani is unrelated to a conversational level.
Wanikani will help you with reading Kanji but it won’t teach you grammar, and even with vocab you’ll be missing a lot of basic vocab which doesn’t hinge on Kanji usage.
You could be at level 60 and not be able to hold a conversation if you’re not studying from other resources in addition to WaniKani.
He guru’d 90% of the kanji on level 7.
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The guy is pretty popular on the WK forums. Everytime I saw him, he had that nice and shiny golden lv60 badge.
I’d also like to point out, “Hold a conversation” is pretty vague.
If you want to go:
You: 寒いですね
Them: ですね
Then that’s probably a bit easier than if you want to talk about how the Uyoku should just should up and Article 9 is not a big deal.
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Well, holy shit. Right as I though @Leebo couldn’t be any more of a legend, he goes out of his way and pulls this off. I’m frankly impressed.
Level 0 because you don’t read kanji while you talk
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Hold a conversation in 日本語? I can barely converse in 英語, and i was born into that one!
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if you’re just starting out and want to learn some basic conversation I recommend:
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Given that learning kanji is relevant to reading, and that you want to know how soon you can start doing something that will help to reinforce what you’re learning here, I think the more relevant question is “how soon will I be able to start reading stuff?”
…And unfortunately that will also depend on your grammar studies outside of WK. You could have a look around the threads of those participating in the beginners’ reading club. They read Yotsuba initially, and there are probably some discussions there already from people wondering what level they need to be at to participate.
You’ll probably find it easier to start off with graded readers like these: http://www.ask-books.com/tadoku/en/?page_id=2488
They have level descriptors which give you a vague idea of the grammar and vocabulary you’ll need to know, so you can see where you’ll need to be before picking up Level 0.
I’m not too concerned about grammar, because grammar is essentially just more vocab. Particles and whatnot. Otherwise, the structure seems like a mix between English and Spanish. The only thing I’m worried about is vocab, because without vocab I can’t even begin to attempt to form a sentence in Japanese.
If Wanikani doesn’t teach you enough (or the write kind) of words to hold a conversation, what would you guys recommend I use to supplement it? Most of my time studying is at work, where I don’t have access to a lot of websites (I’m thrilled I can access Wanikani at work) and I’m not allowed to have my phone, so books would be nice, but I may be able to use some online resources. I currently have a bunch of Dragon Ball books in Japanese if you think learning to read those would help with my conversational Japanese. I have a Japanese to English dictionary and access to Jisho.org.
Thank you guys for all the help!
Well, it’s true that, if you imagine the extremes, someone who only knows vocab can have a caveman-esque conversation, while someone who only knows grammar can’t have a conversation at all.
But I’m not sure grammar is as easy as you make it sound… proper usage of the particles is notoriously one of the most difficult things to learn.
Also… I’m not sure what “the structure seems like a mix between English and Japanese” means, heh. Surely, Japanese structure is… Japanese.
There are loads of books that focus on vocab commonly used in conversation, if you search on Amazon.
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Oops, I meant English and Spanish, but I was thinking about Japanese haha. I fixed it, sorry about that!
Okay, well at least the sentence makes more sense, though I’m not sure I agree with it. English and Spanish are both SVO, so there must be some other aspect of the languages you are considering here.
As a Spanish teacher, and someone who’s been learning Japanese off and on (mostly off) for thirty years, I can say that Japanese is nothing like halfway between English and Spanish. I am constantly surprised by how different the structure of Japanese is from any other language I’ve studied. (It’s my first non-Indo-European language.)
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That sounded very abrupt, sorry.
If Spanish is the only other language you’ve studied, I can see how you might feel this way. Your second new language often has things in common with your first new language, and that makes you feel that they’re alike, when all that may be happening is that you’re noticing ways in which the languages aren’t English. One way or the other, the fact that you already have learned both English and Spanish will make this easier for you.
What strikes me most about Japanese is that (a) everything is ruled by particles that define the role of the elements of the sentence; and that (b) these particles and other sorts of phrase-ending words combine in complicated ways that create unpredictable (to me) meanings (although they’re looking more logical as I go through it this time). I’m still trying to sort out whether the transitive/intransitive verb pairings belong on this list, too, as a significant part of Japanese structure, and I’m inclined to think that it does.
Whereas in Spanish we spend the bulk of our grammar study on pronouns, verb forms, and verb tenses and moods, in Japanese we don’t really use pronouns and the verb forms are relatively simple. But your whole understanding of a Japanese sentence can switch depending on a “に” or a “で” or something. (I’m not very advanced so I can’t give good examples at this point.)
This doesn’t answer your question about what to use for study, though!
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lol I’m sorry buddy, but you’re killing me 
Anyway, I’m sure once you start getting into grammar you’ll realize how wrong/right you were about this, and I think that learning kanji/vocabulary first could be a good approach and it might work for some people, but if you get into Japanese grammar expecting a mix of English/Spanish you’re in for a big disappointment and a whole lot of frustration.
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