WaniKani sent me this interview since I'd reached the program's max level. I figured I'd save my answers here for posterity.
Q: Why did you study Japanese?
I took German language in high school, but both its similarities to English and the near English fluency in every German person I've ever met conspired to discourage me from really taking it seriously.
I did, however, learn that the act of studying another language was a deeply perspective-altering activity. When you see how a language and a culture are inextricably linked, it triggers in me an introspection of my own ideology—what do I take for granted that's encoded into the English words I say or how I use them?
Ultimately, this led me to want to learn the most challenging language I could find, with a secondary priority for cultures that my own experience would relate to the least. Of Japanese, Chinese, and Russian, the emphasis on subtlety and harmony in Japanese culture put it over the top. Once I started studying, traveling to Japan, I just couldn't quit. I was learning more about myself in identifying every tiny difference between my world and this bold new one.
Q: What obstacles did you face as you progressed through WaniKani, and how did you overcome them?
While I took several years of Japanese language courses in college, I found myself in a state of arrested development in language progression. No (Western, adult-serving) course can realistically take the time needed to hold one's hand and ensure that you learn 2000 or more kanji.
As such, I had spent the better part of 13 years traveling to Japan occasionally, picking up a little more each time, but with nothing to challenge me to firm up my foundation of kanji and vocabulary understanding.
Once I got started with WaniKani, the hardest thing at first was to acknowledge that I didn't know my 200-400 kanji as well as I thought I did. Unlike other flashcard tools, with WaniKani, you can't cheat and retroactively tell yourself that you understood an item when you really didn't. If you can't provide the right answer to a term's meaning or reading, then you don't know it. This forced me to slow down and for the first time understand the radicals and commit to learning each character's onyomi and kunyomi readings. It's also the aspect of WaniKani that encouraged me to build KameSame, because I wanted the same feedback to challenge me to be able to produce each Japanese word given only an English prompt.
Q: How did your view of WaniKani change as you moved toward level 60?
Most people who finish the WaniKani course will find that the pace at which they clear each level learn actually accelerates as they go. This is a testament to the tool's strength in providing clear and habit-forming feedback, but also to the consistency of its structure. Once you internalize how phonetic radicals tend to be pronounced the same way when they appear in other characters, or which sounds in jukugo words are more likely to be altered via rendaku, WaniKani's level system enables a productive learning cadence to emerge.
At first, it took me what felt like hours to work through lessons, and I'd find myself repeatedly getting new items wrong for what seemed like dozens of attempts. But once I realized that it wasn't cheating to study the meaning and pronunciation of each new word, I could pretty consistently memorize 90% of a level's characters on the first day that I learned them, and let the app's SRS timers reinforce and verify that memorization.
Q: What is a story (or two) of when you were able to apply your newfound Japanese knowledge to the outside world? How did WaniKani study help you outside of WaniKani?
WaniKani gave me enough confidence to seek my first regular Japanese conversation partner. We would meet once a week for an hour, and spend roughly half our time in English and half our time in Japanese. Each week's learnings gave me new topics to talk about, and I challenged myself to use the vocabulary I'd picked up from WaniKani in conversation. Since then, I've found other conversation partners in my city, and—through them—more formal classes and discussion groups through a regional Japanese Association. Taking the first step to joining a community can feel like a giant leap, but the validation I felt as I progressed through WaniKani's levels gave me the confidence to step outside my comfort zone.
Q: What has changed for you now that you've finished WaniKani?
I'm not done yet! I still have over 2000 turtles left to burn! But each day my review queue gets smaller and smaller. I had a choice: I could either declare victory and taper off my Japanese study or I could begin to embrace the fact that the next chapter of my learning was going to require a little more initiative and creativity on my part.
I decided to take the latter path. I started building KameSame as level 60 approached, and it'd take me another 2 years to finish WaniKani's curriculum in reverse. I've also started watching Japanese TV shows—if you don't know where to look, Netflix is an easy place to start. (Because subtitles are so common in Japanese, once you have reached level 60, you'll be able to pick up so much more of what's going on!) Finally, I've taken my newfound reading ability and started reading as much of my news as I can in Japanese. Japan's popular "Smart News" app on iOS is available in the US app store and can easily be configured to display its Japanese edition.
The path to mastery of a language as complex as Japanese has no end date. We all just get a little better for the effort that we put in. That sense of incremental progress brings me as much joy now as it did when I opened my first Japanese text book over 15 years ago.