I never knew that memory can be related to the motor cortex. But, I had a friend in high school that couldn’t really learn well unless he used motion to learn.
Also, I think you are right about the stroke order. I think that it will take a longer time, but I would not confuse similar characters as much. I’ll try Duolingo again! It seems it has expanded a lot since I last used it.
As someone who is currently on track to complete the program in under a year, I can assure you that this is not something for everyone. You have to be really dedicated if you want to do that.
Apart from that, if you want to level quickly, you need to prioritize learning the level critical radicals and kanji. As long as you can remember 30 kanji for a couple of days and do reviews at the right times, you can level every week. It’s as simple as that. Of course, the reviews will pile up very quickly if you forget them later, but that’s another matter.
I just had a review session where I missed a bunch of Enlightened reviews for old Kanji. That won’t stop me from leveling one iota. I’m also doing almost 400 reviews a day on average now.
I went too fast on levels 13 and 14 and paid for it when I hit level 15 and my accuracy went through the floor. I was watching my Apprentice count and I knew I had overflowed that queue, but figured it would be ok. What I realized was that I had reached a point where I needed to watch my Apprentice AND Guru count. Combined it was at 572 when I got the level 15 email from Tofugu. It’s now back down to the low 420s where it seems to have stabilized as I add lessons slowly. This has taken about 6 weeks, and I’m only about 2/3 of the way through the level 14 vocab. But I feel more in control of my reviews. The beginning of the third week when I did under 50 reviews one day might have been the low point. It was a dark few weeks there.
But I’ve kept my daily streak of reviews going. 249 and counting.
My new rule is to keep Apprentice + Guru in the low 400s and if the Guru item counts becomes greater than the Master item count to stop lessons entirely until that fixes itself.
I started WK a long time ago, dropped off and recently came back and plan to keep at it this time. Better late than never.
I have been using habitica.com to gamify certain tasks in my life to create habits so that I do them every day, so I added tasks for WaniKani and it helps a lot to keep me on track.
My WaniKani tasks are:
Complete a single review - ‘trivial’ difficulty
Complete 20 reviews - ‘easy’ difficulty
Complete a Lesson session (1-5 items) - ‘easy’ difficulty
So I get a point for doing even one review. Sometimes you just want to get that point so you do one, then you figure, well, I might as well do a few more…
If you have a lot of reviews, you can complete the ‘20 reviews’ task multiple times. It feels good to come off a big review session and click that button 5 or 6 times and give yourself points!
Same with completing lessons - I finish a lesson group of five new items and immediately switch to my habitica tab to click it and get the points for it. Then I can consider if I want to keep going. It’s nice to have a motivator to do more lessons balancing that knowledge that too many lessons will bite you later!
Anyhow, it helps for me so you may want to give it a try.
You can download a third party app called heat map
I’d also recommend the site wkstats because it shows you how much time you spend on a level, when you’ll likely level up und how your accuracy is. And also things like how many of the Joyo Kanji or JLPT Kanji you know per level.
There’s no “too slow,” I promise. You only have your own self to compare yourself to. I started in 2012 and I’m still here Reset twice and took years off here and there. If you’re learning and enjoying yourself and fitting learning into your lifestyle, then that’s the right pace for you! Going faster because you see other people doing it or because you are too hard on yourself (or any other reason really) is just a recipe for burnout… I learned this the hard way a few times before the lesson finally stuck.
Thanks! That’s good to know, but I think for me the act of pressing the button myself and getting my food pellet… er… habitica points is part of why it works for me. ^^;
I’ve been wanting to get a Kanji Practice pad, but I’m not sure how to use it. Do you just write a certain kanji over and over? How many times do you tend to write one before moving on?
I’m at level 4 only and already feeling the burn. But I know I just gotta keep going on. Despite the thousand same repeated mistake. But I guess this is what wanikani is about. repeat till you remember. DON’T GIVE UP! がんばりましょうね。
I’m not sure I follow your question. I try to do three review periods in a day (7am, noonish, and 8pm). I’ll sometimes round up one or two if I don’t quite make 20 review items in a review session, if I know I’ll have more later in the day that I can “borrow” from. (I.e. if I finish 19 items in this session and my next session is going to be 30-some items, I’ll click the 20 Items task for the current session.)
Is there a userscript to control the number of reviews you do at once, or do you just click on the little "go home" icon when you feel like you’ve done enough?
There’s a little clock in the bottom left corner where you can “finish up” the last 10 reviews. That way you don’t lose any progress during the session. I learned this recently and it’s great!