Hello everybody!
I’d like to say, first of all, that i’m really enjoying my journey here on WaniKani, it’s been surprisingly fun and entertaining to study japanese with mnemonics.
I started about two months ago and I’ve been doing my lessons and reviews almost always when they’re available, getting, at the lowest, an 80% “correct” rate (I forgot what it’s called).
My question is: i’ve seen people say that the first two levels would take like a week each, atmost, but i’m still at level 2. I don’t know if it’s because of my “correct” rate, or because the first levels might be slow, or even because I might have problems with some kanji and won’t unlock new vocabulary that use them.
Thank you for your time!
EDIT: Okay, so I goofed up pretty bad. Got mixed up with a thing on the “Heatmap” script and my brain fried up for a bit. However, thank you all for your nice and useful replies! I’ve read them all and will be taking into account all you guys said, but I don’t think i’ll be answering the comments since I actually haven’t been practicing for 2 months, but rather 2 weeks, which I guess is kind of on track.
Thank you all for the help
80% is still really good, I think the ideal is 85% or higher? So it shouldn’t be your accuracy that’s slowing you down, at least not by that much. How often are you doing your reviews? Ideally you should be doing them at least once every day (“ideally” probably two or even three sessions, but that also depends on your schedule; not everyone has the time to be able to sit down and do them more than once a day, which is fine)
I have been going at a solid 20 lessons a day pace and I’m going to hit the two month mark next week. For reference I have not missed a day and I usually do all of my reviews in the morning and evening. I reached level seven two days ago.
To level up you only need to guru the kanji. You don’t have to guru the vocab.
if you’re going by the default settings, you’ll have to get through vocab lessons before getting to the next level radicals and kanji lessons though. But, there is no need to guru any items to move onto the radical lessons and so on.
Maybe it would be worth reading up a bit about how WK works to allow you to plan out your use of wanikani better?
If you hover your mouse cursor over the bar below level progress it will tell you the conditions for leveling up. In general you need to get 90% of the kanji in a level past guru to level up. For level 2 I think there are 36 kanji so you should need to get 33 of them to guru. So if you’re struggling with 4 or more kanji in the level you won’t be able to pass it until you can get them that far. Since I see ekg already hit you with some useful links, I’ll just add on this useful guide. The Ultimate Guide for WK by jprspereira
As you can see it says 0 out of 30 kanji passed, you can also see there is 33 kanji in my level. You don’t need get all of them done to level up, and you also need to get them to guru to pass. You see the 5 bars under each kanji and radical? Once my radicals get to the full 5, I’ll unlock the other 6 kanji, in which case I just need to learn them and do my reviews until I get at least 30 of my kanji at the full 5 bar. After that I’ll be leveling up.
You can click on your kanji, radical or vocab and check when the next review for that is coming up, if you want to level up fast, do your reviews the same hour the review becomes available. I’ve been doing that, and am consistently leveling up every 7 days. Of course, you need to make sure you get the kanji/radical correct, otherwise it will go down 1 bar.
Oh my, i’ve goofed pretty baddly. I got the “Heatmap” script and saw “Done daily: 57/57” and my brain just thought “Okay, that means i’ve used WaniKani everyday the past 57 days”.
That was quite bad, thanks for calling me out! I thought I was practicing for longer than I actually was… I’ll close this post now
Personally I recommend focusing on accuracy and not on any specific timetable (unless you’re going to be in Japan on a certain deadline), and not comparing yourself to others on the forum. I’ve been on WK for like 5 years or so now, have had times where I’ve done the “optimized” lesson schedules to get through them fastest, etc. I always burn out under a mountain of hundreds of reviews. I have frequently made it to around level 10 or 11 and had too many things in life derail my time to spend on WK and ended up resetting back to 1 because I forgot too much. Now I’m just going at my own pace, focusing much more on grammar, speaking, listening, and vocab (from other resources) than on kanji, and I feel that I’m doing just fine. That said, I would recommend a lifetime membership (particularly when they’re usually on sale around New Year’s) if you’re going to take things at a snail’s pace or you’re not going to be getting good value out of the product.
Someone pointed out to me that I was way ahead in kanji learning compared to my level of grammar, speaking, and listening, and I took that advice to heart and have started setting deadlines/goals for my Japanese grammar, speaking, and listening lessons but am just doing WK at a fairly slow and steady pace for now until I get to a point in the rest of my learning where I don’t have enough kanji knowledge for the level I’m at. Once I’m more proficient with the language in general I’ll pick up the pace on the kanji. While I think you should figure out your own method and what you can handle, if you want to know my approach for context, I am still at a beginner level of Japanese and I only learn 3 new kanji and 9 new vocab per day, 5 days a week (in general I think it’s best to keep a 1K:3V ratio because that’s about how many there are overall in WK). If I get new radicals I do 18 per day instead of doing vocab that day (which will knock them all out in 1-2 days depending on the level).
In summary: I think the race to finish WK is highly overrated and counter-productive for many people, ESPECIALLY if you are a beginner to Japanese. If you’re not the type who can stick with it or you’re stressing too much over speed to the point it’s distracting, I’d recommend not focusing on it. Accuracy, followed by somewhat regular use of kanji/vocab you’ve already learned (via grammar lessons or writing to people IRL) is most important. There’s a lot of factors to how fast you can go anyways, including whether you’re in classes, self-studying, have a job, in school, have kids, other responsibilities, etc. but that’s my two cents.
More importantly I’d advise against taking more than a couple weeks off if you have any life events come up that get in the way. Getting back on the WK horse is way harder than just taking it slow. You’ll forget a lot of things. Use vacation mode for sure if you foresee being away from it for more than a few days.
