How fast you want to go is up to you, as others have said, you don’t necessarily have to finish in exactly 2 years. It’s totally ok if it takes a bit longer or if you have to take breaks when necessary. However, at your current speed which would take 9 years to complete WaniKani, I think it would be very difficult to learn the language this way, and I would highly recommend developing and sticking to a plan that works for you.
Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn and it is important to learning frequently. If you are only occasionally doing reviews once or twice or week, you’re not going to be exposed enough to the same items for them to stick. WaniKani’s spaced repetition system is designed for you to frequently see the same items. Right after a lesson, the item will first be put into reviews 4 hours later, then after getting it right, it comes back 8 hours later, etc. In order for WaniKani or any other Japanese learning program to be effective, it requires frequent review. And yes, as others have said, the first 3 levels are much shorter than most of the other levels.
In creating a daily plan, first think about how many lessons you want to do each day. The more lessons you do you’ll have more reviews, but you will also learn faster. There are 9206 items on WaniKani. If you do 5 lessons a day, it would take 1841 days or 5.04 years to learn all lessons, 10 lessons a day would take 920 days or 2.52 years, 15 lessons a day would take 613 days or 1.67 years, and if you do 20 lessons a day it would take 1.26 years. As you can see, the 10-20 daily lesson range is best for completing WaniKani in a reasonable amount of time. I do 15 lessons every day, and I’ve found the daily workload manageable. But you can do more or less depending on what you prefer.
Next, I recommend doing all reviews every day. WaniKani puts items into your review box based on their spaced repetition system, so its important to clear out your reviews everyday. You risk forgetting something you learned in a lesson earlier that day if you don’t see it again for several days, and those mistakes delay leveling up. I prefer to do lessons first, but this is just preference. If you find yourself out of energy after reviews, do lessons first.
In my opinion, those are the 2 most important steps. Set amount of daily lessons, like 10 or 15, and doing all your reviews every day. This will ensure you are not stuck on a level for months at a time. You’ll be constantly learning new items, and then reviewing those items, and leveling up as you go.
This advice I’ll give is slightly more advanced but it may still be helpful. Leveling up is based on guruing 95% of the Kanji in your level. However, you don’t unlock all the Kanji before guruing all the radicals in a level. Therefore, you will level up fastest by first doing lessons for radicals, then doing lessons for Kanji, then doing lessons for Vocabulary. Additionally, the more often you review those items, the quicker you will get them to guru. and the quicker you’ll level up. I like to have 2 review sessions a day, at least 4 hours apart. This way, I learn new items in lessons, do all reviews, then 4 hours later do all reviews again, and by then the items I learned earlier that day will be in the reviews so you can level them up. In summary my plan is 15 lessons a day, then all reviews, then at least 4 hours later do all reviews again. Even though I fall behind sometimes, (recently took a week off to study for law school finals), I’m averaging a level up every 14 days which I’m very happy with.
Lastly, its ok if you have to take breaks or fall behind sometimes, but 90% of the time you should be sticking to your plan, doing the lessons you want for the day and doing all your reviews. Even if you feel like you don’t have much time each day to do all your lessons and reviews, I promise you do. If you really sit down and focus, maybe have a cup of coffee if you need it, you can get hundreds of reviews done in an hour. If you have any questions I’m here to help. You got this
