When did you decide to pay for the lifetime plan?

If they make an account, you should be able to contact the staff to gift them part of a subscription. If you just want them to try it though, the first 3 levels are free so that shouldn’t be a problem.

After failing in my futile attempt to master the kanji/vocab AND have any hope of retaining them, by the anniversary…

Luckily signed up in Dec so yearly discount was in play. Three hundred dollars total for lifetime access isn’t cheap… but it’s $100 off $400 w/o it, I suppose. If you sign up in early Dec and can make up your mind in the trial period, you can snag a Lifetime for only $200 total spent.

Best of luck on your quest. And bring some stamina – Hell is only the middle of the mountain :japanese_ogre:

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I started actually using WaniKani in April 2019, got to level 3, then paid for the monthly subscription until the December 2019 sale.

I haven’t seen anyone mention this yet, so just in case you didn’t know: since you have a yearly subscription, if you decide to buy lifetime in December (or at any point during your subscription), you’ll be prorated for any time left on your subscription. Let’s say you buy lifetime access after 6 months, half the cost of the subscription will go towards it.

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When I decided to pick WaniKani up again in the beginning of this year I bought lifetime with the christmas discount or whatever it was :smiley: I was level 17 at the time. I had taken a long break but no more!

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I had the good fortune to have my trial come to an end just as the annual discount came up. I paid for lifetime then.

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I started in April 2020 and waited until the Christmas sale. After reaching level 4 I tried monthly for a bit, then yearly and finally went for lifetime with the sale.

And because I started to struggle then, I’m very happy that I got it. If you think life might get in the way or you consider maybe doing another round at some point, I can’t recommend Lifetime enough.

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Hey @Joeni Aside from WK, what would be the single best resource you’ve used? As I feel I need to start doing something other than Kanji but don’t want to overcommit myself by signing up to multiple other sites straight away…

In my opinion if you’re going to do one additional thing, I would absolutely do something for grammar.

A textbook like Genki, or online resources like Tae Kim’s guide.
Or something like BunpRo, Bunpo, Lingodeer or anything :smiley:

But I’d recommend Grammar over doing another vocabulary SRS like Torii. I like Torii, but I can’t find the time to do it AND Wanikani.

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I tried Bunpro (admittedly only for a day or two) as I’d seen it mentioned a lot, but I didn’t gel with it in the same way as WK. Maybe I’ll give Lingodeer a shot!

Definitely LingoDeer and LingoDeer+, being apps they’re just much easier to fit into the five spare minutes you have or the time it takes to wait for the kettle to boil, etc. Though their pricing model has changed a lot since I got lifetime. I think it cost me like £35 during their sale, for multilingual access, which now costs £100 and they charge £10.99/m for just Japanese access now it looks like.

I know the first bit of the learning path was free though, so worth checking out regardless and I think they give you a fairly massive discount off annual after using it for a few days, or at least they used to. LingoDeer+ is an entirely separate app, same company, but doesn’t share a subscription.

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I did not really like BunpRo either, but I like and use BunPO on my phone.

Yeah, confusing as hell :smiley:

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Well, I decided to buy a lifetime right after I joined - I didn’t even wait till I finish the free levels.
This was exactly what I was looking for and I knew I’d need it.
Also, I knew that, being just a small clumsy cat, it’s quite likely that I’d stumble and won’t be able to finish in a year and a few months (which indeed happened), so, in the long run, by purchasing a lifetime I actually saved money even though I paid the full price. :sweat_smile:

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I signed up for a year originally (after finishing the free levels) one November a few years ago. And then, when WK advertised the discounted lifetime, jumped at the chance to upgrade as I was already hooked.
It’s handy that the price-to-upgrade is discounted further pro-rata, to take into account any unused portion of the current subscription…

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I started WK in 2019, but life knocked me off and I had to take a VERY long break.
I checked in here and there but didn’t really have the energy.
I knew about the year end sales and I was feeling a lot better mentally by the end of 2020, and I was finallly up for the challange.
I decided on annual for now, because I wanted to see how I am able to keep up and where I will be by the end of the year, and If I keep up, I will for sure switch to lifetime when december roles around again.
For now I have kept up pretty much almost daily, but life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans, so let’s see where I will be at end of this year.

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I was checking out Bunpo-related comments on this forum. Seen a bunch of complaints, including that it is potentially a scam, and that the SRS section does not work. Could you provide a definite answer about this, given that you actually use it today?

I think it was labeled scam when it went from “free” to “paid”.

I use it on Android, the SRS works in my case.

You can get it and try the free content for yourself :slight_smile:

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i might not get lifetime at all.

the end-of-year discount was active when i joined, but i really didn’t know if i’d be here long-term. and 200$ as a lump sum is quite a lot of money for me. if i can maintain my current rate of progress, even with paying monthly, it’ll be cheaper over-all than if i got the lifetime subscription.

that said, i might well have to slow down somewhere along the line, so i’ll definitely look at the situation when the discount comes around again ^^

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Then get yearly now. It’s cheaper than monthly and if you decide to go lifetime in December, you’re refunded the remainder of the year you paid for.

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I do woder, how many have hit lvl 60 and have pushed reset?
i have the vague idea to this if I get lifetime, just to keep on remember things.
And to see if I can go faster?

I think a few have done it.

I personally would rather try to burn everything first, before I get angry about 一 being called ground and 十 being called cross again :smiley: