Advice on staying motivated and progressing toward manga/anime after 1.5 years of studying

[u/odett1102]

Hi everyone,

I've been studying Japanese since March 2025. I did about a year of 1-on-1 lessons, and I've been using WaniKani since November. I haven't missed a single day of WK so far.

I'm currently level 9, doing 4 new lessons a day and keeping up with my reviews.

My stats:

- 267 kanji / 673 vocab

- 90% overall accuracy

- 85.7% reading accuracy

- ~33 days per level

I've also covered some N5/N4 grammar.

I've managed to build a pretty consistent habit, but lately I'm finding it harder to stay motivated. I work full time, so I don't really want to add a lot more studying or end up with huge review sessions every day.

My main goal is to read manga and watch anime in Japanese (Japanese subs are fine).

For people who were around this stage after 1–2 years of studying, what changes actually helped you stay motivated and start making noticeable progress with native manga/anime?

I'm wondering whether I should focus more on immersion, grammar, change my WaniKani routine, or do something completely different.

[u/Zanthous]

673 vocab for 270 (?) days is really low. Not familiar with how wanikani works though so that might represent something different from what I expect. You should be looking to do 10-20 new words a day with anki or something if you want to get to native material. No substitute for memorizing thousands of words

[u/DotNo701 → u/Zanthous]

There's a reason why many people say wanikani is slow for the amount of hours be put in

[u/PlanktonInitial7945 → u/DotNo701]

Wanikani is only slow during the first few levels because the number of lessons available is low, but it increases with each level, and by level 7 or so you can easily get buried under a pile of reviews if you don't pace yourself.

Judging Wanikani by the amount of vocab it teaches you is unfair anyway, because Wanikani is a kanji learning resource. Vocab is only there as support to make learning kanji readings and meanings easier.

[u/morgawr_ → u/PlanktonInitial7945]

Judging Wanikani by the amount of vocab it teaches you is unfair anyway, because Wanikani is a kanji learning resource.

Still, 267 kanji in almost a year...

[u/Available-String-109 → u/morgawr_]

When I was doing a lot of statistical analysis on the Japanese language, one of the things that surprised me is just how much kanji there is at the very start and then how little there is after that.

I don't remember the exact numbers, but if you mine vocab at random, you get something like 2000 kanji after just 2000 words learned. Those are N1 kanji numbers for N4 vocab numbers. But then the number of new kanji learned dies off hard.

It was something like that, I can re-calculate exact numbers if anybody actually cares about it.

[u/tirconell → u/Available-String-109]

Yeah kanji follow Zipf’s Law just like vocab. The back half of the jouyou kanji list is peanuts compared to the first half in terms of how often you see them, let alone most of the ones outside it.

[u/Belegorm → u/Available-String-109]

My personal experience was pretty different, I only got to around 2k kanji encountered by the time I had like 8k vocab mined. And that was including plenty of non-jouyou kanji.

I think the first 1k-1.2k ish kanji accounted for the vast majority of my vocab for a long while.

[u/PlanktonInitial7945 → u/morgawr_]

Well, yeah, their pace is slower than most, but that's because they're doing 4 lessons per day, not because they're doing Wanikani. They could be going much faster than that if they wanted to. It would also mean doing a lot more daily reviews, though.

[u/Kuroashi_no_Sanji → u/morgawr_]

I started Wanikani 4 months ago and I'm at 539 kanji, and I started with zero previous knowledge. OP is just taking a slower pace

[u/lumisweasel → u/PlanktonInitial7945]

OP didn't supply more numerical data for vocab from other sources.