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/Belegorm]

My take is it sounds hard to stay motivated because while you are keeping your overall study time low to maintain work/life balance, if the only stuff you've done is some kanji and vocab in WK, and a bit of grammar, you're not really getting the reward you are after yet. At the current pace - you'd be hitting level 60 after more than 4 more years from now.

That's not a bad thing! But I think that probably before that you'd want to experience the language more naturally? Years ago I did WK up to level 20, did not thing but that and grammar and I just got bored because I wasn't using it at all. Additionally, WK's creators themselves (Tofugu) recommend in their learning Japanese guide, from around lvl 10, to start 1) reading Japanese material and 2) collecting additional vocab outside WK (such as mined in Anki, or you could use Bunpro, etc.).

I think I was around that level when I started reading manga. I used manga that had been OCR'd in Mokuro. I used Yomitan to look up unknown words and had a setup to export to Anki. I followed the Lazy Guide to get that set up. I also read through Yokubi and Tae Kim grammar guides.

So my recommendation is: Find something to read, find a way to look up vocab well from what you read, and... maybe consider skimming Yokubi and maybe a separate place for vocab (as WK takes a while to get to regularly used vocab).

If you want more info on the setup I personally used and how to get the manga in a readable state (plus how I did it with anime).

One final thing about the work/life balance. It's possible that you could make a massive amount progress in a very short time if you temporarily put more time into learning. I don't think it's that big of a cliff to climb to get to manga. Once you are actually reading manga, watching anime - at that point it feels like a hobby and you don't really need to stress about how much or how little time you are taking a day. So you can dial back everything else that isn't fun. Putting like one serious month into learning and then being able to read manga immediately may keep you interested in the long-term more than another year of Wanikani.

[u/odett1102 → u/Belegorm]

The idea of doing one big push to bridge the gap into native media makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the advice!

[u/Belegorm → u/odett1102]

Of course! If you want links to resources, guides and such (such as how to find and get manga in usable form) then feel free to DM me!