A couple of weeks ago, I reached level 60, and I said that I’d get my level 60 post out once I’d guru’d all the lessons. My level 60 vocab bar has disappeared off my dashboard, which means 90% are guru-d so I’m calling that close enough 
Table Of Contents
- My Japanese Learning Journey
- The Stats Section
- Where has it got me?
- Where to from here?
- Various thoughts on Japanese learning
- Reviews on Various Tools
- Shout Outs
My Japanese Learning Journey
So my first attempt at learning Japanese was in early 2022. Back then I started on hiragana and katakana. I originally had an anki deck for hiragana and katakana, but to be honest, for kana that SRS process felt too slow, so eventually I resorted to drills using the Tofugu kana quiz. After that I tried using the Anki Japanese Like A Breeze deck/JLAB to learn some further Japanese. The promise of the deck was to build on N+1 and to combine grammar and vocab with clips of the words being used in context from media. It also had a system to gradually shift from romaji to spaced kana to furigana to full kanji. Honestly, I still think it’s a nice system for a teaser/intro to Japanese, but as I’ll talk in a little bit, I soon outgrew it.
Anyway, then my house burned down and Japanese fell down my list of priorities for some time.
Life back together, I eventually got back to Japanese in early 2023. It didn’t take long to get back to where I was (though confession time, I’m still terrible at distinguishing ソ/ン in many fonts, nowadays I end up still sometimes trying both out to see which is a word). And initially I started with JLAB again. But it was around the time when it got to ましょう and realising that, yes, the deck was going to keep doing one card for every vocab X grammar point conjugation that I decided to look for something more efficient.
On the grammar side this led me to Genki to get an actual textbook. For the vocab/kanji side, that led me here. For most of 2023 then, my learning was a mix of Genki and Wanikani. At some point I also found Cure Dolly’s video series, which was valuable for another angle to look at things which explained some things better than Genki. Eventually I also discovered Bunpro which is a SRS site like Wanikani that originally started out with a grammar focus. So at first I used it as a grammar practice complement to the material from Genki and Cure Dolly.
Eventually felt confident enough to try one of the book clubs on this forum, specifically ルリドラゴン with the ABBC . That was incredibly challenging, and my first attempt actually ended up with giving up, though I later got back to it. The next book club, 小さな森のオオカミちゃん went much more successfully, and I also tried reading some manga solely in that time frame which together really helped start my reading ability improving.
I also tried listening around the same time. My initial goal was Log Horizon. My thinking at the time was it was a series I had seen many times and being so gamer focused, it has a lot of loan words. Surely an ideal choice for a first native listening content, right? As it turns out, no.
I had a few more attempts at listening, but the thing that eventually got traction for me was the しゅんと日本語 podcast. For me it was the right mix of beginner friendliness while being more listenable than Teppei was for me.
Somewhere around here I also discovered Natively which helped on three grounds - first of all it helped having some motivation by having a list of what I’ve done to give a feeling of progress, and secondly it helped to recommend easier content to have a look at based on user’s difficulty ratings, and finally it just helped discover some material from the feed of what other people were reading and listening to.
Armed with info from Natively, I found a couple of easier anime in きんいろモザイク and ゆるキャン which along with podcasts (Shun and later Japanese from Small Talk) finally let me feel I was making some progress on listening ability, even though it definitely took longer than reading ability.
Back on the reading ability, I set myself a goal of doing 52 manga volumes and 5 novels. The first novel was 本好きの下剋上. Similar to Log Horizon, I expected familiarity with the material to help, given I’d watched the entire anime with English subs and by then read the part 1 manga in Japanese. It helped more than it did for Log Horizon, but as a first novel it was still challenging. However, I eventually muddled my way through that (though much slower than I expected - first time I joined the Natively LN club and could not keep that pace at all). I did shift from the full version to the furigana’d JR novel version in the process. While I had been reading some manga without furigana by then, switching to the furigana version helped me focus on the literary language and the volume of text for a novel compared to a manga.
I did eventually get to a furigana-less novel, when I read セーラー服と機関銃 with the IBC and next year my plan is to attempt more, but I think first I want to get a little more experience reading furigana’d novels and dealing with the pace there. I am on 3 of the 5 novel goal I set myself at the start of the year, but I should be done number 4 in the next week or two. I think I’ll probably finish out the junior novel (furigana) version of 本好きの下剋上 part 1 and then try switch to the full version for part 2.
Apart from immersion based study in 2023, I also started the Quartet text book, though I actually only ended up finishing Quartet 1 and skipping Quartet 2. Maybe I will get back to Quartet 2 at some point since I have the physical book, but I also have covered a lot of the N2 grammar in Bunpro too and have gotten a load of reading practice elsewhere, so it would be more if I got into speaking some more. I also started doing vocab earlier this year on Bunpro too, to supplement what I was getting from Wanikani and reading, since Wanikani doesn’t have great vocab coverage since it primarily uses vocab to teach kanji. Finally, about a month ago I reached level 60 at last on Wanikani, which is the most recent achievement.
Also for about two months, I spent some time using コツ to study pitch accent, as I was finding a complete inability to recognise it. It’s still not great, I’d say my accuracy has gone from 50% (basically coin flips) to 65%, and it’s something I’ll need to come back to if I start heavily focusing speaking at some point
The stats section
So most of these stats I only started recording in detail in 2024, so you can sort of handwave 2023 as like “the same but maybe 20% less”. I do have some Wanikani stats going back to like November 2023, but not too much detail for the February to November timeframe.
So the top level summary!
The short version is that I spent about 500 hours on Japanese this year so far (or it will be 500 hours by the end of the year). And probably about another 500 hours across 2022 and 2023, so I’m about 1000 hours into learning Japanese in total. I’ll talk about in the next section what that 1,000 hours has got me.
In terms of breaking that down into other activities, this is the time spent in native media since I started recording in April
(Note this doesn’t include gaps, days with 0 activity are omitted)
And my SRS activity per week
Finally, since the cause for this post is hitting level 60 in Wanikani, here’s my item distribution over time:
Where has it got me?
So with 1000 hours and almost 2 years of Japanese study, where am I in terms of my Japanese language skills?
Reading is definitely my strongest skill, and I’d estimate my reading to be somewhere around an N2 level. I can read most Japanese content and while I won’t get every word, I will usually be able to understanding the meaning. and for the rest, 1 or 2 lookups will usually clarify what I’m missing. My reading sessions for novels have gone from busting out yomitan multiple times a sentence to a couple of times per chapter (particularly useful since I’m stuck in the Bookwalker app), I can comfortably sit down with a physical copy of the manga for Frieren and just read it offline. My reading speed nowadays is maybe 25% of what it is in English I’d guess.
Second place is listening. While I was very down on my listening skill for a while because there’s a larger barrier to starting (you basically need to have a very high tolerance for repeating things or get to being able to understand in real time to feel good about it), just the other day I was watching some anime raw and had maybe 85% comprehension - plenty enough to get the meaning. I’d estimate my listening ability is somewhere around the upper N4/lower N3 range.
Third place is writing. I’ve been practicing occasionally on the EJLX server but I haven’t put nearly as much time into it as the first two, so unsurprisingly it’s worse. I can have basic text conversations and follow along, though it’s definitely hard to come up with stuff at the speed which is needed for conversation in the chat room when it’s relatively active. It’s hard to come up with an approximate JLPT level for production since JLPT doesn’t really test that but if I had to compare it by thinking of inverting the reading levels, it’s probably about N4 level.
As an aside for handwriting, from where I started I did learn to handwrite kana, and I started with some basic kanji handwriting, but I wouldn’t be confident to write anything but the very basics. Handwriting is probably the last skill I’ll work on though, as even in English, I have at points gone an entire decade without handwriting.
Finally, speaking is clearly my weakest skill at this point. That’s totally unsurprising, as I’ve spent basically no time on it except a little bit at the very beginning. In a way it’s hard to motivate myself on that one, there’s no Japanese people in my life and Japan is very far away, so it’s not going to have a practical use in the near future. However, there’s also a bit of a pride aspect of if I tell someone in real life that I’m learning Japanese, the first question is going to be “Oh, can you say something in Japanese”, and my obviously non-native pronunciation even to someone with no Japanese experience makes it look like I haven’t done anything on the other skills. So I suspect in 2025 I will go for some iTalki or similar lessons on speech.
Where to from here?
Obviously Wanikani activity is going to go down after the next year, as with no new lessons coming in, the workload will continue to decrease. At the same time, as my reading speed increases, reading the same volume of material is going to take less time. Which means I’ll have more room in my Japanese learning schedule for other activities, I’ll probably have a more concrete 2025 goals post on my study log in about a month, so this is more a big picture ideas than firm goals at this point.
- More novels. This year I’ll have read 5, next year I’m thinking of maybe setting the goal at 20 or so. Just like I went from 10 manga in 2023 to 54 and counting in 2024, this feels like a big increase but attainable.
- Play some games in Japanese. This is something that my reading and listening progress could work together on, and could provide a way to enjoy Japanese with some of the other activities, especially since Japanese has severely subtracted from my gaming time these last few years
- Get some lessons with a tutor to practice speaking. This is a huge gap in my Japanese ability obviously, and one it would be good to shore up.
Various thoughts on Japanese learning
One thing I’ve noticed time and time again in the Japanese learning language community is there’s a lot of absolutist opinions on various tools and approaches. “Just study the core 6k then you’ll be able to read”, “SRS is the most efficient and all you need”, “SRS is pointless, just go AJATT”, etc. A lot of these are not particularly backed up by what their proponents say they are if you go into the limited research there is. Like a lot of the studies that proved the effectiveness of SRS where on college students who have a very large extrinsic motivation to complete their studies and therefore a method being potentially boring is not nearly the problem it would be as for something which people are undertaking on their free time as a hobby. At the same time, a lot of the AJATT arguments consist of people mentioning that they were doing textbooks/whatever and it wasn’t working but then they started reading and they could read after practicing a lot, so skip the rest. I think this is discounting what the foundation they built enabled, and also disregarding how frustrating reading from 0 can be.
So in general, my thoughts on learning methods is that you should try a bunch of methods and find what works for you, which may be a combination of methods. And don’t be afraid to change things up if something is no longer producing the progress you want, or to come back and try something again when you’re at a different stage in your journey.
With that said…
Reviews on various tools
Wanikani
Well, let’s start with the site we’re on now. And really that’s two questions: “Would you recommend starting WaniKani?” and “Would you recommend finishing Wanikani?”. Those are two different questions as some of the items in the back half of Wanikani get more niche than those at the beginning. Overall though, my answer to both questions is definitely “Yes”, though with maybe a few more asterisks for the latter part.
The structured system works pretty well early on, for getting you into the idea of thinking of kanji in terms of their radicals and understanding how they get used in various phrases. I think a lot of the early kanji have good mnemonics which also helps with recalling them, especially while there’s less visually similar kanji that you need to disambiguate them with.
I definitely think having the basis of kanji and some vocab made starting reading more pleasant, which is why I think it is worth doing Wanikani or a similar product rather than skipping straight to immersion. And when compared to the competition, Wanikani is the most complete on content still. I did a comparison partway through against MaruMori but it was clear at that stage that I was going to overtake the rate that they were adding content, which proved ultimately true.
Overall, while I have obviously also picked up some content from media too, it feels like most of it has come from SRS and it definitely feels like it’s cleared the way to make reading more pleasant for me.
I do think the setup with discreet stages and levels is a double edged sword however. I think the fact that future content is denied to you unless you Guru a specific set of content can for some people cause them to speed up and increase their workload despite it’s intention to keep workload down, as it feels like you’re missing out on future content unless you clear the current content now. The UI is so heavily built around discreet stages also, that it does seem to be an obstacle to adopting improved SRS algorithms like FSRS, though that is a weakness in common to basically all these SRS sites.
Over the last year, I’ve noticed a trend with the content updates, in that Wanikani is moving away from an ordering based purely on kanji complexity to one based partially on frequency too. This is I think a good move, I remember when I started, there was some really basic kanji (I can’t remember which but like 行く, 食べる or 飲む level of basic-ness) that was in the level 40s just because the kanji itself was complicated. However, this does ironically diminish the value of the later levels somewhat, which is certainly good for the user who wants to finish early but maybe not so good for Wanikani’s buisiness model, lol.
I think the largest amount of useful kanji is in the level 10-25 range. This is not the same as saying the later kanji is useless (even in the level 50s, I still had a few cases of coming across a kanji in Wanikani and then coming across it the very next day in a manga), but it is a frequency game. Like 行く might be as frequent as everything in level 50-60 combined, and so you’re definitely further down the frequency curve in those later levels. I’m still happy I saw it all the way out, and I was somewhere in the level 20s when I sort of knew I was seeing this through though I did contemplate slowing down in the 50s a few times until I actually got there.
Book Clubs
The other most important contributor to my progress has been reading and I think the book clubs on the forums here were a huge contributor towards me getting started and feeling confident even attempting reading as early as I did. Wanikani’s emails advise people to pick up a grammar book around level 10 and start reading around level 20, but honestly I think that’s a bit late. With the help of the book clubs (and with tools like Mokuro and yomitan if you get into them), I think you should consider starting a reading around level 10, and probably it’s also worth starting a grammar resource in parallel to Wanikani.
I’ll plug the 小さな森 club again here as a good point to start reading as it’s one of the easiest book clubs the ABBC has done. There’s also been clubs for the Genki text book if that’s your thing too (and Quartet later on). Don’t be afraid to ask questions either! While later on you’ll be more able to find answers to your own questions, don’t be afraid to ask, especially early on.
Bunpro
I’ve used Bunpro through most of my journey, first as a grammar SRS and later as a vocab SRS. The vocab works as a nice compliment to Wanikani because it supports a sync with Wanikani to avoid duplicating effort, and also for me it sort of doubled as what other people use KaniWani or KaneSame for as I used it in the reverse direction to Wanikani where I had to produced the japanese answer. The grammar SRS can get a bit frustrating at times when they’re looking for a specific grammar point among overlapping points, especially when they hints don’t want to give away the answer so they’re like “Can you try another point with a similar meaning?”, so that stings a little later on, but it was definitely a good accompaniment to Genki and Quartet 1 for me, since the exercises in these books didn’t quite work as well since they were self graded since I’m not using them in a classroom setting.
Textbooks
The textbooks I’ve used over the course of my experience to date have been Genki I, Genki II and Quartet I. I think I’d recommend pretty much all of them as something to try and see if it works for you (for N5, N4 and N3 level respectively). Feel free to take what you need from them - if you don’t feel motivated to do the workbook exercises, don’t worry about them so much. For me the biggest benefits were the grammar and the reading exercises, though I also did the writing (well typing) exercises. The exercises being self-graded as a drawback, which is where you might consider Bunpro to be helpful. I don’t think I found the listening exercises that helpful, as I still struggled afterwards until I got into native media, but possibly even Shun’s podcast would have been too much otherwise. And then the speaking exercises I didn’t do for lack of a speaking partner, so I can’t comment on those.
JPDB
I gave JPDB a try earlier in the year. The idea of having decks catered to the media you’re reading really appealed to me, but ultimately I mostly dropped it for a couple of reasons. The first was that I just had too many SRS systems going on, with Wanikani, Bunpro and JPDB, so for workload management purposes one had to go. The second reason though is that it proved much less effective at actually teaching me anything with just the SRS system on its own. I think youi’ll need to pair it with some dedicated study. The reason for that is I think is that its reviews operate like Anki rather than like Wankani or Bunpro. If you get something wrong, instead of being added to the current review queue, it gets added at the next interval. Which means if you get it wrong, you still might not see it again for 8 hours, while Wanikani and Bunpro will make you keep going until you get it right at least once.
Cure Dolly
Cure Dolly was a grammar resource I used which explained things in a way that was very effective at getting me going. I think her way of looking at things is very effective in a way that the textbooks didn’t quite click initially. However, while Cure Dolly often accuses textbooks of overcomplicating things and saying her way is simple and complete, it is just worth keeping in mind that actually she does tend to oversimplify at times. Of course all learning materials for beginners have to, to some extent, but since Cure Dolly frequently insists that there is nothing else you’ll need to know, it’s probably just worth warning that that’s not actually true long term.
Still, she is one of the best resources for getting going with grammar, especially if you prefer listening to reading or just want a free resource.
Game Gengo
The Game Gengo Youtube channel is also quite a useful resource. While I started listening as I intended to play some games in Japanese, which admittedly I’ve been a bit mixed on my motivation to actually do that, his N5/N4/N3 grammar series are good at giving a bunch of in-context examples of grammar rules paired with an explanation, and his game vocab series are also good for getting used to listening a bit or building an idea of how you’d approach a game.
EJLX Discord Server
I’ve actually noticed some other server members have discovered this server recently I found it from the r/learnjapanese subreddit last year and especially around december/january did a lot of posting in their #beginner_jpn_chat and #japanese_chat rooms which helped a lot with getting confident writing any Japanese. I really should get back to doing that. People were definitely helpful, both for practice partners and the questions channel, though sometimes it’s hard to tell if an odd bit of language is because the other learner made a mistake or just used more advanced language than you.
Shout Outs
It’s going to be hard doing a shout out section, because I will definitely miss out on people, so don’t feel left out if you should be on this list. Also, you only get on the list once, so if you fit in multiple categories but are only listed once, that’s why! Still it feels a bit of a cop out not to try, so here we go:
Book clubs! Thanks to everyone involved in running book clubs, both now and when I started out. ChristopherFritz, TobiasW, MrGeneric, soggyboy, Gorbit99 all come to mind here
Study log crew! Akashelia, Jintor, taiyousea, mitrac and more sharing their own logs, along with everyone who has ever commented on mine
The milestone posters: Everyone who has been sharing and tracking their progress on the 0/0 challenge, 900 days and study buddy race threads, including LuisTM, PotatoDancer, NeoArcturus, hotdogsuplex, Rehan, etc…
POLLfam: Always good to share some idle chit chat and motivating me to keep coming here and reporting my progress which helps with the motivation to study. saibaneko, pembo, joeni, shuly, kilikenny, teni, and if I keep listing names this will get absurdly long, so just assume you’re all in here
Userscript authors: Kumirei, seanblue, rfindley have multiple scripts I use, along with a few other authors who’s scripts I also use.
I hope you’ll continue having awesome further progress on your Japanese journey.
I learn so much in these posts and I can’t wait to see what you do next 
I even defended level 50-60 a bit, but I’m not sure I could justify a level 60-120