It’s the main reason I do it, so people can point out anything I get wrong lol. Best way to learn is from your mistakes, frustrating as it is.
I feel the (manga) book club difficulty progression is something like this:
|ABBC|-------------|BBC|------------------------------------------------------|IMC|
From the manga side of things, the absolute beginner book club often has beginner book club level manga, only read at a slower pace.
The beginner book club will read similar manga at a faster pace. But you may also see simpler manga without furigana.
The intermediate manga club goes at an even faster pace without much concern for the existance of furigana or the number of words on a page.
If you keep at it long enough, constantly learn more material, build up pattern recognition, and then build up reading stamina, you’ll find yourself naturally progressing from one club to the next.
It’s interesting that the first thought お父さん had was to try and open the door from the inside instead of trying to find out where Yotsuba went. They’re both very easy-going people…
BAsed on the beginning of the book when よつば thought a few kids outside school meant a festival was happening, and was amazed by how many houses there are in the new neighbourhood, and was waving to everyone like she expected to know everyone there, I’m assuming they came from a very small rural village, where they didn’t have to worry about her wandering off very far. It’s much like when she wandered off to the park I guess, where he basically said ‘she’ll come back when she’s hungry’
At least he taught her not to talk to strangers i guess!
This is pretty much my experience with Azumanga Daioh, which is another manga series by the same author as Yotsuba. On paper, it has a pretty low reading level, but the lack of furigana, occasional pages with very dense text (like weeks 2 and 3 of this club), and lots of strange cultural references and weird puns make it hard to decipher at times. There are many times when I read Japanese where I can pronounce what’s being said, even with kanji, but it leaves me thinking “what?!”
That’s why, a few days ago, I decided to start focusing on grammar again, along with trying to learn more common vocabulary besides the words WaniKani teaches. WaniKani has done wonders for my ability to read Kanji, but I feel like my kanji knowledge is far beyond my actual reading level, if that makes any sense.
almost fell behind, but i’m catching up.
couple of thoughts:
yomitan can sort of screw me up sometimes. take this panel:
のきれいじゃない方だ
on first parse i had no idea what this meant because i was trying to read the の as if it was the first part of the word. without really thinking about, i went straight for yomitan. if you hover and yomitan the の it tells you that のき means “eaves”; that れいじ means midnight…
i sit there for a minute trying to figure out what she’s trying to say about midnight eaves before copying the text into notepad and trying to space it out into parts that make sense to me.
[の] + [きれい] + [じゃない] + [方] + [だ]
i don’t know what the の is doing here, but i recognise きれい as “pretty” and じゃない as “not”, and 方 as direction (?) and that makes a little more sense… being lazy and going straight for yomitan sent me down the wrong trail, but actually trying to find words that i recognise inside of a sentence gets me closer sometimes.
Yotsuba’s line is appending to what she said in the prior panel, so this is 「おとなりさんのきれいじゃなう方だ」.
Possibly it’s connecting back to the previous bubble, like a delayed continuation of the sentence.
あ！おとなりさん．．．のきれいじゃない方だ
But yeah, I kinda just… skipped over that の myself. 
方 can also refer to one side of a comparison, the smoothest English translation (at least in this context) would be “one”.
It took me a bit of looking at those two pages to realize that の is probably a continuation from the last panel. The combined text makes sense as a sentence. Manga likes to skip punctuation almost everywhere and particles when it can. Getting used to how to read them is a bit of work on its own sometimes.
方 is “one” here like Belthazar said. It’s a direction / method word, and Japanese loves to use directions for things instead of referring directly to something. This gets used to refer to all kinds of things without directly pointing them out and it’s considered more polite than just being like “that person”, similar to the こちら and such usage when talking to people.
ah yes - I also tripped over the の there. I was wondering for a while “what on earth is a nokirei?”
But then I went to run it by jisho, where the IME instantly converted it to の綺麗 in the entry box and suddenly it made sense. Another case where kanji would have made things easier!
For the people further along Wanikani than me? How heavy do the reviews get? I’m occasionally getting 300 reviews in a day and it’s a bit of a struggle.
I have reduced my items that I learn, as I prefer about 50 reviews or less a day at the moment.
So, I went from 15 to 10 to 7 to 5 lessons daily. Every time I felt like I had too many, I reduced. If you feel like it’s too much, it’s the only way to consistenly bring the number of reviews down. But, if you have an urgent need to finish Wanikani, it will impact that significantly.
If you check the second block in the table of contents under “Level 1 is slow: why?” there is a workload graph.. which looks probably about right.. I’ve never modeled it. From that, about 21 / 22 is max reviews.
Ya, I’ve done those kinds of review counts and it can be a bit much sometimes. The bigger problem with srs is that high review amounts piles up super fast. It may be fine for a while and then you hit a patch where some smaller amount is it before feeling like burn out.. and then those high count days turn a few days of not clearing the reviews into a 500 backlog. I’ve done that.. a bunch of times, lol..
Like SarahSh said, lessons control review flow. Adjusting the amount also lags by a lot before it stabilizes. It’s easy to increase the reviews and harder to decrease. You kind of need to keep the next couple weeks in mind when doing lessons and if it starts to feel like you need to slow down do it sooner rather than later, it’s always easier to increase. Each lesson is 2 reviews that same day, 1 the next, and 2 days after. If you did 15 lessons that’s 30 reviews you add on top of previous ones every day.
The way I usually stabilize them is to reduce the lessons and then just don’t do all my reviews.. I’m usually hovering around 180 - 220 or so daily and some days (like last week recently) I’m just not up for that much. I had 350 some backlog earlier this week because I was only doing about 80 - 100 a day or so. Do what you can and let them build up a bit. With the reduced lessons it won’t be adding as much and then more of the amount you review is going to old stuff rather than new lesson reviews. You do have to eventually pick back up again or it will build that backlog until you get out of the old stuff coming up. But, it does let you balance the loads a bit..
Hmm according to this chart I’m near the worst of it. So hopefully it won’t be getting that much worse. I really don’t want to leave reviews undone before I reach level 30, since at the moment Wanikani is pretty much my only form of learning Japanese and I’m still dedicated to learning the language lol.
Don’t leave them permanently undone, just slow down temporarily and then when motivation picks up again the lower lessons and backlog should have lowered your daily reviews. Then you have to increase the review count again to get out of the backlog.. and then when that is cleared.. you can decide whether to increase lessons and go faster again. Clearing my small backlog I had resulted in doing a bit more than my like ~200 average area for this week and it’s mostly cleared now. But the lower lessons that past week have lowered my current amount.. until I start increasing again.
It depends what you’re doing and how and such.. I shifted vocab study out of WK earlier in the year. I can adjust speeds on vocab / kanji / grammar separately now if I feel I need a bit less study time, but still want to keep say vocab going at a certain pace. WK is mostly just kanji for me.. and the odd vocab I throw in here and there. I’m doing about 7 - 9 day levels currently. I may keep that pace until mid 30s and then stay closer to 9 and after level 40 I’ll probably slow that to 10 - 12 maybe.. I want to focus on vocab and grammar more after I get most of n3 and 1000 most frequent kanji finished.
Mostly, it’s just being aware motivation fluctuates and that high workloads can cause burn out when low motivation hits pretty easily if you don’t have a way to deal with that situation. Letting my reviews be a bit more flexible was my way of dealing with that.
I’m not further along that you obviously, but when i feel reviews are getting a bit much, i just don’t do any lessons at all for a few days, just the reviews. I like wanikani, but I don’t want it to be my sole learning focus! I have anki decks to do, plus grammar studying, and reading etc. there are only so many hours in the day.
I’m the same way. I watch my number of reviews for the week like a hawk and try to time my lessons based on that. I usually do 10 or 15 on days where I don’t have a pile of Enlightened items coming back for a potential burn review.
For example, I currently have 62 items awaiting review with 19 more coming later today, for 81 total at the end of the day. If I were to do zero reviews until Tuesday, I would still have 49 items coming back for reviews that day, meaning there are probably a fair number of master/enlightened items coming that day. Sunday is pretty light, so I’ll probably do a couple of lessons there, and maybe a few on Monday. That’ll increase the number of reviews on Tuesday, but not by a lot.
I was gonna go on and on about how you can time your reviews correctly if you do lessons on certain days, knowing that Apprentice 4 items take 2 days to come back (thus potentially avoiding extra work on Tuesday if you get those items to Apprentice 4 on Monday), but at that point, it feels like I’m trying too hard to optimize WaniKani.
Since so many people have issues with getting destroyed by reviews because they can’t predict how many reviews they’ll have in the future, I think WaniKani could take a few lessons from Anki and change the way the review algorithm works. Let the users select easy days with fewer reviews coming back, give items a variable amount of time before coming back (plus or minus a few hours each time an item is reviewed), a review cap the user can set, stuff like that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a character come back in reviews after 6 months, before getting it wrong, seeing the answer, then using that knowledge to burn vocabulary words I really shouldn’t have burned. It’s because they all come back at the same time because that’s how I did the lessons.