Just reached level 60 in Wanikani and wanted to make a quick celebratory/encouragement post. I started Wanikani in 2018 while I was studying abroad in Japan and as you can see from the level up graph was really bad about sticking with it. I thankfully bought the lifetime pass so it wasn't the biggest deal, but could just never get into a groove of staying on it for more than a month or so, and had four different levels that I was on for about a year (1 of them about 2 years). Don't even know how many times I waded through 1000s of reviews to catch up only to drop it again a couple of weeks later and repeat to process again. But on the other hand I could just never drop it completely because I just noticed that kanji I learned through Wanikani generally tended to stick much better and quicker for me comparatively.
Early last year I started trying more and more to interact with Japanese media entirely in Japanese (Games, Manga, Light Novels, Visual Novels, Youtube, etc.) and quickly found that while I was generally fine with simpler games like the early Dragon Quest games or with audio content like Youtube because my grammar, vocab and listening were relatively strong, my Kanji knowledge was just a real hurdle in more complicated games like Kuro no Kiseki (which I eventually got through using the game script on Trails in the Database as help for quicker searches) and especially in Light Novels.
So at the beginning of this year I decided that I was finally going to stick to it and get through Wanikani once and for all and was able to maintain a consistent pace doing 1 or 2 review sessions a day every day, and going at about a level per week. Generally 100 reviews took about 15-20 minutes with the earlier levels having about 100-200 reviews per day, and later ones 200-300 (do to burns from earlier levels) on average. Because of this on the last few levels I would wait on doing lessons until a day or time gap with less reviews instead of doing the lesson right away on unlock as I did on the earlier levels. I really pushed myself to not let a day pass without doing any because I knew how easy it would be to drop it again if I let it happen and today finally finished the remaining ~40 levels in 10 months.
I've noticed my kanji recognition has vastly improved during my immersion over the course of the year and and am finally getting to a point where getting through things is not as time consuming or painful. It goes without saying that the immersion itself played a role in this as well which is why I continued it the whole time, but it was incredibly frequent to see a new kanji on Wanikani and instantly see it later that day in a manga I was reading, which always felt incredibly rewarding. Will continue to do Wanikani reviews for a while now just to reinforce the more recent levels Kanji for a bit, but know there is a lot more I still need to learn that I hope immersion could continue to fill in the gaps for now that I have a more solid base.
The app is definitely not perfect and I had plenty of problems with it (most probably could have been fixed with plugins but was stubborn to a fault) but found for Kanji specially I needed some type of structure and personally can't stand some alternative methods like Anki. It is obviously not going to be for everyone but is definitely among the most helpful tools I've used in my Japanese journey so far.
Anyway, again just wanted to post this give my experience quick and hopefully encourage some people that were in my position in terms of sticking with working towards whatever their goal is (Wanikani or otherwise). No matter how long it takes or how many breaks you take, it is possible to get back to it.
by Andiff22