I’ve been busy with work and I’m extremely stingy, so I’ve been abusing lesson & review reordering + override to guru kanji as quickly at possible while leaving my lesson and review piles staggering. From time to time I do mass reviews but pools of leeches are also quickly amassing.
My question is: others who are in this situation, how do you pace your lessons so you can eventually catch up? I’ve been realistically doing 6-30 lessons per day but I haven’t crunched the math regarding if I’ll ever actually catch up
Catch up by only doing vocab lessons and by no longer abusing the reorder script. You say you’re stingy, but you’re wasting your money by not learning the material properly.
^^^^ Cannot agree more. I was in your situation once where I had 300 or so vocab lessons or so since I left them out to do Kanji and level up. I realized that the Kanji I’ve been learning have actually been harder to remember than before, since I never learned the vocabulary that reinforced them.
Don’t do a single Kanji lesson until you’re caught up, like sean said. Sure, the feeling of leveling up may give you a feeling of ecstasy as if you’ve leveled up in a game, but you’re just cheating the system, your own learning and your own money.
Only do the vocab lessons. If you learn a kanji and you ignore the vocab for the kanji and go straight to learning more kanji, you’re going to forget the previous lesson’s kanji…
you’re slowing down anyway, so why not slow down and reinforce the kanji you know?
stop kanji lessons if you’re overwhelmed. do as many vocab lessons as you want, their purpose is to reinforce the kanji…
Seconding everybody else. Neglecting the vocabulary will likely harm your learning to the point where you burn out, or have to pay extra for further material/subscription.
If you’re paying for monthly and can afford the yearly subscription, do it - it’ll take some of the pressure off (stress makes people stupid and unable to learn well), and also you’d be getting 2 months for free. Getting the lifetime subscription during the winter sale is also something to consider.
Stop using override and reorder scripts. The vocabulary is there for a good reason and you really really need to be doing it to help both reinforcing your kanji readings but also to expand your own vocabulary for speaking and reading.
I find that the vocabulary helps to reinforce the kanji. That I never really know with the kanji as well as I think I do, until I do the vocabulary. So it seems like it’s something you should not neglect.
why the word catch up ? there is nothing to catch up …
there is only one thing and it s your own pace !
the pace that you can deal with in your daily life !
If you have not a lot of time than use WK slowly but correctly !
Using reordering is not the way you’ll learn kanjis …
I spent two months on a level ( 37 ) because I’m very busy with my work during spring !
Last year I did only reviews for 5 months still because of my work !
If you want to learn a language , you have to do it properly even if it takes time
the goal is not to guru kanjis , the goal is to learn a language and use it
you won’t do it that way
I work 50 to 60 hours a week for 8 months of the year. Plus I have pets and a big garden. So, I phase my lessons out and only do reviews over the summer. Starting in August, I will start with maybe five new items a day, then ramp up more in October, and try to get another 10 or 15 levels done this winter.
In the meantime, I have a giant burn pile, which I self study when I get the urge. So, most of my first 10 levels, both kanji and vocab, and completely cemented in my head.
Plus, I am not stressed out and can just come on and chat on Wanikani, or watch Japanese movies, and listen to Japanese newscasts, and not feel guilty that I have reviews to do.
Depending on how far you leveled up your kanji compared to your vocabulary, your only options may be to just keep doing vocabulary reviews and new vocabulary only, or do a level reset.
As an aside and to explain why we’re all so vehement against how you’re going at things: I’ve been on WK forums on and off for 4 years. In that time I’ve seen many, many posts from users regretting having done the same as you.
I cannot remember a single one that was happy about what they’d done. The vast majority crashed and burnt pretty fast and spectacularly, leading at best to a partial reset, and at worst to entirely abandon WK (and I assume Japanese in general). The few that did end up at their goal level said that their knowledge and retention of the levels they used this strategy on were shaky and uncemented.
You’re not doing the bare minimum; you’re well below it.
ETA: how many lessons and reviews do you have waiting fkr you, exactly?
I prefer the vocab. It reinforces more and quite frankly because you know what the kanji means, it does not mean at all that you’ll understand the words using it in real life mean. Also, you seldom get the kunyomi version in Kanji so you miss out on a lot of verbs and such.
Different strokes though you know? A lot of people do the RTK way. I personally don’t like it, but that’s kind of what you’re doing + learning how to say them 1 way.
I use the reorder script, but I use it wisely. When I level up, I’ll do the kanji lessons right away, but I do the vocab lessons a few hours later. I never let them pile up. Also, because you need the vocab to reinforce the kanji learning, otherwise you’re just learning the Japanese alphabet without context…
The reorder script is actually very convenient, but you need to know how to use it. Hasn’t hurt my learning in any way.
What are you “catching up” to? Are you trying to reach level 60 before your membership runs out?
As far as doing the bare minimum goes, I took no lessons over the past four days. I had 59 items in my lesson queue this morning. I just completed 12 lessons - in two batches of six. I don’t use re-order script. I prefer to have a mix of kanji / vocab: A couple of new kanji in each batch of six lessons and vocab to reinforce a newly learnt kanji.
If “pools of leeches are also quickly amassing”, you are taking too many lessons. Stop taking lessons and do reviews only. Use the self-study script to train yourself on your leeches.
The stingy approach is to buy a lifetime membership at Christmas time when the discount appears. That price is discounted further if you have a fixed term (one year or one month) membership.
Not doing reviews? If you stopped at Guru I highly suspect those items didn’t stick at all, essentially making them new lessons again. You potentially have 3000+ lessons right now if you didn’t study outside WaniKani. Completely stop doing lessons until your reviews are at 0 and you don’t have some ridiculous workload waiting for you the next few days. You may need to use a user-script to order your reviews by SRS level to have any chance of getting anywhere if your amount of reviews is huge. This may take a few weeks/months. If you can’t get through them, reset some levels.
I feel like comments like this aren’t constructive. There are a few other comments similar to this in the thread. There’s a reason the RTK idea is popular. I think there’s an argument to be made that WaniKani generally has people focused on SRS to a fault, especially with the vocabulary that’s given.
Studying kanji over vocab will definitely let you recognize sentences faster. You will have to look things up more but that’s in comparison to having to drill WaniKani daily with no context.
I find your comment kind of negative (which is why I am replying) and to say he’s not learning anything seems naive.
