I recently reset my level; I am still on Level 6 and have been for a long time. I shifted my focus to grammar as much as possible, before someone introduced me to Ringotan, a Kanji writing app that happened to let you learn Kanji by a specific order…including WaniKani order.
Ringotan helped me get engaged into learning more Kanji and Vocabulary again (writing Japanese is fun by the way), so now I’m back here again. Resetting Level 6 allowed me to just focus on Levels 1-5 so I can keep practicing reviewing content I’ve learned about for some time. I’ve been burning reviews already from those levels since coming back, but I’m afraid to learn the rest of levels 6-10 where I’m at.
My review pile was around 400 but was cut down to 319; I’m now down to 255 so far (I’m going to stick to a set number per day but right now I feel highly engaged so I decided to do more reviews). Have you ever stuck around a level for awhile before moving on to consuming more Kanji/Vocabulary/Radicals? Can you give me advice on how to manage workload?
No. Stalled at level 1 for a while then had 7 day levels since. I just do all my reviews 4-8 times atleast per day and do all the lessons as they pop up.
What’s your time interval between reviews? I work 8 hours a day, but I recently tried finding ways to stuff studying in between openings (thanks Tanaka san for introducing me to sukima-time!).
I don’t think I’ve ever been in the position to save reviews. I do all of them as they come.
I save lessons though. I don’t study new content if I have 60 Apprentice items. Other people may have a higher cap but that’s my limit since I spend a lot of my studying on other aspects of the language, not just WK.
I don’t study new content if I have 60 Apprentice items.
That’s helpful. If a bunch of items that I review get demoted to Apprentice level, should I just pause learning new content for now until I get those over with so I don’t overwhelm myself?
For the sake of not having a ton of reviews come in at once, I tend to split large chunks up. If I have more than 30 reviews, I’ll go by type or level, depending on how they split, using the reorder script. It saves me the stress of having like 80 reviews come in at once.
My cap is currently nonexistent because I reset from 20 and I’m trying to get back up there as fast as I can, but the generally accepted cap for apprentice is ~100 and I think people like master to be at ~500. Once I get to level 20 these are the caps I’ll be using.
I do about 20 lessons a day, but that’s only because I remember all of the content so far. Once I begin to struggle I’ll go to 10, which is what I was doing before.
It depends on you and what your personal cap is. If your cap is at around 60 and suddenly you go up to 80 because you messed up a ton of reviews, then maybe you should- but also these demoted items are ones you are likely more familiar with than the fresh apprentice items, so it might be easier to remember these than the new ones. It depends on your memory and what you personally want.
Since level 5 I decided to hold at the end of the level until I whittle down the vocab to under 50 before moving on. Since then I’ve been passing the level in about 8 days but not moving on until the start of the next week. So 2 weeks per level. It’s been working well for me.
That is the general rule. I think a lot of people have their caps at 100 Apprentice, but as @smellslikerain mentioned, it depends on what you feel most comfortable with. Try limiting at 50 or 60 at first, then slowly raise (or lower) the bar as you go.
At first I felt like the reviews were so out of control when I first got to 五, that I kind of sank into a bit of a rut. Trying to tackle reviews, then feeling like there were too many to do, then trying to tackle reviews, then feeling there were too many to do.
But I noticed that when I got items past apprentice, they slow down so much that it became more manageable. Before taking on more lessons, I tried to get the items in apprentice below 100, and that was enough to get more into enlightened, and that made the reviews slow down to a point I felt like I could actually keep up with them. Now I’m aiming to keep around 50 in apprentice, which lets me focus on the ones that hold me back more. When I get near or below that number (or I feel ambitious), I take on more lessons.
The email you get at level 6 actually suggests throttling the reviews by controlling the lessons you pick up, which makes a big difference, but the bigger difference is how many items you have at the lower levels. You might find that sometimes you can breeze through the vocabulary because it’s all read-as-written or words you happen to already know, and other times you get stuck because of rendaku and other exceptions.
Well it speaks for itself, right? The past few levels I’ve really been staying consistent, took me a while to do so, but no more of those big breaks I took.
Reason for those breaks was to catch up on vocab lessons, I was really afraid of doing lessons because it increases the amount of reviews. I’ve been pushing through now though.
I honestly don’t recommend taking a break from lessons, if you want to manage your workload, you manage your apprentice pile by doing less lessons, instead of doing 20 daily or whatever you do, you can decrease it. Since you do want to slow down, probably go about 5 daily, if you go complacent it can be hard to get back into it.
At the same time though, you are motivated, feels like you could do more, but of course do too much and you could burn yourself out. Do what you can but don’t stress yourself out.
This looks good! And yeah, don’t stress yourself out, I agree. Me, it’s very important right now especially because I work in a hospital, so I tend to come back home exhausted; the video I linked in a comment in this thread is what got me to study while I’m work. That’s where a lot of my energy gets allocated to for most of my day. I feel like a steady consistency could have helped me last year too; I had almost an 8-month lasting break and it did terrible things to my motivation.
