Advice regarding Kaniwani

So, I hope I made the topic in the right place.

Recently, I have felt the need to remember Japanese vocabulary, more as recall. I feel kind of frustrated that I know the meaning of the words but am not able to recall them when I need to.

Kaniwani should be helpful with this, but I wonder how I should go about it. Last time I tried it, was 10 levels ago. At that time, I had unlocked everything (?) and it was overwhelming. So, I wanted to know if there is a particular pattern others follow, so I can make it easier for me since I am already Level 23.

KaniWani items progress at a much faster rate than WaniKani (if I remember correctly). Even if not, the easiest advice would be simply to not unlock everything. Depending on your speed, you likely have already started burning items. One tactic to lightly ease yourself into it would be to only unlock levels in which you have most (or all) items at Enlightened or Burned and your current level. Reviewing current level items will help you progress in WaniKani, while only unlocking very old levels will help you prevent failing burn reviews as they come up.

If you feel comfortable with that load and feel you can support more, simply unlock another level one at a time until you’re satisfied. Personally, I use KaniWani as a time-burner, so I intentionally let reviews cluster up (I never do less than 300 reviews at a time). Sounds like my method isn’t a fit for you, so try to slowly add more to find your ideal pace.

For an alternate practice, if you use the WaniKani stats site and/or leech scripts, you could track with levels took you the longest/have the most leeches and unlock those ones first.

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KW has “lessons” now, so the things you unlock will not directly fill up your review queue. I was unlocking way too much in KW previously, it’s better to do lessons until your apprentice count reaches some number (say 100), and then wait for a few days to add new stuff. Even if everything seems easy, the vocab you have problem with will be buried under tons of stuff otherwise.

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You’ve probably already taken a look and discovered all this already, but just for the benefit of anyone else reading:

KaniWani has a settings page which allows you to control various aspects of how words appear. As acm2010 said, lessons do not directly become reviews, either. There is a setting called ‘only review items at or above’ which lets you restrict items such that they only unlock once they’ve reached a particular status in WK, such as apprentice, guru, burned, etc.

Based on your level you are probably just starting to burn some words, so I would recommend setting it to ‘burned’. This way you will be able to do a sensible number of lessons per day without getting overwhelmed. If you’d like to start covering the words faster you could set it to enlightened (these settings can always be changed later) and do a set number each day - perhaps enough to gradually ‘catch up’ and let you change it to master and so on.

You can lock and unlock individual levels on top of this by going to the ‘Vocabulary’ tab, so you could also lock particular levels to keep the number of lessons sensible, or just do it by level.

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