There seems to be a lot of interest around Wanikani because of the yearly sale, so I thought I can share my experienes since I recently reached level 60. (long post incoming)
I’ll split the topic into multiple sections so that you can navigate or skip as you wish. If someone is still curious about anything else, feel free to ask in the comments.
**Background**
As many people who are learning japanese, I grew up with japanese media like anime and manga. I eventually grew out of the medium and stopped watching and reading it. But still stayed curious about the language and japanese literature, which i continued reading in the form of books.
I tried learning the language multiple times. Starting with the Kana, and then after finishing them in basically 2 weeks, I hit the Kanji wall. 2000+ characters that have multiple readings, meanings, and are very difficult to write? How the hell am I gonna learn those? I already know 3 other languages, so my first thought was to study the alphabet to actually understand what I’m reading, but I never was able to get over the kanji wall. Anki was overwhelming. KanjiStudy on android was nice, but I couldn’t make it a habit.
Fast forward to 2020, corona happened, and I started learning about motivation and how to actually achieve goals. The biggest game changer at that time for me was the book Atomic Habits, which helped me understand how to create a habit. It gave me a mental shift on how I see things. At the same time I quit online games (which was really hard), social media, deleted most of my accounts. Then at the end of the year, I found Wanikani.
**Start of Wanikani**
I started wanikani with the free version, 3 levels. It was a bit slow, but I slowly got the gist of it. I hit the subscription wall, and as a poor student i was very wary of subscription services. And 300 for ifetime was too much. But since I had nothing else to do, I decided to buy the yearly subscription. After 2 weeks I liked it and the yearly sale happened, so I bought lifetime.
I did Wanikani between December 2020 and slowly stopped doing it by June and July 2021. My gaming habit kicked back after I found a new card game that I got addicted to, and university started getting much more difficult. So slowly I stopped.
I didn’t really have a goal while doing Wanikani in that period, i was just doing it and the load got bigger and bigger with each month, so at level 25 I got very overwhelmed, and since in my head I didn’t really have any goal, my motivation kept declining.
**Start of Wanikani again and starting Japanese learning**
By 2022 I was done with university, and in the winter holidays I started looking on what I want to do, and I came up with “moving to another city”, and “continue learning japanese”. Since I was reading lots of japanese novels in english, I decided that my goal of learning japanese is to read novels in japanese, and with that, Wanikani made a lot of sense again.
I researched learning japanese, and after looking into many things, I came up with the following goals and plan at the beginning:
* Learn Kanji using Wanikani
* Learn vocab sentences using Anki and Tango N5
* Main Goal: To read a novel in japanese
I focused solely on reading and comprehension. Since then I haven’t done much listening or any output. I also learned solely on my phone.
**How I used Wanikani**
Many people use Wanikani differently, and I tried many things. This is what worked for me.
I used the Tsurukame iOS App and put it in Anki Mode. After using Anki, writing in wanikani felt very tedious so I enabled Anki Mode in the iOS App, and it was a huge help. My Wanikani accuracy dropped but I was able to progress much faster.
**Other tools beside Wanikani: Anki, Jalup, BunPro, RingoTan**
Beside Wanikani, I looked into other tools, here’s a brief experience with each app:
* **Anki**: I used to dislike Anki because of its UI, but it’s so powerful so I used it a lot. Once I finished Tango N4 I stopped using it though. I found sentence mining using Anki a bit tedious. For mining I’m currently using Nihongo dictionray
* **Jalup:** Jalup is a weird one. It’s a collection of 7000 n+1 sentence cards like Tango, that costs 100$ per 1000 cards, or 300$ for 7000 cards. The first 1000 cards are just grammar sentences, and after that the explanations become japanese. Jalup is weird because it was almost abandoned, but it was rescued, at least on iOS, by one person (the anki cards are still purchusable i think)
* **Nihongo Lessons**: The creator of the iOS dictionary, Nihongo (the app I use for mining), got in contact with the creator of jalup, and thus Nihongo Lessos was created. It’s a very simple app. It’s a good complementary to Wanikani and Anki, but as with every other app, it’s not good alone. I reached around 3300 cards before stopping.
* **BunPro:** At some point I thought I needed grammar, so I used it for a month. It was too overwhelming so I stopped it. I studied grammar using Tae Kim and Cure Dolly and I would highly recommend both
* **RingoTan** is a great app, it’s a kanji writing app. I used it for a while, but drawing the kanji so often on my small phone caused me issues with my hand, so I stopped using it
The only app I’m currently using beside Wanikani, is the Nihongo Dictionary, which has OCR feature that you can create flashcards for. I’m planning to go back to Jalup, but at this point I feel immersion is probably more useful.
**How many hours per day?**
I learned mostly on my phone, using Wanikani, Anki, and Jalup, and per day I would spend between 45 minutes and 2-3 hours per day. Most of that time went on Wanikani, in Anki mode. My reviews were mostly around 150-250 reviews per day, and in the 40s and 50s, they reached 300-400 reviews per day.
**Was Wanikani useful?**
The short answer is yes. I don’t agree with everything the app provides, I wrote some of my complaints in the wanikani thread (how they teach radicals for example), which are very common complaints. But without Wanikani I wouldn’t have reached so far in my goal. It’s a great app, it gamifies learning, gives you the studying material is doable chunks, limits the complexity, and overall it’s a great tool.
I’ll emphasis these 2 statements though:
* ***Wanikani is not good on its own***, use other learning methods with it
* ***Wanikani is a Kanji learning tool only***, yes you learn vocab, but those vocab are there to reinforce the kanji, not to learn the vocab only. Vocab are best learned in sentences and in context
**So after 1 year of actively learning, have I reached my goal? Can I read?**
Yes, but in a limited way. I bought some light novels from my favorite manga Bleach and I’m currently halfway through the first one. My comprehension is very high, but kana words are still a bit tough, and I’m still missing a lot of grammar. At this point, and Wanikani recommends this, I’m just immersing and trying to mine new words and grammar points.
**What next?**
Immersion basically. I’ll just continue reading the novels I bought and continue mining, and see how it goes. At some point maybe I start listening and outputting, but for now I’m happy with just reading.
Overall I’m very happy with my progress. Wanikani was a huge help, but so was limiting my social media usage and gaming, and learning about how to create a habit. If anyone got any questions, write them below and I’ll answer them.
Here’s my level 60 celebration post if someone is curious, with graphs and everything)
[https://community.wanikani.com/t/i-thought-ill-never-finish-wanikani-but-3-years-later-im-here/64076/3](https://community.wanikani.com/t/i-thought-ill-never-finish-wanikani-but-3-years-later-im-here/64076/3)
Hope this was useful.