Ironically, I’m on a low income, so even with the holiday specials, I still couldn’t really ‘afford’ it. But I didn’t want to miss the specials, so I splurged and called it a Christmas present to myself. Had to tighten the budget here and there to make up for it for a few months after. 
But. Good point, and something one would need to consider, whether one can afford it at the time or not.
I didn’t get that from the comment, but okay. We might also just have different thresholds to where we feel like it’s too much of a struggle/we’re not “there” yet. My main problem at this stage is usually recognizing grammar and applying it correctly (there’s so little context, who’s doing what? Are we still talking about the thing from three sentences ago?), not so much vocab since it’s a lot easier to look up.
And I agree that WK is best used alongside other tools. I can’t imagine why some people would try to “finish” WK by itself before starting to look at other resources. (Even the recommended “wait till level 10 before starting grammar” seems like really counterintuitive advice.) And this is why lifetime is a good deal if you can afford it, both for WK and for bunpro, it takes time to get the balance right. I’m glad bunpro made such huge updates during/since the sale a year ago, I got a lot more out of it already than I would have thought when I signed up, especially with the addition of vocab decks (I’m not far enough on grammar to enjoy the more recent explanations).
I don’t think it would be 240 unique kanji 
Nevertheless, there are graded readers, like まる子ちゃん manga series. I think 300-500 kanji are sufficient to read such books. And of course, there is fugirana for almost every kanji.
Of course they wouldn’t be unique kanji 笑. I am talking about coverage % of kanji. 800 kanji gives roughly 90% coverage (obviously depends heavily on the text). It was that sort of statistic that I was discussing.
You’re right, each person is different. I had wrongly assumed that everybody would understand that sentence to mean that the learner should do either a monthly or yearly sub to give themselves a chance to re-evaluate before committing. It doesn’t mean no one should ever get lifetime.
Six to eight months sub gets most people to approx. level 15-33, and at that point someone who hasn’t bought lifetime has committed $54-72 or $89 (or less as there are 30-50% coupons for new yearly subs). Their goals and needs may have changed in that time and they have the flexibility to reallocate their resources. Maybe they want to learn/practice writing Kanji at the same time and discovered Skritter. There are a lot of different Japanese learning tools out there.
Again, if someone is sure then by all means but even then unless they are getting it during the year end sale, they are better off getting a yearly sub first since $89 (which gets prorated) + $199 < $299. There is really no reason to not retain flexibility.
It depends on who you ask, doesn’t it? I think that being able to read 80% of the Japanese you encounter in online articles, news, social media, etc. in 6 months is really good. I don’t think many people can say they can read 80% of Japanese even after 2 years of study, unless you’re living in Japan and studying Japanese at a cram school. Heck there are people who have lived in Japan for many years and still can’t read 20% of what they see (if anything). Of course there are exceptions, but they are not the norm.
Personally, I think it’s really cool that you don’t have to do that much Kanji look up these days, but how long did it take you to get to that level of Kanji reading? If I may ask?
BTW, WaniKani level 30 is around 1,000 Kanji, which is where you start to reach the point of diminishing returns. Actually, I’d say level 40 would be more like it (which would put people learning through WaniKani at around the 1,500 mark as you mentioned).
I don’t think it is misleading at all if you consider the typical working adult, who spends about 8 of hours working 5 days a week, PLUS has a family, and other responsibilities. Or take a college student who, besides studying for their career, also have work and possibly other responsibilities. The only time I would agree with you is if the person studying Japanese hardly has the responsibilities mentioned above and thus has all the time in the world to solely focus of Japanese studies. Then, of course!
Well, that depends if you consider 40 mins a day just practicing new Kanji (besides the time it takes to learn it) insignificant:
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great to be reading anything in Japanese. Just I think that when percentages get thrown around it can mislead new learners a little bit (it mislead me, at least, and I thought I was fairly realistic at the time).
To answer your question, I have been studying Japanese for around 16 months, if you go from when I started learning hiragana, and in that time I have probably studied/immersed for at least 800+ hours. I don’t want to misrepresent my level; I am still not very good at Japanese but I do appreciate that I have maybe moved a lot faster than some other people. I don’t really track so it is hard to tell. I’ve lived in Japan for about 6 months and I work as an ALT in a high school. Obviously I have more time on my hands than someone with a family and a more stressful job however I haven’t exactly put insane hours in either. When I started I would study for maybe 20-40 minutes a day and only since I came to Japan have my hours really gone up.
Regarding foreigners in Japan learning or not learning Japanese, I think that, as you say, there are some cases where people are way way too busy. There are also people who know they won’t be here for too long and therefore learn very casually so that they can just about get by. Nothing wrong with that. Depending on your goals and your own situation you may not want to compare your own progress with those people though. You might not want to compare yourself to anyone at all (probably the healthiest option, although it can be hard to do).
Regarding children learning kanji, I don’t mean to imply that they don’t do a fair bit of it (I didn’t watch that video but I don’t think they do an honest 40 minutes every day though - I’ll watch the video when I finish work) but rather that the situation is so different for natives that it is hard to make a real comparison. I do feel like that the 9 years thing can mislead learners because of this.
I’ll say it again - I do tell people to check out wanikani since it works for many people. It has some clear advantages for some situations. I just also think it has clear disadvantages for most situations. Ask me again in 10 years when I actually know Japanese and I’m sure I can give you a more balanced answer though lol
Those percentages are not baseless though. I’m not pulling them out of thin air:
Apologies for not being able to screenshot the whole table but, if you look at the Level 30 mark, you’ll see that the WaniKani stats page says you should be able to read at least 80% of the pages mentioned at the top of the table. At Level 60, the percentage raises to ~93% to 99% (it’s not 100% since WaniKani doesn’t cover all of the Joyo Kanji). Anyway, that’s where I’m getting my numbers from 
.
Watch the video .
Of course you can’t make a direct comparison. But, if you take into account the things I mentioned (work, family, etc), not being born in or living in Japan, etc. And on the other hand, these being kids, who (as you correctly said) are also learning other subjects at school, not learning as many Kanji a week as some of us are, but are surrounded by the language and were born in Japan, etc. I think it balances out.
BTW, you are in a privileged situation since, not only do you not have family responsibilities, but you are in Japan! I assume most people here don’t have that advantage, but I also don’t want to deter from your achievements because, as I mentioned earlier, there are also people who live in Japan who barely know the language, so keep up the great work!! 
As for not wanting to mislead people, I’m with you on that, which is why I try to be as accurate as I can when I comment. I guess I should include my sources next time I comment on percentages, etc, so that people don’t think I’m just guessing. Unfortunately a lot of people do that, which is why I don’t blame you for thinking I’m just throwing numbers here.
Lastly, I’m not saying WaniKani is the best method to learn Kanji for everyone. I simply wanted to clarify some of the things mentioned here because it seems that they are coming from people who didn’t complete all of the WaniKani levels, and that’s fine. It didn’t work for you guys, that’s alright. But if people stick with it, at least to level 30, they will really start seeing the benefits of the system and it’s a great feeling when that happens. Unfortunately you do have to reach a high enough level to notice them, because in the beginning you won’t be able to read much of anything.
Anyway, that’s basically all I wanted to do (to clarify why I think what I think about WaniKani).
Take care!
We are still planning on doing this in the near future. It will probably be soon after we finish making all of the fixes to the naturalness of the sentences on the website as mentioned in our most recent update post. This itself should be complete within a few weeks, which means we would possibly be looking at making flashcard reviews available sometime reasonably soon after that.
Something I have noticed in Japanese which I think is a bit different to English is that the gap between reading skill on a person to person basis varies drastically among adults. Of course there are English native speakers that have a better vocabulary/level of literacy than their friends in English, but this disparity is blatantly obvious in Japanese. I have met adults that don’t even really remember all of the jouyou kanji, because they don’t really read too often, and I have met adults that can easily read books that I almost feel sick thinking about the amount of new kanji in them for me.
Right now, I would say that I see maybe one new kanji per 50 or so pages of a book, or 100 if I am lucky. A saving grace of kanji aquisition beyond jouyou though is that it tends to be very topic specific. Meaning that even between different authors, you’re going to see the same ‘niche’ rare kanji used over and over.
About WaniKani, I recommend any new learner to at least give their 3 free levels a try to see if their method suits you. And if you think you like it, maybe give the monthly sub a try first before considering going for lifetime. For me, WaniKani’s way to learn kanji is the best out of all. I used to study japanese in highschool, but dropped it after I went to uni. Kanji being what intimidated me the most, since I have the worst memory out of anyone I ever met in my entire life. After I found WaniKani almost 10 years later, it’s what made me stop being scared of learning Japanese. I would say their mnemonic system works well with me, and some of the common kanji I saw often and already knew, I just ignore those mnemonic.
If someone told me back in highschool that there’s a system that allows me to understand 80% kanji in 6 months, and 94-99% kanji in a year, I wouldn’t have stopped trying to learn Japanese back then.
While I recommend WaniKani overall, I Wouldn’t recommend it for anything other than kanji study tho. That’s all they really aim to do anyway. Their vocabs exist to help you learn those kanji.
Also, nothing really stop you from studying other common kanji in reading that would not appear until later levels in WaniKani right? When those are common enough, the frequency would hammer it in your brain after awhile.
I think some people might have the wrong idea that I’m campaigning against WK.
For example there’s nothing wrong with recommending not jumping directly to the lifetime sub.
You should try for yourself and see if it works, just like any other service, for example BP, or outside the Japanese learning scope, anything else that is subscription-based.
Sometimes the free trial is enough, most of the times it isn’t. A couple months on the monthly sub to better judge is what I’d recommend.
Again, if it works for you, more power to you. I wish it had worked for me.
I have an insane amount of learning methods purchased, and I’m confident in my current set is making me progress in the areas I want.
Just don’t take anyone’s word for the absolute truth, including mine, research and test all the options available to you, and see what sticks and what not. Don’t invest too heavily in one of them before trying it for yourself.
I probably over-reacted to the first part of the sentence, since I had immediately gone for lifetime, deliberately. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Is there a way to skip vocabulary that are in the decks? For example, I selected the Genki Vocab deck and I would like to exclude vocal I already know from appearing when I select learn.
So far, I haven’t been able to figure it out.
Thank you!
Well, you can always individually select which vocab you want to study, which is admittedly kind of a pain in the butt. But off hand, AFAIK, if you use the Learn button on a particular deck, it will always go in-order from the beginning of the deck to the end. So, not without ‘hand-skipping’ (so to speak), no I don’t think you can. (Anyone correct me if I’m wrong!)
Thank you! I guess you can go and click for each and set to mastered.
Would love to see the option bulk set words as mastered in this screen instead.
Oh, I hadn’t even thought of that! That’s a good workaround. But if you just want to ‘skip’ a certain vocab temporarily, you’ll eventually need to remember to ‘unmaster’ it later on, which is also a bit of a pain in the butt.
Just thinking… 
! You know what would be a fairly decent solution? Might take a bit of work, depending on how their codebase and database are set up, but:
If you could press a button (perhaps during a Deck’s lesson session from pressing Learn; perhaps in the ‘contents view’ of each Deck) to “Defer” or “Skip for now”, which would simply move that vocab to the ‘end of the list’ for that particular user.
This would imply that each person has (at least the capability to have) their own custom ordering for each deck, starting from the default deck ordering, but adjustable by the user to, for instance, move individual items to the end of the deck. Could take some work to implement, but maybe they already have things set up so it wouldn’t be too hard to change. (Hmmm, I think they’re already planning on allowing for custom decks anyway, so maybe they do already have a good set up for this, or will in the near future!)
Not sure if this would be a good long-term solution, since it could get pretty messy with all different people ending up with slightly different deck orders. But, then again, they already have the capability for each person to do any item in any order, by hand. So, maybe it wouldn’t really be an issue in the long run. Something to consider?
Good point. Either way, some sort of solution would be nice 
I didn’t realize how nice it is to have grammar and vocab in one place until recently lol.
I didn’t know about Cloze until I saw this thread. Can I change the reviews of already studied vocab to Cloze? I pressed the ‘Change ALL to cloze’ button in the deck settings but I don’t see anything changing.
So to add to the wanikani discussion (and the heisig method) here is my two cents.
First of all this is a real good thread with a lot of viewpoints on the matter.
I think it’s important to state your background and where you are in your journey.
AND
to have a good understanding what an app will help you learn.
Short answer.
Wanikani will help you read and write kanji. That’s it. you won’t be able to speak Japanese afterwards.
VERY LONG ANSWER
So the first thing I did on my japanese learning journey was learn kanji. I finished heisig. I stopped doing reviews two weeks after completing it.
My reasoning was that if I could get the “tough” part out of the way than my journey would become much easier…
Basicly I thought of it as climbing the mountain and than the rest of my journey would be a nice descend.
I completed heisig in about 8 months.
4 Years later and not being immersed in Japanese I remember nothing from heisig. Well that might not be completely true but looking back I wished I spend that time on conjugations
If while doing heisig/wanikani I would have done grammar and vocabulary as well , it would have been more usefull.
Now I am doing the opposite . I am learning grammar and vocabulary but don’t focus on Kanji. I do some kanji but that is focused on reading and not reproducing it.
What is clear to me now is that language output is completely absent.
I mean speaking. I added listening recently.
Looking back the way I learned English was mainly by listening.
But listening to Japanese doesn’t feel right at low level.
Because my native language is Dutch picking up English was really easy. There is a lot of common ground . Not so in Japanese.
Because grammar and vocabulary between Dutch and English is so similar it really becomes a quest of filling in the few blanks you have.
Japanese is the other way around almost… you start from nowhere.
And while you could argue that you know the English katakana words. I would argue that it might be easier to remember them. But the words are still different.
Anyway back to the point.
I think it’s important to know what you can expect.
And I think , especially when starting to learn a language that is completely different from yours, that you should sort of try to understand what you gain from learning an aspect.
English I learned as a whole completely. I didn’t divide stuff in different aspects. I learned it by watching movies, listening to music and reading on the Internet.
This makes a case for immersing , but immersing in English was really easy. I had a big headstart because my native language is Dutch.
Japanese I divided into parts.
And probably the parts I think most important now is vocabulary and grammar.
Vocabulary , unlike in English, I divide into listening, speaking, reading and writing…
DO I pick up the word in sentence?
CAN I recognize the word while reading.
Those are most important to me now.
Than it probably is using the word correctly in a sentence.
And finally writing it.
Wanikani, and heisig to a lesser extent, will make step 2 easier. And both make writing it easier.
But that’s it.
Learning Kanji only makes those two parts of vocabulary easier.
I probably get into wanikani again after I get far into N3 and I am sort of hopeful that it will be easier to pick up because my vocabulary won’t be starting from scratch.
And I might get frustrated because some content of wanikani is locked.
But I really shouldn’t as wanikani should be used as a tool to learn 2000+ kanji and kanji that I encounter while learning grammar and vocabulary outside wanikani. And mastering that Kanji where I will be will hopefully stick much better than the first time it did with using Heisig and have no Japanese words at all.
Edit:
I was considering yearly plan during wanikani’s end of year sale .
But I didn’t mainly because of the lifetime membership valuation.
If you decide to go lifetime they subtract the outstanding amount of your current membership.
Frankly if they made the upgrade they subtract all that you have paid in the past 13 months it would feel much better.
Here I start to go in meta mode and not buying lifetime straight away if you decide to do it is just throwing money away.
And if you don’t stick with it for whatever reason it is a huge investment. Much bigger than getting lifetime membership here.
anyway I will be really tempted to make that commitment when I have reached my goals this years.
