As of tonight, I've officially been studying Japanese for four months, so I guess it's time for a status update.
Wanikani: Level 19. Guru+ items: 623漢字 1886単語
Bunpro: Level 23. 111/111 N5 items and 12/178 N4 items studied
Watanoc: Read a total of 12 articles to date. I think it's getting a bit easier. I haven't gotten around to asking for grammar explanations on Reddit as suggested earlier though.
Nihongo con Teppei: Listened to somewhere around 160 episodes over the last week.
To try to gauge my progress, I took some practice N5 quizzes online tonight. I was really hoping that after four months of study, I'd at least be in a position to comfortably pass the N5, but it seems that I'd still fail miserably.
I started with
this test. I'd already seen the first three questions previously, so those don't count. Out of questions 4-6, I only got one right (5) and even that was just an (educated) guess, so I gave up after that. In the case of questions 4 and 5, the key word in the question was one I hadn't seen before (勤める and そうじ respectively). Or at least I probably saw そうじ on Lingodeer at some point, but Lingodeer's lack of SRS review meant that there was no hope of actually remembering it. My hope with doing the Core2k deck on Anki was to shore up my weakness in common vocabulary that WK didn't happen to cover, but as I mentioned before, I got frustrated and gave up on Anki. Question 6 was a grammar question, which I had no idea on, despite actively studying grammar and having completed all the N5 grammar points on Bunpro. Unfortunately, it seems that Bunpro can't prepare you for the N5 practice questions, let alone real world grammar usage. I'd already started to suspect that the only real way to "study" grammar was to soak it up the hard way via immersion.
After that, I did the
quiz here and got 13/15 right. However, I don't think that actually counts for anything, since their questions are obviously much easier than the ones at the first link, which are supposed to be representative of the real questions. The ones at nihongomaster by contrast had a lot of easy questions asking you stuff like "What does め mean?" or "What is the Japanese word for see" which are pretty trivial to anyone who's done any Japanese study at all. And I still had to make an educated guess on the one reading comprehension and listening comprehension question at the end of that quiz due to not being familiar with some of the words involved.
P.S. Lately I've been thinking about trying to take the N3 JLPT this December just for fun. I knew it was an ambitious goal, but after tonight, it seems downright hopeless. Oh well. As long as I don't give up, I'll make progress in Japanese eventually.