Summer is coming and I’ll have a pretty sizable break from classes, and I was hoping to use that time to really work through WaniKani. However, I’m hesitant to go for the 1 week pace because I’ve burnt out before, so I’m trying to get a good grasp on exactly how much time I’ll need to dedicate per day (also working through a couple Anki decks and the latter part of Genki I so I’m trying to plan everything out well).
Thanks in advance for any replies!
My dashboard timeline calendar thing says 139 (on average), but I think this number will fluctuate some between people going full speed too. Your general accuracy during reviews and how you’re spreading lessons probably influences it quite a bit.
Good point about review accuracy, forgot about that part. I feel like I could maybe manage that pace over the summer so that’s good to know. Thanks a bunch for posting! 
For the absolute fastest speed you have to do 3 tightly scheduled sessions to hit the interval marks. Each session will have anywhere from 60-120 items, and you can knock them out in 30-45 minutes. So it’s not the total time or number of items, but whether or not you can hit those sessions regularly in order to catch the items as soon as they’re up for review.
I get around 200-300 reviews per day average at about 95% general accuracy. After starting some late levels, it isn’t unusual to get over 500 reviews in a day at least once a week, especially on days I level up.
Good luck if you decide to go full speed!
If you have 3 hours per day for WaniKani you should be fine
I recently restarted learning Japanese in earnest and as such have been leveling up WK as fast as possible. My pace is currently 1 week per level. Every Sunday I level up, and on that Sunday I focus mostly on the radicals since they determine when I unlock all the kanji. So I don’t go as hard through the first batch of kanji, but I usually get them done either that Sunday or Monday. I’ve been doing this since level 18ish, and so far it’s been pretty good. My Sundays are a little rough, but not too big of a deal.
I don’t know how many reviews I have per day as a max, because I do them as soon as they come in. I’m a student too (and also at home due to good ol’ ‘Rona) so it’s easy enough for me to just knock them out once they pop up. I also use Flamin’ Durtles app, so if I’m out and about, I can knock them out with out much problem.
I don’t use any reorder scripts. I do use the undo script because I type rather fast and am quite prone to typos here and there. All that, coupled with the fact that I’m not an especially adept learner, is to say that it is very much doable. You just have to be willing to put in the time. I’m sure there are better methods out there than what I do, but it’s the routine that I’ve gotten into and it’s what stuck.
As well, I just completed the Tango N5 deck and am now working through the Tango N4 deck. So I’m working on retiring the reviews from the first as well as going through N4. I just do all my anki reviews in the morning and that’s that.
Best of luck to you. I look forward to seeing the number on your badge ticking!
Thanks for the long reply and the good luck!
Sorry to ask more of you, but personally how much time do you tend to dedicate to Wanikani, especially on your Sundays?
On an unrelated note, where did you get that Tango N4 deck? Can’t find it on Anki and would love to check it out (can’t find a good N4 deck that I really like).
As much as the prospect of speeding through Wanikani might be enticing, might I suggest something different.
Since your free time is temporary until your classes start back up again, why not use this opportunity to establish a consistent WK habit instead of speeding through WK during the break. I mention this because I get a bad feeling that once your classes start up again, you won’t have all the free time you had before, you’ll get overwhelmed with the reviews during your months “cramming” wanikani and you’ll feel discouraged, tired and drop it once they start piling up.
I’ve been working on WK for about a year. I have a full time, 40 hour job and I’ve been sticking with this routine that ensures I keep learning and I have time everyday for WK.
First, I do 10 vocab words a day. If I come across radicals, I’ll finish them along with the remaining vocab from the last level since they’re simple enough.
Then, once I come across Kanji, I do 10 a day. Usually there’s 33 kanji in a level more or less so depending on how I feel, I’ll cram the extras in the last day or take a “mini break” and only do 3 the next day.
As for reviews, I’ll do reviews as I have time. No real set schedule and this is more based on when you’re available in a day.
So you may ask “what do I do with all the rest of my time?” which is a good question. Do other, Japanese language related activities. Learn grammar through books or videos, practice reading and creating sentences with the grammar point you learn, use Bunpro if you dont like books, listen to shows in Japanese to get familiar with the language.
Point is, WK is meant to be brief periods of time in the day to remind your brain to remember words over a long period of time. All of the other points I mentioned take much more time and comprehension. Of course, depending on where you are in grammar will have you do different things that may or may not be what I listed above. They’re just examples.
To this end, I think this is the best of both worlds where you’re being efficient with your time and attacking Japanese from two different directions (vocab and exposure).
If you do reviews as they come up and keep your lessons and reviews at 0/0 daily, you can expected about 300-500 reviews on level-up days.
At around your level 10, your days would typically look like this (based on my own data):
Sunday: 90
Monday: 17
Tuesday: 406 (level up)
Wednesday: 153
Thursday: 173
Friday: 9
Saturday: 453
This was my worst day before fast levels hit:
My two cents: if you have a lot of extra time, then by all means you should aim to go full speed. You will get 2 days/week where you will have to dedicate about 3-5 hours for WK, but the rest of the week will be relatively light and you can study other material like grammar, listening/reading comprehension, etc. However, you also mentioned fear of burn out. If you feel that going full-speed WK becomes too overwhelming, feel free to slow down. WK level 60 is not the endgame of Japanese learning, and it’s better that you reach your goals slowly than not at all.
Oh yeah I totally agree.
I’ve been working on building good WK study habits and wanted to take the opportunity to ramp up a bit more since I feel like I’m comfortable with raising my pace a bit on WK, but I wanted to get some knowledge and information on the amount of time people have to commit to stay at the fastest pace. That way, I can decide for myself whether or not it’s a feasible long-term plan for when my classes do start back up.
Ask away! Lord knows I’ve asked more questions than I can count!
I’m not entirely sure because I break my study periods up, but on Sunday I usually spend around an hour getting through my main lessons.
I don’t worry super much on my vocab lessons as I focus on learning those in earnest when they hit my reviews. However, one thing I do when doing kanji lessons, and this might be super obvious for some, but when it is a rather concrete mnemonic, I spend a not insignificant amount of time actually picturing the mnemonic in my head. I found that before I started doing that, I was having a harder time holding onto the kanji in my memory. I keep vividly picturing the mnemonic each time for at least the next few reviews, and by then I’ve usually got the kanji down pat. One thing to note is that for more abstract kanji, it’s harder to make a physical picture in my head, but oh well.
Again, perhaps that’s painfully obvious to the people here, but it’s been helpful to me!
As for the Tango Decks, I emailed Matt vs Japan with proof of purchase at his massimmersionapproach emailand he’ll send you the deck.
It’s nothing official or anything, it’s just a courtesy to the company that sells the book. I just took a picture of the amazon receipt. If you’re able to spend 25 bucks, I would definitely recommend it. All the kanji are in i+1 format from the get go. And I’m super lazy and don’t wanna sentence mine yet, so it works pretty well. The native audio is great too.
This has been answered in detail here
Basically it ramps up until level 60.
I’m personally currently at around 150-300 per day. It varies massively.
The average daily review count is at 185.
The MIA N5/N4 decks? I don’t think so. They are meant to be done after RRTK so it has been fully “kanjified” from the get go.
I made the N5 deck myself by hand so I did the same.
So yeah since I didn’t do RRTK and I was around level 7 in WK at the time it was a bit rough. But eventually my kanji knowledge caught up through WK + reading immersion (reading subtitles). I tend to keep SRS time (anki+WK) the same as immersion time at this point.
I did get the N4 from Matt though. Now I’m about 52% in and it’s pretty smooth. I have a harder time with the kanji from the sentences I mine but I reckon by the time I get WK level 50 that would catch up as well.
Not sure if I want to do the N3 deck after I’m done with the N4 though (Matt recommends against it), since I’m fully into sentence mining and immersion at this point. I want to spend more time in immersion + sentence mining and less on WK and Anki (hopefully I’ll be done with WK by December/January… 
)
My b, I meant to say that all the vocab are in i+1 sentences. Good catch!
I’m not sure if I’m gonna do the N3 deck either, we’ll see. I haven’t started sentence mining yet, instead electing for Tango and WK. A big part is building up my Morphman database, which Tango has helped a lot with so far.
I don’t know if you’ve watched any of OhTalkWho’s videos (his appeal comes from being a busy guy who still has time to make progress, etc) but some of his videos are talking about deep diving a show for sentence mining. Once I get done with Tango, I’ll see how I feel about N3 and then we’ll see about deep diving. Since I’m doing kanji the slow way (compared to RRTK, that is) I’m trying to let my kanji catch up a bit so I’m focusing more on the pure vocab and sentences instead of all that plus kanji.
We’ll see how goes though, cheers!
I’m getting 200-250 right now pretty consistently.
Keep in mind that there’s no burn reviews yet (I only started in January), so this number will get a bit higher.
It’s interesting to see how different the results are. I do use the lesson reorder script so I can do the radicals and then spread the rest of the lessons evenly throughout the week. Depending on the level, you’ll need to do about 20-30 lessons a day this way. I’ve also used the timeline to anticipate days with high workload to adjust when I do lessons to keep the distribution even and make sure I can handle it. So far I’ve only hit 300 once on a level-up day, so it can be managed.
My work is busy too, but I make sure I always do my morning and evening sessions at around the same time. I dropped other SRS systems for the time being, as I noticed that would burn me out for sure; for me personally focusing on WK for now seems to work out better than tackling too many things at once and I’m already having a way easier time picking up other things on the side due to the knowledge I gained.
The key to cruising through levels at roughly a week each is choosing your study times wisely.
IMO the best thing you can do is pick two times of day, 12 hours apart, that you will consistently have an opportunity to hop on WK. One or both of which generally having another spot 4 hours after.
If you do that you will hit all your reviews just as they become available, you’ll probably have the best retention for the early ones by not being late, and it really makes it a lot easier to cruise through without feeling burned out.
yep I know Dave… His video on how to use Subs2SRS got me started in Sentence Mining… 
But so far what I’ve been doing is pre-creating a subs2srs sentence “bank” of sentences from shows I’m going to mine from, then watching the show and noting which sentences I want to mine.
What I do is have the time stamp visible, have shareX running in the background and the moment I read a n+1 sentence I just hit print-screen. That way I don’t need to interrupt my viewing…
After I’m done watching I’ll go through the timestamps in the screenshots, then find those cards in the sentence “bank”, fill in the definition of the n+1 word, add native audio for the word, then move that card to a separate sentence mine deck.
It’s quite streamlined and has made sentence mining probably the most fun part of my studies.
I did try morphman but the results were pretty weird. It gave me a bunch of sentences with no new words from the core6K deck I made it sort… lol. Maybe I messed up when first running it… (I might not have pointed it to the N5 deck initially)
So I still have morphman installed but currently not using it to find me new sentences, just having it run recalc once a day so I know how many words I know plus it will build up it’s database.
So currently I’m just doing the reviews on the ?N5 deck (i’ve set a 6month retirement interval), completing the N4 deck (10 cards per day), and sentence mining (10-15 sentences per day) and ofc doing WK on the side. So all of this is eating up time that I could send in immersing.
I do think it’s ok for now. Once I’m done with the N4 deck I can just rely on sentence mining 15 sentences per day.
Once I’ve reached 2k mined sentences though I’ll have to decide on what to do next. Several options exist:
Also need to decide what to do with WK. I’ve so far been going at 7-8 days per level but I feel at this point I know enough kanji to make my immersion fairly comprehensible. So I might slow down at around lvl40 so I can have more time to immerse. Or I can just keep going and get it done with…
As for having morphman pick out cards, I think that’s a year or more in the future for me.
Yeah, that’s where I found Dave too actually. His s2s video and his morphman video.
That’s actually a really interesting way of doing sentence mining, I might have to steal that when I start eventually. I’m not really sure when to start the monolingual transition, probably after the N3 deck if I decide to do it. My basic plan was to wait until around lvl 30 so that I would be at over 1000 kanji, which is where I would be at if I did RRTK anyway. That said that, I’m pretty hooked on WK, so I’ll probably just keep blitzing through. Especially since the fast levels are in lvl 40 onward.
Also, there’s a pdf version of the DoBJG as well as a website that has a searchable index of the book (it uses an anki deck as a database, I think) if you’re interested in that. Although, I’ve heard that drilling DoBJG is pretty rough.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Cure Dolly and her Organic Japanese series, but I just finished going through her Japanese from scratch and the way she explains the structure of Japanese and how it actually works was incredibly enlightening. She teaches why things are the way they are instead of treating them as just grammar points. If you’ve got the time, I would highly recommend it. The videos are on average 15 mins, but she talks really slow, so I watched the whole series on 2x speed.
3 hours? Really? I’m not trying to judge but I spent like an hour a day maybe. I used to level up about every 9 days, but ever since I got stuck on a level for 14 days I’ve been leveling up every 7.5 days. I do about 200 reviews a day, looking at things statistically, that’s 18 second for each item (9 for reading/meaning). Given that I tend to distract myself midway through my reviews I can see how that adds up to more time than usual but still…