so like i said i am leveling one level per 2 weeks is it alright?
i am now almost done with lvl 4 which i learn since about 2 weeks is that normal or am i too slow ;(?
The only way you can measure if youâre too slow is by your own desires.
I wanted to finish as many levels as possible before the JLPT on July 2nd, so I was going as close to max speed as possible. And it worked, several of the kanji reading questions were from those levels I reached at the end.
But it depends on your goals.
Thereâs a lot of people on both sides, who will level up within 8 days, and then those who will take twice as long (if not even more). Like leebo said, it really depends on your goals and to a further extent, if youâre supplementing it with other things. Assuming youâre doing grammar studies each day along with WK, I donât think 14 days is really slow.
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Because of the SRS system, itâs impossible to progress more than one level every 8 days (maybe 7 if you really mess with your sleep schedule), so a minimum of a week is only only perfectly normal, itâs impossible to do faster than that. The rest of your level progression speed will depend on how quickly youâre picking up new radicals and the new kanji. If youâre scoring 90% or more on your reviews and youâre doing them on time, then you should be able to progress is pretty much optimal time. If youâre finding that you canât get near 90% consistently on the earliest Apprentice reviews, then you might want to consider changing your study habits some how, or checking out the meanings of kanji and radical names again before your review comes up. Itâs not necessary to read every single alternative synonym, example sentence, and mnemonic to do well on the reviews, so donât cram on the lesson materials. Use mnemonics for ones you can tell are going to be trouble, but otherwise stick to just associating the characters with their meanings and pronunciations to limit the amount you have to take in at once.
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If by âreally mess with your sleep scheduleâ you mean, wake up between midnight and 5:00AM one time per level. Thatâs typically how frequently per level youâd need to get up to maintain 6 days 20 hours. Sometimes it works out so you never have to do that, sometimes you might have to do two sets of reviews in that same late night block.
If you were okay with 7 days 0 hours, you could find a schedule that is sleep friendly and just repeat it every week.
One of the annoying things about 6 days 20 hours is that it constantly shifts the schedule by 4 hours each week.
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If Iâm understanding the Wanikani intervals correctly, 6d20h is impossible to finish a level without some kind of script or without knocking off some hours somewhere. Assuming 4hr, 8hr, 24hr, and 72hr intervals need to be cleared to get an item to Guru level, that means a minimum of 108 hours from lesson completion, so I donât know how youâre arriving at the 6 days 20 hours count. As I understand it, radicals must reach Guru before Kanji unlock, and Kanji must reach Guru to count toward level progression, but I could be wrong. Perhaps more importantly, this is also dependent on getting 100% on radical reviews and at least 90% on kanji reviews for all new material, which I donât think is reasonable for new learners on a consistent basis.
Itâs 4 hours, 8 hours, 23 hours, 47 hours to guru. Thatâs 3 days 10 hours. Thatâs the minimum time to guru the radicals. But all items reach guru in that amount of time so, thatâll unlock the last few kanji you need to push you into 90% guru for kanji, and take another 3 days 10 hours.
Yes, you do need to get 100% of reviews correct for those radicals and the 2nd wave kanji.
But the other 30 or so kanji you could get wrong for 3 days straight and not impact your minimum level up time. They just have to be done before 6 days 20 hours is up. You can wait a long time to do those lessons too.
And now that lessons donât require a script to be ordered, you really donât need any scripts or special effort to do the minimum time.
EDIT: Additionally, you have an hour of leeway whenever a review appears for it to be done âon time.â Say a review shows up at 1:00. As long as you do it by 1:59 it counts as having been done by 1:00. It rolls back to the start of whatever hour youâre on.
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well i have a lot of homework and school stuff so i am basically doing my reviews as i go, in the bus etc ;d
also yeah i learn a bit of grammar but because my exams will come tomorrow i didnât have a lot of time to study WK, actually learning German (Not my native language) and Japanese which is kinda hard sometimes 
The fact that lessons are ordered now will probably slightly speed up your progress regardless. It means you wonât randomly get the level-critical items sprinkled throughout your lessons.
Thanks for clearing that up. I couldnât find that info posted explicitly anywhere on the WaniKani guide or faq, so I guess theyâre either out of date or they just use code that differs from their presented explanations of the schedule.
Yeah, the guides are really outdated, but some of the details (like every timespan of one day and longer is actually that timespan minus an hour, or how rollbacks work after a review is completed) were never explicit in the guides. Theyâve been mentioned here and there by the developers, and Iâve been doing minimum levelups throughout that time as the parameters changed.
Now Iâm at the âshort levelsâ that have few or no radicals, so I can level up in 3 days 10 hours every level. Yay!
I average about 10 or 11 days per level, but it concerns me that the OP is level 4, so might be talking about levels 1-3, which are meant to be shorter (I finished all three of them in a hair over two weeks, never mind two weeks per level).
@Leeboâs advice about going at the pace that works for you is solid. To an extent, WK is designed to prevent you from going too fast (and therefore not retaining anything, which is something Iâve learned the hard way with another language I donât speak because I âstudiedâ it too quickly), but thereâs nothing particularly wrong with going even slower if you find that more helpful.
I say âifâ because the theory behind SRS is that the best time to review something is when youâre about to forget it. That length of time does differ from person to person (and from item to item, for that matter), so WKâs one-size-fits-all timings might not necessarily be the timings that work for you, but if you go too slowly for your own memory, chances are youâve already forgotten it by the time you review it. Thatâs not the end of the world either (itâs a rare review session where I can remember everything that comes up, and mistakes are nothing but an opportunity to become more familiar with the item), but if you find you have real difficulty remembering a lot of things, you might want to do your reviews more often.
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Levels 1 and 2 have shorter-than-normal SRS intervals, which allows them to be completed in a little over 3 days each, despite having the standard radicals + kanji-unlocked-by-radicals structure. Level 3 is a normal level, so 6 days 20 hours applies there. But this means you can do the first 3 levels in 2 weeks.
I level up at least every 30-40 days. Itâs really slow, but I donât really mind going at that pace atm. Thatâs just me though. I feel like I retain things better that way. Two weeks is really fast imo.
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Iâm averaging about 8 days however Level 4 was a whopping 11 days! No scripts - just as they come.
I wouldnât worry. This is about learning, not racing.
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Dude Iâm like averaging 15 days per level now. Lol.
Here is a list of the review intervals, current as at 11 July 2017. (Copy/pasted from âregularsâ forum)
| SRS Level | Next Level | Total Wait | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apprentice 1 | 4h | - | Lesson |
| Apprentice 2 | 8h | 4h | 1 |
| Apprentice 3 | ~1d | 12h | 2 |
| Apprentice 4 | ~2d | 1d 11h | 3 |
| Guru 1 | ~1w | 3d 10h | 4 |
| Guru 2 | ~2w | 1w 3d 9h | 5 |
| Master | ~1M | 3w 3d 8h | 6 |
| Enlightened | ~4M | 7w 5d 7h | 7 |
| Burned | - | 24w 6d 6h | 8 |
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I would say no, since my times are generally 10-20 days but maybe Iâm in slow category as well.
na, Iâve been rather slack and have only gone from lvl 8 to lvl 11 (might still be on 10 lol) since may last year!
Same here. Iâm on level 5 and itâs been over 30 days. I do too much other stuff to do it any faster. But, Iâll be level 6 within a day - finally - level 5 has been long.