Am I progressing slowly?

WaniKani
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Greetings! I love WaniKani, and after juicin’ it up with some UserScripts, it’s pretty much my perfect little kanji-learning app.

That said, I was comparing my progress to other users’, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m progressing slowly. I usually try to learn 10 new Lessons a day, and do all of my Reviews daily. (On Level 3 I dropped WK for two weeks, but that’s about the only big break I’ve had.)

Am I going fast? Slow? It’s been 7 months since I started using WaniKani, and I’m around 70% finished with Level 5. I burned my first set of Reviews yesterday.

Sorry if this sounds intense of me, but the N5 test is just around the corner and I want to be ready for it.

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You’ll see a lot of people talking about how it should only take 8 or 9 days per level. I feel that, unless you already have some kanji knowledge, or a butt-ton of time to study, that’s a bit unrealistic. You’d need to do every lesson and review as soon as possible, and get them right every time.
I’ve been averaging around 30 days per level, just taking my time. Getting 60-70% on reviews, and only adding 10 or so in every couple days.
Just remember, its not a competition. Go at whatever pace you’re comfortable with. You want to challenge yourself sure, but don’t overload yourself either. You’ll just burn yourself out.

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Considering that properly learning Japanese is a very long term project, 10 years from now it’s going to be irrelevant whether you finished WaniKani in 1 year or 3 years. It’s more important to keep making progress and making sure the material you have already covered is properly learned.

That being said, you may want to consider getting a life membership.

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It’s true, you are going slowly compared to much of the community (I would recommend getting a lifetime subscription if you go on this way), but if you have a low accuracy during your reviews as it is, I wouldn’t recommend going faster. Inaccuracy increases the number of reviews you’ll see during your time on WK and you might end up overburdening yourself as you take on more lessons.

If your accuracy is high or starts to improve, then go ahead and increase your workload if you’re comfortable with it.

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Are you going slow? Yes. You’re also going fast. Or maybe just right.

As others said, go at your own pace. @jprspereira is going like max speed, I’m taking about 11 to 14 days a level, I’ve seen others consistently take 40+ each level, but they keep going which is the key.

I don’t think @jprspereira is human or sleeps

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It’s true, I’m doing 7-8 days levels and he keeps getting closer to me.

timeturner

Is he a wizard?

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Most of the community drops out…so don’t compare yourself to them.

Set your speed based on what you can handle, while remembering Kanji is only ONE part of the language…you need a well rounded study plan.

Yes you can level in 6.something days…and without a 90% retention rate have 300+ reviews per day. And if you happen to have hours per day to spend on just Wanikani alone…you would “learn” kanji faster. But set reasonable goals based on your actual situation.

Keeping Apprentice around 100 and under 150 reviews per day is a good area for spending 20-40 minutes a day on Wanikani. I would also try to do reviews twice per day as opposed to once.

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If you have a clear goal, like the N5 test you mentioned, it’s probably worth upping the challenge to see if you can speed up. You might be surprised at how much more you can handle. But only if you want to! You’re doing this for you, and not for anyone else.

That said if you’re doing all your reviews every day and 10 lessons a day when they come up, mathematically you’d probably be a bit farther along. Did you only recently start keeping that pace? If so, you’ll likely see things start to speed up now. But the unknown factor in the equation is your accuracy during reviews. You can get a sense of that by going to wkstats and entering your API key.

If you feel your accuracy is low, speeding up the rate you take on new lessons wouldn’t be recommended. In that case, maybe rethink how you’re processing new lessons and see if there’s any way to improve that.

But again this is only if you personally have a problem with the rate at which you’re progressing. Since you posted this, maybe you do have concerns. But I’d recommend avoiding threads like the current Accuracy Screenshots thread. By and large, those will attract people with favorable numbers to share, and won’t necessarily be representative of the average user. And even if it were, it’d be human nature to only pay attention to people with better numbers than you, and that can just be discouraging.

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Slow and steady wins the race

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Thread last seen 64 days before at Am i leveling at snail speed? [1 lvl every 1-2 weeks] Title similarity: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)

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You can get all the kanji wrong until you guru the radicals, though, and you can spread out the lessons over the week and still do 7 day levels.

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I think that so

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I don’t think that you need to go super fast. However, I do think you can do better :slight_smile: WK is very much dependent on organization. For example, each time you level up, you can choose to do the vocab, the kanji, the radicals or all mixed. You have to do them all, right? However, doing them in the right order is essencial to save you time. To level up, you need all 90% of the Kanji guru’d. This means that you need 100% of the radicals guru’d (radicals unlock Kanji). It’s wise then to start the lessons with radicals. Install the reorder script for this.

Also, realize that WK works on a 12h schedule. I’ll explain:

To guru an item, you need to get it right 4 times in a row. Each time will have a different waiting period: 4h,8h,23h and 1d23h respectively. Just think of these as 12h cycles.

4h + 8h = 12h (1st and 2nd reviews)
23h (let’s consider 2x12h) (3rd review)
1d23h (let’s consider 2x1d/4x12h). (4th review)

What can you do with this? You can make your own schedule for WaniKani. If you do your lessons at 10 am, you’ll unlock the 1st reviews at 2pm (+4h) and the 2nd reviews at 10 pm. This is a 12h cycle. The 3rd review will appear in the following day at 10 pm (2x12h cycles) and the final review before guru will appear 2 days after at 10pm. Did you notice the pattern? :slight_smile:

Find a 12h cycle schedule where you can find 10 minutes to be available for WaniKani. Can you do lessons at 9am and 9pm? Then your schedule will be at 9am and 9pm. This depends on your availability.

You will need to use WK 4 times per day. (example: 9am/1pm/9pm/1am). However, it’s easier to find 10 minutes 4 times a day than 40 minutes in a row. You’ll be also respecting the SRS intervals which are designed by the WK to ask you for an item right before you forget it. Doing a lesson and then not picking up WK until the end of the day is not a good idea. The item will be waiting for hours and hours when it only should have waited 4h.

Won’t this make you level up too fast leading you to burn out? It depends.

By having a 12h cycle schedule, you’ll be saving the excessive dead time between reviews. Your % of items that you get right will also go up. You’ll lvl up faster. This won’t lead you to burn out. The biggest factor in WK to worry about is not doing too many new lessons every day. Think about what’s your ideal number of lessons to do per day. Control that and you’ll be fine :slight_smile:

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People who are going fast are more likely to brag about their time on a forum than people who are going slow :wink:

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Well, I didn’t even mention my lvl up time. I do apologize if it sounded like I was doing it.

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More likely to brag, less likely to litter the forums with “Am I too slow” posts :wink:

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It’s wise then to start the lessons with radicals. Install the reorder script for this.

Again pointing out, no script needed, its an account setting now, actual feature.

9am/1pm/9pm/1am

Also, who the hell is awake and functioning that long. I’d die.

Literally me all day:

https://media.tenor.com/images/d5d07001458783bbb4fd4a18c650e14f/tenor.gif

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Not really. The closest option is “ascending level then subject”, which means doing the previous level vocab before radicals. When I’m busy, I’ll reorder my lessons so that I can do my radicals, which takes like 30 seconds, and then do the previous level vocab whenever I have free time.

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It isn’t. By using the “ascending level then subject”, every time you level up, you unlock vocab from the last level and radicals, kanji and vocab from the current one. This means that you’ll get vocab first, not radicals :slight_smile:

4th step can be skippable in all the occasions expect one: when you unlock something at 9pm and choose to do the lessons at that time (following the example). If you’re not about speed and only do lessons 1 time per day, you only need the first 3 steps. Sorry that I didn’t mention that xD

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