Hey, so I hit level 60 yesterday so I thought I would make an obligatory post!
It took me around 850 days to go through (almost) every single item that are currently available on WK and honestly, it’s a bit weird knowing that I’ll have less and less reviews from now on… But I’m sure some leeches will stick around for a bit longer
A bit about my journey:
I started studying Japanese before entering university not really expecting a lot from making an account on here, but the almost game-like style of learning just kept me hooked in the beginning (like a lot of people).
At some point it had turned into a very essential part of my day, but towards the end (and at some point between levels 30-40) exams were a bit more important, so reviews and learning new things was just not my top most priority and in return my motivation to study new words went down quite a bit.
It probably didn’t help that my accuracy also got lower with leveling up higher and higher. But nonetheless I basically always finished my reviews, which I’m pretty happy about. Another factor was, that the kanji were becoming more similar to ones from previous levels and they also were harder to find in any literature, so a lot of those still don’t stick very well, which is not a huge issue tho.
A pretty cool coincidence is, that I leveled up on the day of my last exam of this semester, which really rounds things up nicely imo.
My experience with WK:
I basically never really had a huge issue with the site or with the mechanism, but I still ended up using some scripts to make my time here more enjoyable: Leech Trainer, Phonetic-Sematic composition, Heatmap and Ultimate Timeline being the main ones. I never installed any scripts that would allow me to change to answer, since I knew I would absolutely abuse something like that, so I kept my hands off of that
Around level 10, I got into reading books mainly through the bookclubs on the forums here. A big thanks to all people posting and contributing to the forum discussions, people asking and answering questions, etc.!
I never really participated in many discussions, but I would always read through all of the posts and more often than not it would make me rethink about a part of a book I had just read! If it weren’t for the clubs I probably wouldn’t stick to much of a schedule when reading and I would probably never really finish any book
Future plans:
I don’t really have any set plans for anything revolving around Japan/Japanese, however
I thought about trying JLPT exams, but I’m not too sure if I want to even study for those; I also want to visit Japan at some point during my life, but I think there’s this weird pandemic going on, not too sure tho
I definitely want to work on my vocabulary, and I also want to improve my speaking ability, since I have sort of neglected that one…
Obviously I want to read more books so I’ll still stick around the forums and participate in the bookclubs!
In the end I’ll shift my studying towards different aspects of Japanese, which hopefully will be as fun as it has been until now! If you have some tips or ideas on what I can or should do, please let me know!
Some extra rambling:
I feel like WK has taught me important lessons when it comes to studying, which is that consistency is probably the most important thing.
It doesn’t really matter how much you might study in a day or how many words/kanji (or pages of a script and exercises if talking about school related stuff), as long as you do something it’s better than doing nothing.
Of course, you should still try to do a sufficient amount so you don’t end up studying to little, but you also don’t need to learn a crushing amount of things.
Another point is that you should also take breaks. This is probably just as important since breaks allow things to settle. Taking a few breaks here and there might ultimately save you time throughout your progression, even if it might feel like you are wasting time at the moment.
So this is it! Maybe a bit of a shorter level 60 post, but I don’t really have a lot to say about my whole experience so far, but nonetheless thank you for reading and I hope you have a good day!