You are trying to burn each item before starting with a new level? That sounds really slow and inefficient. 
4 Likes
haha well, not each level. I was going through trying to focus on 100% on my reviews, and then thought I would batch each 5 levels and try to burn them all. However, yes, I am now rethinking that approach which kinda led me to this forum and seeing how other people do it.
I still have no intention of rushing through to only have mountains of reviews and lots of mistakes, which I see other people complain about, I think slow and steady is best. Butā¦ maybe not THIS slow and steadyā¦ It would be better to be able read sooner
3 Likes
That makes sense, and thatās my plan to read more and reinforce learning with that. Iām also doing just basics of grammar now, I think after I get past level 10 I will focus more on grammar, then return to get to level 20, then back on grammar, etc.
And also your pace is impressive while still retaining, (on the other post) I canāt move that fast, but yeah Iāll find a cadence that works for me.
1 Like
when i do all the new lessons every day and all the reviews every day it takes me 10-12 days. Are you doing all the new lessons on the day they appear? Can i say though that doing them in 10-12 days feels like doing a full time job. I can only do this because i have a part time job and have basically no friends and no other hobbies lol
2 Likes
doesnt it take about 6 months to burn an item?
2 Likes
Congratulations, and thank you for all your advice! You mention the undo script. I guess with it you would never fail anything, right? Or did you decide when to fail? Wouldnāt that betray the whole purpose of SRS? I think without the undo script it would be very difficult to keep the pace you have shown.
3 Likes
I would almost never fail Apprentice reviews because I knew they would come back soon enough anyway. Then basically the higher the SRS stage the more strict I would be in my reviews unless it was some vocab that felt super niche and I didnāt care much about. I wonāt lose sleep over not remembering
Suspension Of Indictment for instanceā¦
Before studying Japanese I learned Portuguese and Russian to an intermediate level and I used many different apps and SRS implementations to do that, so I already had a good feel for it when I started with WaniKani which helped a lot. That let me manage the load more efficiently from day one because I knew my limits and how the reviews would stack up in the long term if I overdid it.
As I mentioned on top, Iām really not an SRS purist. I believe that some people fetishize the system a little too much and think that you can really just mess it all up if you donāt adhere strictly to the schedule. I think itās certainly true to some extent: you donāt want to just autopass everything all the time and you need to use some common sense, but at the same time I canāt imagine that my Japanese would be any better now if I had used ārawā Wanikani without undo (in particular because I would probably have given up halfway through out of sheer frustration).
5 Likes
Got it, I guess it makes sense. I was starting to think about these things because Iāve been using vanilla wanikani for two months, without tweaking my lessons queue in any way, and my pace is two weeks per level approx. I am not in a hurry, but it is true that sometimes I stumble upon vocabulary words that I donāt care too much about (Iām still wondering what a āBig machine counterā is). I think Iām going to give your setup a try and see if I feel like Iām learning the same.
Again, thank you for your insights and congrats!
3 Likes
I think two weeks per level is a very reasonable pace unless youāre willing to invest a lot of time into WK every day like I did. Youāll get to level 30 in a little over a year and hopefully by that time youāll also have elementary grammar and non-kanji vocab skills which should let you engage meaningfully with native content.
That being said personally I would still use undo even in your situation, not necessarily to go faster per se but to reduce the load of unnecessary reviews due to silly typos or āclose enoughā answers that were rejected. That frees more time for more productive study!
Japanese uses a bunch of counters for various items (like how we say āone pack of cigarettesā, āone ream of paperā etcā¦ except used for basically everything). å° is used to count things like cars for instance, hence ābig machine counterā. So you donāt say āfive carsā in Japanese, you say āfive å° of carsā.
ę¬ is used to count tubular things like trees or pens for instance (which often confuses me because at first I think the sentence is talking about books but then I remember that the counter for books is not ę¬, itās å).
I find this stuff a lot easier to learn in context (where you get actual examples of things being counted) so I certainly wouldnāt worry too much about that on WaniKani.
11 Likes
Thank you for the explanation, that makes sense!
Yes, many of my mistakes are due to these kind of things, and I hate it when it happens. I have also installed the reorder script, lets see how it goes. I still want to do vocab, I have no intention to skip it, but I think that with both tools learning should be a bit less painful.
2 Likes
Just remember that any increase in lessons will increase your review load progressively over the course of a few weeks as the items slowly work they way up the SRS intervals, so be careful not to brutally increase your number of lessons if youāre not prepared to deal with the fallout.
That being said I do think that the first 20 to 30 levels are well worth doing as fast as youāre comfortable, you get a huge return over time invested it terms of being able to read Japanese. After level 35 or so I wouldnāt recommend keeping that pace though, your time will almost certainly be better spent studying other things or just reading Japanese.
When I was doing one level/week I spent so much time doing WK every day that my girlfriend complained about itā¦ First thing after waking up was doing reviews and lessons in bed, last thing before sleep was doing reviews, and then Iād have a bunch of smaller sessions throughout the day to advance Apprentice items and spread the load. And thatās with abusing the āundoā!
4 Likes
Wait till you get to ābread loaf counterā 
As for the undo (double-check) script:
I find it useful, but itās also very tempting to abuse it, due to the gamification of WK and wanting to keep climbing that level ladder 
I try to use it sparringly, but some times I slip up and go overboard 
- typos (obviously not an issue)
- get a wrong answer but then donāt open the explanations just have another think at what the answer could be - if I get it right then all good and I move on
- if the answer doesnāt come for either meaning or writing but I know the other one, Iāll look at the relevant info for the question and decide if I want to put in the correct answer and move on or I mark it as failed
- if I canāt recall either meaning or writing, I fail the item outright
Even so, I am maybe abusing the script butā¦ oh, well itās only my learning that will suffer, no-one elseās 
6 Likes
I think itās a little bit hard to be a purist if youāre already immersing in native media anyway. Youāre going to constantly be seeing what you learn in the wild. So the spacing in the repetition is lost anyway.
A thought worth expressing further because some people really do hold off on engaging with actual material for fear of disrupting their precious SRS timings. Holding off on learning the real language these characters are part of. Wanikani honestly doesnāt give enough context (nor is it meant to) to really convey what half the lessons actually mean properly anyway. Like the å° counter talk right now.
11 Likes
Iām also speedrunning WK in vanilla mode 
There is a runaround or āshortcutā if you want: Open two
Windows in your browser. If you forget a kanji, use the first one to lookup the meaning/reading (for kanji only), do your reviews in the second window.
If you make a mistake, just close your review window and open it again (your mistake will NOT be recorded).
It seems sillyā¦ But it is a lifesaver considering how just one typo in Apprentice 4 stage can delay you for 48 hours 
seriously hindering your progress 
3 Likes
I think I did this before switching to Smouldering Durtles around level 10.
I commend you for going through 50 levels that way!
1 Like
Hey Simias,
Congratulations on getting to level 60. I usually donāt read level 60 celebration posts, but I just saw your post mentioning it in the āIām giving up on WKā thread and based on what I read from you, your approach to language learning is similar to mine, so I was curious to see what worked and not worked for you as you are about 6 months ahead (I started in April 2023).
I also sped run but only until leveling up to 31, then slowed down to 2 weeks a level. I also subscribe to Bunpro but I started just a month after starting WK. I also started the writing thing after I read a post from someone on Bunpro who did this for 2 years, but I gave up after a couple of months as it was starting to take too much time. Iām still thinking of doing it again, but on a targeted basis, as it might help me not mix up similar kanji.
Itās interesting that you sped up through the last 10 levels while Iām considering either not doing them or doing them slowly as I donāt know if itās going to be worth the time to do them.
3 Likes
I was just dead set on finishing one way or an other, but I also wanted to put WK behind me and that felt like a decent way to speed up the process. I donāt know if it was worth it objectively, but I donāt regret doing it either.
1 Like
Big congrats!
I agree on your point here especially. Almost 50 years living in this world, not stopping is the best way to do things in my life. Like in my marathon, even if I need walk, as long as I donāt stop, I will reach the finish line.
-wawan-
4 Likes
hmm, more like 3 months I think. But I could be wrong, either way still too long.
The fastest time possible to burn an item is 5 months and 24.5 days. But to burn 100% of the items in 5 levels, it takes a year or longer realistically because failing just one item in the enlightened stage, stuff you last reviewed 4 months prior, adds an additional 5 months.
As an example, I have already burned 3,226 items, but I still have 40-50 items left to burn in levels 1 to 5, items I first learned a year ago, and I wonāt burn them all for at least 5 more months, by which time I could be leveling up to level 60. You donāt learn all items in a level equally. Some stick well while others donāt stick at all. Trying to burn 100% of the items in a level (or 5 levels) before moving on is gambling that you wonāt fail reviews. You should seriously reconsider it.
7 Likes