Always at 0 reviews and 0 lessons, will workload pick up?

WaniKani
#4

Yes and no. I’ve also been able to keep things at 0/0 fairly easily with a schedule that allows me to take 5 minutes every hour for WK, so if you do that it becomes pretty easy to stay on top of reviews.

As you go on though, your higher guru, master, and enlightened items will come back in waves to give you a higher workload. So you won’t have a “full” workload until you’re burning things.

If it feels too slow I’d recommend trying to level more efficiently (you can do it about once per week). One other thing I’ve been doing myself is spreading out my lessons over the course of a day intentionally, i.e. only letting myself do 5 lessons an hour. I find this helps to keep the content at a steady flow, and also helps my review accuracy.

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#5

Will it pile up? Yes. How much will it increase by? Depends on your accuracy, levelup/lesson schedule, etc. Will there be days with 200+ reviews? Wait til burn reviews come in.

My guess is that you’ve been going relatively slow (level-up wise), despite constantly doing reviews, which is why it may seem like the workload is low. Increase level up speed, increase lessons/day, then maybe you’ll start feeling a crunch.

You could, if you’d prefer not to rush, also spend this time studying other aspect of Japanese, such as listening, non-kanji vocab, grammar, culture, etc.

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#6

At my current pace its 10 days to lvl up, this afternoon I’ll be lvl 10. What do I do to lvl up a little faster to get it in that once per week range?

#7

Since you’ve got time, and are always on top of your reviews, then the simple answer is, “No”. Your workload will mostly stay the same. There will be times when you’ll definitely get more than you’re used to, reason being items that are about to get Mastered, Enlightened or Burned coming back. After they’re done, you’ll be back to your regular schedule… until the next time.

#8

Once you level up immediately do all your radical lessons. Once your radicals are guru’d immediately do all the kanji lessons they unlocked, and any outstanding kanji lessons if you have any. Your goal is to guru the kanji, so if you do this you’ll be going as fast as possible.

It helps to use a reorder script so you can do these lessons first. Also make sure you really learn the mnemonics for the radicals/kanji, since if you mess them up too much it’ll slow you down.

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#9

The fastest time that you can level up in is 6 days and 20 hours (this time is even shorter for the first 3 levels and some of the later levels). To achieve this, (or something a bit more realistic like 7 days), you need to do your radical lessons and reviews for your current level as soon as they come in. Once those radicals are at guru level (should take about 3 and a half days at the fastest pace), you’ll unlock the next set of kanji for your level. At this point, you need to have done all the lessons for your kanji, so that they all have moved into your review queue. Now all you need to do is guru at least 90% of the kanji for your level which also takes around 3 and a half days at the fastest pace.

It helps to have a reorder script, so that you can do your radical and kanji lessons before your vocab lessons.

The key to this strategy is doing your reviews for the kanji and radicals as soon as they become available. You also have to be pretty accurate (especially on the radicals).

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Can't progress at my own pace?
#10

Short answer: Yes, workload will pick up.
lvl 9 was fairly chill as far as i remember.
When you hit the mid 20’s or even earlier you’ll regret wanting more reviews.
Im going a little slower at this point because im a fairly busy person. but i still have +200 reviews every day.
If you have time to spare, consume more native content :wink:

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#11

I’m only at level 10, but i’ve already got 75 lessons i’m procrastinating working on. Don’t worry. It gets plenty harder.

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#12

If you feel like things are going slow for you, it may be a good time to try and reach out to other areas of your Japanese learning. Having a good pace in WK feels nice, but it doesn’t mean much if you know 800+ kanji and lack the knowledge to listen, speak, or read the language to apply your kanji learning ( I may be speaking from experience :wink:)

Wanikani doesn’t teach a lot of vocab that shows up as kana-only. Adding another SRS platform like Anki or Torii can be useful for teaching you that extra vocab. Additionally, studying grammar is pretty tough. I use bunpro at a snail’s pace, but it helps me slowly introduce more grammatical structures into my tool belt so I may one day be able to comprehend a typical Japanese sentence a little better. I know a lot of people use the Genki books, Minna no Nihongo, or Tae Kim’s guide to Japanese as reference material for learning grammar.

As previously mentioned, just engaging in native material can also make a big difference. Having exposure to the language from people who really know the language can help build some connections in your brain, which may help make your other learning areas easier.

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#13

You might want to try to work through a textbook like Genki or Tae Kim’s too. You can use Bunpro with both. (Tae Kim’s is free and, frankly, pretty awesome.)
EDIT: Oh. You already mentioned both. Oops. :slight_smile:

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#14

I’m literally at lvl 10 in like 2 hrs, and you get those amount of lessons at the beginning of each lvl so I’m assuming the “harder” isn’t going to be coming until later levels, which is where this question was directed

#15

Thanks I’ll look into that reorder script

#16

Cool thanks

#17

Check this guide. Summary: install reorder script to level up in 6 day 20 hours. IF you really feel like the load is easy.

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#18

Some kanji are harder to learn than others. (Complexity and meaning.) Later levels also have more vocab. (I know this from looking at level 40 kanji while bored/procrastinating.)

#19

I agree with the whole post, but I’d recommend this reorder instead.

The mainstream reorder can lead to bad habits, such as skipping vocab and using reorder during reviews. This one from Seanblue only works on lessons and it allows to choose how many items of each (radicals, kanji and vocab) one wants to do in a given lesson session, which is indeed the only thing we need to level up fast.

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#20

What I’ve been doing to avoid abusing the reorder script is only turning it on when I unlock a new level to get at the radical levels right away, or when the radicals unlock the new Kanji (less so in this case though since I normally don’t have any lessons blocking them though). Once those are done I disable the script.

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#21

I’ve sort of been doing the same, except without the script. Whenever I level up, I paste something like this into the browser console, which lets me just do the radical lessons plus the first four vocab.

$.jStorage.set('l/lessonQueue', $.jStorage.get('l/lessonQueue').filter(r => r.rad))

It’s mostly because I don’t want to install any browser extensions, but I suppose another advantage to not having a reorder script is that there’s less temptation to use it all the time. I also only do this when leveling up. For the mid level kanji lessons, there’s no issue because I’ve already cleared out all the vocab lessons over the last 3.5 days. The problem with levelups is that it gives you a large amount of new vocab lessons at the same time as the radical lessons, so it is very helpful to be able to defer those to a more convenient time.

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#22

It will definitely pick up. As a couple others have mentioned, there are a few big load jumps over the course of WaniKani, mostly when items start reaching master, enlightened, and especially burned. This is because these reviews will start to add up with the apprentice to guru stuff that you’re already reviewing on a daily basis. It’s a long journey out from level 10, but the fast levels around level 48-60 are the largest jump in load I’ve gotten so far.

I definitely understand the feeling though, but nowadays I sometimes wish it’d slow down a bit :sweat_smile:

Good luck!

5 Likes
#23

Supplement your learning with grammar and join an absolute beginner book club! Bunpro is pretty good if you’re at work and want to do some learning on the computer, and it is also a SRS system. Some people are into Torii for additional vocab.

Basically diversify your learning, remember WK is primarily for Kanji memorization.