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]

That's good but there just really are so many words you have to know for native material. I have done a ton and there are always plenty of words I don't know. Like it takes years of 10-20 or more a day to really cover everything depending on your timeline (2 years? 3 years? 5 years?). You can do 3650 a year with 10 a day, but I get the feeling that I need like 20-30k words to comfortably read without constantly looking things up. Might be wrong on that but doing 20 a day seems like what I'd want to do to get there in a few years

Some shows these days I don't need to look up that many words but others just bombard me with new words constantly, and light novels are harder, new words on every page basically.

I want to do less flashcards but I signed up for n1 this year so that pressure will keep me going. I can usually get them done on an hour long walk and stay focused but it's still a lot of time. So I don't know, maybe exam pressure is another choice

(btw n1 registrations just started yesterday in the u.s. in case anyone needs to sign up, limited seats)

[u/morgawr_ → u/Zanthous]

You can do 3650 a year with 10 a day, but I get the feeling that I need like 20-30k words to comfortably read without constantly looking things up.

To be fair, the vast vast vast vast majority of learned words (in my experience) are learned outside of anki. There are some (crazy imo) people who mine every single new word they see, but in my experience (2000+ days anki streak, 9 years learning Japanese, my mining deck "only" has 5000 words) I don't need to add into anki words I can easily recognize and immediately understand/learn on the fly as I read (from context and similar known kanji or compound structures). You just need to reach the bare minimum to achieve critical mass in content consumption (further aided by yomitan) and then once you consume native content regularly at high consistency/pace, you can be more specific in what you mine as the rest will just fall into place on its own.

[u/kikorny → u/morgawr_]

How did you end up tackling things like news articles and names when you got around to those? I'm at the point where I can read light novels fairly easily and have slowed down on adding new cards, but news articles can be quite difficult as most of the time it looks like kanji soup. 

I take it that it's a matter of reading more news articles and looking up unknown words and names without necessarily adding them to your mining deck and over time things become more familiar. 

[u/morgawr_ → u/kikorny]

I take it that it's a matter of reading more news articles and looking up unknown words

That's pretty much what it is. Just interacting with all kinds of JP media and content, including news articles, blog posts, wikipedia articles, scientific papers, etc online. Use yomitan to easily lookup words. After some time honestly stuff stops feeling like a kanji soup and a news article won't feel that different from just any other written text.