It sounds like your main problem is that you dont seem to have anything specific to measure your progress so you end up using arbitrary numbers of task completions.
It has nothing to do with “going too fast”, that’s different for each person and relative to their environment and situation.
This is great but try to pick one specific thing that you want to be able to do in Japanese. You can always change it later but you need something to avoid studying randomly and actually feel progress.
Maybe try to find a way to measure your progress. Eg apply for the JLPT exams starting from N5 all the way to N1… It would be cool to show all the certificates 
(I think it may be a bit too early) On the Bookwalker / BookLive websites, there are samples on (nearly) everything (manga / light novels / magazines), just click on the cover image.
NHK Web Easy should slowly start to become more accessible soon too… (depending on the news topics )
Personally, even now after years of study, there are shows / tv series where I hardly understand anything in Japanese. Try to find stuff at your level. Japanese is a bit complicated in the sense that in a way unlike European languages (from my experience), there is a much higher vocab / grammar requirement to understand stuff. So don’t worry, try to find stuff near your level.
I think no one has mentioned this so I’ll say it. I believe these averages are skewed by the fact that lots of people join Bunpro after they’ve already been studying for a little bit so it probably artificially boosts accuracy early on.
To me it sounds like you’re doing great. Japanese takes a lot of time and the start is intellectually the hardest part, in my opinion. As others have said, motivation naturally goes up and down. I think the reason you’re getting so many responses is precisely because your experience is so relatable; everyone hits a wall at some point (multiple points, normally). The only question is whether you carry on. I hope you do!
Knowledge is multifaceted and isn’t something you can “tick off”, so to speak. The grammar used in N5 is the foundation of everything else meaning so long as you aren’t overwhelming or overworking yourself it should naturally sink in over time as you progress. Relax. It will take care of itself so long as you keep studying and exposing yourself to the language. It’s totally normal to understand very little at first. Grammar is tough. Just keep going!
Duolingo and Genki are better at teaching you somthing the first time, SRS is better at reminding you so you don’t forget later. I recomend only adding bunpro reviews for stuff you learn first in Genki or Duolingo
I’ve hit a wall several times.
I started by going to Japanese class in college. I hit a wall when my class finnished What do I do now? I was stuck here for 3 years
The answer was lingo deer and putting the CD that came with the textbook in my car to listen to everyday.
Next wall: OK, so this retains the knowlage I learned in class, but how do I learn more? Stuck here for another 3 years
Anki vocab and kanji. and 4 years later I’m still studying anki vocab from premade decks. The first year was productive- and now I’m stuck again.
I know lots of Japanese, time to actually use it. Watch all the anime 10 years ago you wanted to watch when they started studying Japanese!
Maybe if I learn gramar on bunpro- then I’ll read Japanese. My 1 year subscription is up. I learned enough grammar to pass N4. I need to read manga and middleschool books (elementry school books don’t have enough kanji)
If you’re looking for simple books, I would recommend Natively. The account is free, and you can sort books by free, if money is a concern.
You can also sort the books by level. I’ve been slowly working through the low-level ones in my spare time, and I feel like a young kid reading their first books in their own. Which for Japanese, is exactly what I’m doing! They also start off a lot easier than NHK Web News Easy. (NHK says it’s Easy, but it’s still a jump at first).
Between Natively for books, NHK Easy for news, and Jisho.org for the many words I’ve not learned yet, I can feel like an adult learning a language, but still accept that I’m at a kid level in terms of understanding.
I’ve been studying for about 6 months and finished N5 grammar, and I’m really hitting N5 vocab before moving on. I’d started with 3 grammar points a day, but that turned out to be a bit much. I felt like I was getting in too deep, because I’d not fully mastered earlier things before I was trying to build on them. I’d felt sad and hopeless and cut it down to 2 grammar points per day, hit the same wall, and cut down to 1 a day.
Something that helped was resetting progress on some of the grammar points. Around lesson 8 I’d gone through the Cram function and found all the points I didn’t just know, and I completely reset those points. And all my points with ghosts. And all my Troubled Grammar. Learn them from scratch, like I’d never seen them before. But I had seen them before! Like a week ago! It wasn’t totally new this next time, and seeing them again wasn’t so hard.
If grammar isn’t sticking, it’s okay to start fresh. Learning a language is new and exciting, especially when it’s so different from your native language. But it can also be overwhelming. Just take your time, and if today was rough, then tomorrow is a new day.
Hi! I have a minor in Japanese. (4 years of studying). I live in Japan. And every day, working on N4 grammar on bunpro makes me feel like I will never actually get good at Japanese. There seems to be an ephemeral space between true knowledge for me where I will react to bunpro with the right answer but cannot call to mind the answer later (outside of bunpro). However, I noticed that things are gradually starting to come into my mind. I am recognizing things that I learned in bunpro in real life conversations. Even noticing my gradual progress, I still feel like a failure when I bomb a review. I often get 60-70% scores. I have it set to “Rigorous” so it introduces 20 new vocab and 5 grammar points a day, because what I’m studying should be beneath my level. It’s still really hard. All that to say you’re totally not alone in feeling like this, it’s a very hard language for westerners to learn and the process is gradual. Don’t be so hard on yourself, keep going, and try to enjoy the process even though it’s frustrating is my advice.
I can recommend you CI Japanese or any similar channel on YouTube. Even if your vocabulary base is actually bigger, watching content for complete beginners where they repeat the same sentence a few times just slightly altering the grammar or vocab in it can make the language sink in better and help you get used to listening.
Myself, I’ve been watching at least one comprehensible video per day since June and I can already see the progress, so I really recommend it 
Hi! I agree with CursedKitsune: I don’t think that 85% average is real. I recently discovered Bunpro and I already have the N3, yet I’m still reviewing some N5 grammar. But it’s easier than reviewing grammar that is new. I’m guessing there might be more people like me and that’s why the average is higher in the first levels. The averages for N2 and N1 are around 75%, which is probably more realistic, and it fits your average as well. So I think you’re doing great!!
I love Wanikani and had an episode like yours, where I lost motivation. My advice is to let it rest. You will come back, don’t worry! You can try something else, or nothing at all. Just relax for a while. Right now, my Wanikani dashboard says “Your time on this level is 450 days”. And that’s OK, I’m still enjoying it and happy to be back. You don’t need the perfect statistics Good luck!!
Adding on what you’re saying here, I think it’s entirely possible that the average for N5 and N4 is higher because of two reasons I’ve already seen on this thread:
Many people do not come to Bunpro as fresh learners (like CursedKItsune said)
Many people get waist-deep into Bunpro and reset their progress to start again
This means that for many people doing N5 and N4, this isn’t their first rodeo! Makes sense why the true percentages come out at the higher levels!
After 6.5 months, you understand and speak Japanese better than you did 6.5 months after you started learning your native language (that is, from the moment you were born).
It took you 6 years to reach, you guessed it, 6 y-o level in your native language.
As with any language, it takes time. The more time you spend learning the language, the better you will understand it.
Also, Bunpro is only designed for you to learn and review grammar. But it’s by actually consuming content in Japanese (such as books, news articles, films and TV, random conversations) that you’ll actually put all that learnt knowledge into practice.
Don’t despair. The wall is always there. Learning and consuming content is how you climb it.
Source: Japanese is my 5th language.
My suggestion is to use the success rate to determine your speed. If your success rate remains low, drop your speed
So, I kind-of have that too, where the nuance can be lost. Sometimes things can be a guess. I find things do get better with repetition. Unlike you, I’m a trash student.
This is how I interpret the role of the flashcards:
I use them to get a “general sense” of things, but I don’t need to have a precise understanding.
In fact, I think people derive all meaning with language in relation to the context on which they have used them or seen them used.
To that end, it is then no surprise you are feeling disconnected from the material.
What I found helps is “participating” in Japanese.
I use Bunpro to be “aware” of vocab and grammar, and then use that awareness when making my own Japanese sentences and communicating in Japanese.
I have a Japanese twitter account that I use to practice Japanese.
I even have a follower that is a Japanese native that often comments on my posts.
Let me tell you, it will be very cringe for awhile, but it allows you to problem solve with what you know vs what you want to say.
That has helped me understand things better and form some kind of conception of them.
Yes, I’ve gotten a ”ガチャガチャ” with respect to one of my tweets, but that’s the learning process.
And I will never forget the word now…
I wanted to add my perspective. I’ve been learning Japanese for over 10 years now, including getting a minor degree in the language in university, and I’d still say I’m at ~N4. The reason? I never actually applied it to anything. I kept saying “I will read that novel or watch that show, etc. when I’m a higher level on WaniKani.” The result? I got to high 20s as fast as I could in WK before burning out and stepping away. This cycle continued for a few years as life went on and I entered the industry for my profession, I’d hop on WK and see 2000 reviews and words and kanji I couldn’t even recognize despite passing them earlier. I nuked myself to level 10, tried again, and ended up going ALL of the way back to level 2. Now I’m level 18 again.
Now I want to share another part of why I think I failed. I’d keep buying games and say "someday I’ll play this in Japanese. A few times long ago I actually did, I bought Persona 5 and NieR Automata on the JP eshops when they weren’t released in the West yet and I made halfhearted attempts to play them and understand. Of course, it was extremely daunting. They got NA releases and I just played them in English after the fact, not making it very far in JP. I’d end up looking at my Steam library or my Switch library and say “someday,” but I never felt ready.
So what am I doing differently this time? Firstly I’m making sure I’m holding myself accountable. I do my reviews every day, even if it’s a slog. Right now I’m typing this from my in-laws’ house. Secondly, I forced myself to actually start applying myself. I picked up one of my favorite game series, Ace Attorney, and went through the struggle. So much vocab I didn’t know, and I forced myself to look up basically every word. I’ll admit, I don’t use Anki, so many times I’d have to learn the vocab by simply looking it up, knowing it, forgetting it, seeing it again, looking it up, etc. until it started to stick. I started that ~Sep-Oct, and three days ago I finished the third game in the series.
I can honestly say that it was an incredible “level up” mentally for me. For instance, I’d see grammar in the game daily that I had just learned on bunpro and it would really help it stick and give me additional nuance to understand the meaning. It also helped with Kanji recall, especially for compound words I didn’t understand. If I knew at least one Kanji, I could recall the onyomi for that character and use it to look up the entire word. Also knowing the character’s meaning, I could try to figure out the word through context of the sentence and look up what I thought the word was in English first, as well.
For my journey, despite my EXTREMELY slow pace, I will admit I at least have a decent foundation simply having cemented some Japanese knowledge over a decade. Even though I forgot 85% of it, the 15% that stuck was always a solid starting point to pick it back up. Ace Attorney may have been my catalyst for applying myself, but there are so many other easy forms of media to help you. I also used the NHK Easy site (however I found this a bit boring since I find it hard to apply myself to topics I don’t care about, and it’s not guaranteed the daily news will be interesting to me on a consistent basis).
In summary, find a piece of media that is basic enough but that will challenge you. You will likely need to look up things for every single sentence at first, it will take hours to get your grip, but once you find it you will rapidly accelerate. Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until you’re “ready” before you start applying your Japanese. You will get nowhere, and you may be looking back 10 years later wondering why you let it go to waste.
Well, I know you got a lot of replies, but I wanted to share a little bit of my experience as a N3 student that passed N5 and N4, so if you don’t mind, here’s my 2 cents:
Don’t rush the process.
I never really liked the wanikani speedrunners that cleared every level in 7 days, I think the amount of reviews must be terrible, and it must be really stressful to try to absorb all of that content so fast. In my case I usually take 20 - 26 days to clear a level on wanikani, I’m currently level 29.
With anki I just learn 5 new words daily, and with wanikani my daily max is 10 items.
With bunpro, i do think 3 new grammar cards a day is a bit much, what I usually do is learn 2,3 or 4 in one day, and take some days reviewing those new points until I have a good understanding on how they work, after that I add a couple more, it’s a slow process, and I won’t win any “race”, but I’m slowly but surely learning more and getting better.
About your accuracy stats, my average is 70%, somedays its better than this and I reach 80, 90%, and somedays are worse and i reach 50% (especially when I just added new grammar points).
So, TLDR here is, the language is difficult as F, don’t rush it, trust the process and you will see improvement on the long run, a little bit every day keeps the doctor away.
I only read the first post, hopefully someone else has already said something similar to this
if you feel like you’re guessing at grammar. Go ahead and hit the ‘beginner’ on the home page and see which of those you feel like you don’t know. Go to the page and remove them from your reviews. Now, the other ones in there that you feel like you do know- go to resources and study. With Wanikani I feel like yes it can be more of a memorization game, but grammar is not. You need to understand the rule to apply it. I personally only do 1 grammar point a day- on the weekends if I feel like it- I might do two. I have a 9 to 5. So I do 1 grammar point and I watch at least one youtube video on the grammar point and try to read the entry in Amazon.com: A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar: 9784789004541: Makino, Seiichi, Tsutsui, Michio: Books because I’m a spoiled adult with adult money. I actually have one of those books at home, one at work, and one in the car. So if I’m on chores with the car I can read it. I can study it at home. Or I can cite it when arguing with a friend over grammar points. I have become the grammar nerd of the group now.
You’re probably also doing too many words a day. I do 8/d on bunpro if I’m using a deck here. Only on Wanikani can I get crazy and do like 20/d (in which case I am doing 0 in bunpro) because it’s just a bunch of Kanji I already know with a little bit of Hiragana in certain patterns that tend to have a predicatble meaning.
I love looking at ajatt@ for pick me ups like this when I need it. For example:
Maybe you suck compared to what you’re going be, but you’re amazing compared to what you used to be. Remember that.
https://x.com/ajatt/status/1480268146439303171
main thing; don’t burn yourself out. It’s really a marathon not a sprint. I’ve tried to make it a sprint too many times getting nowhere. When you make it a marathon, it’s a lot easier.
Even if it’s a sprint, it’s just a marathon on a high speed. Even with 5 hours a day it’s going to take about 1 year to to start using it comfortably in daily internet life, as I assume.
Maybe 8 or 10 months, but anyhow it’s not a sprint anymore
never give up
頑張れ！
I see that there are already posted tips and things that I wanted to share, I didn’t read everything but I still want to write you something from me, れんしゅうするといい.
If you understand this you are for sure getting better and if not I am sure that you can read it.
A year ago you couldn’t so there is progress. Look behind and see how far is the starting line. Oh you don’t see it? even better. There is no finish line.
There won’t be a moment like after finishing a game, netflix series or school that you will close Japanese learning book or app stand proud and say.
-I know Japanese now.
I heard somewhere that you don’t learn a language but get used to it, so it becomes more natural and comfortable for you.
The fact that you mentioned percentages in your accuracy made me laugh as I saw myself half year ago that I was afraid to add new content to study and make mistakes because I didn’t wanted to make errors and ended up almost leaving my Japanese. That’s how we learn, by making mistakes. It’s scientifically confirmed that even if you got the answer wrong but made an effort of remembering it, you just got a little closer to knowing that, no mather if you know why you know that or you feel like you guessed. It is just also how the SRS works. System waits for you to forget something to remind you the content.
Also I wouldn’t recommend you forcing yourself to meet your daily learn goal (I feel like thats a wrong habbit taken from pubic school. Feels like a misconception that you can’t rest if you want to be succesfull). My is set to 1 grammar and 2 vocab daily, but usually it looks more like, not learning any new content for a weak, then wanting to learn and having free mind so I learn 4 grammar points and 12 vocab or add 40 new vocab that I found interesting in games anime or no one knows from where, instead of letting bunpro choose them for me (Sometimes it feels more fun).
The fact that I am still learning Japanese is that I rarely treat it like something important. That loosens the tension from it and let my brain just do it without a fear of doing it wrong.
I am glad that I am at the point that doing 80 reviews daily is something easy for me but I let myself play League of Legends and leave my day with less if I just don’t want to do them without feeling guilt.
I know that no one will open my account and say “WTF how did you answered this one review 7 times in one review session wrong”, and I will not say it to myself, because I know that some of them requires that many mistakes and other ones I will rarely miss. Sometimes I get drunk (I am adult, please kids don’t drink alcohol) and decide to open bunpro butchering my statistics. But that’s fine, who cares, I have fun, this is just a healthy hobby and I am not racing anyone.
I know it is getting very long and at the beginning I wanted to make it short and simple motivation pill but last thing. Find a person, like a friend, or this one crazy cousin that will listen you talking about new grammar point or some other learning step that you have and without understanding just nod and say “wow, you are achieving that and, I am happy that you have that much fun doing this”
Lower accuracy (75% accuracy in your case) is a sign of learning too much at once and needing to slow down and absorb what you’ve already learned. Pick up some easier reading/listening material and reinforce rather than adding more (while keeping up those reviews!)
I’m at a stage where I’m relearning a lot of Wanikani from levels 40-60 right now because I didn’t follow this advice, so I felt compelled to respond to you
From my other post - a WK+BP Level Recommendations. I recently completed N3 studies in Bunpro and have completed WK. My last post was back in April, and after 6 months, I have reaffirmed my reflection on my own study and changed very little. An abridged version here with minor updates - check out the original for a bit more details.
Recommend WK 10 and ~100+ Katakana vocab from Bunpro N5 deck before doing pretty much any grammar. It will save you time on understanding sentences and ensure you learn your own way of doing SRS.
N5: WK 10 Complete, Avoid going past WK 30.
N4: WK 25-30 Complete, Avoid going past WK 40
N3: WK 35-40 Complete, Avoid going past WK 50/51
N2: WK 50/51 Complete, STOP WK!! Do immersion!!
“N0”: N1 is more academic and may not relate to your Japanese goals. It would be better to start a custom Bunpro deck or manually add vocab/grammar as you run into it, or just manually learn from the existing decks.
I’d recommend not even looking at WK 52+, but I know some folks have tendencies toward completion, so if you feel like it, go for it during N1 study.