How long am I likely going to be using WaniKani?

9 comments

1. > Is getting the lifetime wanikani worth it?

   no…

   Wanikani is just a glorified anki deck with a pretty ui, (impractical) forced learning order, poor approach to repping, slow progression, intensive reviews, sigh-inducing mnemonics, hefty price tag.

   If you want to buy it, lifetime is likely gonna be best value, supposing you intend to stick with it the whole way through, and, like a normal person, arent waking up at 3am to do your reviews as soon as they’re available. Otherwise you’ll manage it in around a year.

2. I got lifetime because for me it’s cheaper and I also had a new job and lots of expendable extra cash and I thought I would treat myself.

3. Get a yearly subscription now. Wait until the Christmas sale. They usually offer a $100 discount on lifetime, with an additional discount equal to your remaining subscription value at Christmas time.

   You can get the yearly subscription now, and if you still feel like it is worth it in December, then commit to the lifetime subscription.

   I think lifetime is worth it if you like WaniKani.

   I think WaniKani is more than a glorified Anki deck, but even if it were just a glorified Anki deck, there’s nothing wrong with paying people to organize your study materials for you. You could theoretically learn Japanese for free. But you’re going to put in considerably less effort if you leverage some cash to get others to help you do it.

4. If you‘re doing it consistently then you won’t need more than 3-4 years I’d say. Some people finish it in a bit more than a year or in 18 months. But I think the average is around the 2-3 year mark.

   However, that’s taking into account a perfect scenario where you won’t get burnt out or lose interest or take breaks. I have lifetime for example, and last year I didn’t do anything, so when I continued this year, getting lifetime before was a pretty good decision.

   That said, they do a yearly sale on New Years for 200 dollars, so you can get a yearly sub until then and they lower the amount depending on how long you paid. Until then you can also see if WK is a good investment for you. For me and many others, it is well worth the investment.

5. Lifetime was worth it for me because I’ll simply reset one day and then my daughter can use it.

6. Don’t listen to mca62511 please. Wanikani is slow and inefficient. Doing a vocab deck in anki is a much better use of time. There’s even a deck that has everything from Wanikani if you really want to use their materials. Better to do that in anki because it’s free and you aren’t restricted in the pace you can go.

7. I personally think Wanikani is not worth it. This is coming from someone who bought the lifetime btw. The ordering of the kanji from “simple” to “complex” is a misguided concept, and learning ON/KUN-yomi out of context is not very effective imo.

   If you just studied vocab you will pick up onyomi readings along the way (which is more natural anyway) and have more useful vocab available to you than just studying wanikani.

   The core 2k deck is perfect imo.

8. No, it’s not worth it, especially if you already have some pre-existing knowledge since you can’t skip anything and are timegated. However, you get mass downvoted for disparaging wanikani for saying it’s not worth it. People here just love making others unnecessarily spend money.

   Just get the wanikani 3 tokyo drift anki deck and do that. It’s wanikani with none of the negatives. You can find it by searching wanikani in the search bar on /r/anki.

9. It depends on your learning style. For me, it’s been worth it even with other studying methods. I paid monthly for 18 months and then upgraded in my 2nd xmas sale to lifetime. I definitely already knew a lot of the kanji since i was studying in college, but i still found it helped things really stick for me. I reset it recently as I took a 9 month break from studying Japanese and am glad I have the ‘script so I could just start again when I needed to.