Advice on huge vocab pile

I have a huge amount of vocab lessons available to me (like close to 500) and up to this point I’ve been doing kanji and radicals as soon as I get them and tried to do at least 15 vocab cards a day while keeping reviews manageable. However, this pile seems to just fill up whenever I think I am chipping away at it. Probably stems from a terrible habit I had early on of only doing kanji.

That being said, this has not negatively affected my kanji stats (at least I think it hasn’t). Was wondering if I should pause on the kanji while I go through the vocab, or whether I should just go full steam ahead and then potentially have a huge vocab pile at level 60 to work on lol

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If (one of) your goals for learning kanji include(s) reading native Japanese content, then studying vocab is quite important to do - you can’t do an adequate job of learning the kanji ‘readings’ without studying vocab (I tried that once, in my pre-WK days, via the use of paper flash cards, and it failed miserably).

I don’t know what your prior exposure to Japanese may have been - in my case, before coming to WK I was at perhaps an N5 level, having studied textbooks such as Japanese for Busy People, which had taught me a large number of vocabulary words (but in kana only). For me, that has meant that a lot of the vocab words that I have encountered in WK were words that I already knew (without knowing the kanji), and so learning the proper kanji was both a treat and an eye-opener, because it gave me important context for both the written and spoken language that I had previously not understood well at all.

If you don’t already have that kind of background with the language, then perhaps it might be useful for you to gain that kind of experience in tandem with going through WK.

If your pile keeps ‘filling up’, maybe try increasing the number of reviews that you do.

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I would slow down the Kanji/radicals (maybe 1 lesson each a day) and do more vocab lessons, while still trying to manage your number of reviews, rather than fully pausing. That way everything stays moving - good for motivation.

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This sounds like a fair enough strategy.

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You could try manually sorting through the vocab items available to you, and chose to focus on the ones that don’t have the reading you learnt with the kanji. That way you would be learning their alternative readings. There’s quite a lot of vocab that reads exactly as you read it and has a very obvious meaning too, so doing it this way might get you learning new vocab more efficiently?

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I was also close to 500 vocabularies available.

So I decided to take a break from learning kanji and focus on vocabulary. Since there were several words that I already knew or that weren’t that difficult, I managed to learn 10 to 20 words a day.

Now I only have 154 vocabularies to learn (I’ve been at level 18 for 17 days), so if you’re not in a hurry, it’s worth focusing only on vocabulary and leaving kanji aside for a bit.

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It looks like this might be WK’s default behaviour. If I don’t manually pick lessons now, it does 12 vocab and 1 kanji and 1 radical.

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Maybe start by looking through them and choose to “learn” the easy ones where the kanji and vocab reading are the same since you already know those. That helps you whittle down your pile. Another easy choice is to do the Katakana vocab because they are easy to read/learn and usually only have to do the meaning in the reviews if they are 100% katakana. For me the Katakana ones are fun because it’s fun to see how the borrowed words are altered. Next, I like to do things in small groups that have a common kanji in them and just learn around 5-10 a day. Having them clustered like that helps layer everything in your memory and adds to your recall.

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First time poster on the forum! I’ve been doing the 15 suggested lesson mostly everyday and personnally I find it more natural. I never have more than 50ish lesson in stock.

Not only do I get my kanji, but vocal that goes along with it. I level more slowly, but this isnt a sprint. Like other have said, slowdown and catch up!

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The brain is a pattern seeking machine. Learning the vocabulary in tandem with the kanji will reinforce your memory as vocab provides context on how the kanji is used.
It’s called interleaving: "Interleaving" To Memorize More Japanese