How many lessons are people doing a day? I’ve got mine capped at 15 at the moment, which I’m finding manageable, but it takes me quite a while to get through a level. How many lessons are you guys doing and how do you manage the reviews? I’m just finishing level 7 now
10 Likes
I used to do 15 per day which is levelling up in about 10 days.
I found it perfectly manageable but I’m a single bloke so not a lot of responsibility
11 Likes
I don’t have a clear cap but often find it to be around 20 more or less.
15 a day seem to be frequently quoted as a good way to manage the pace.
Do what you feel is comfortable as it gets noticeably busier when the reviews come back for master and enlightened later on (not to mention the leeches).
6 Likes
I was at 15 per day for a while, but I found it a bit slow, so I bumped it up to 20, which I find is a much better pace for me. But I also have a lot of free time, so the increased amount of reviews doesn’t bother me as much is it might others. So if you find 15 per day a good pace, then stick with it.
6 Likes
enough to overwhelm yourself soon for later levels. Huge pile of review items.
Unless you have a lot of free time during the day.
I only did 5 lessons per day for apprentice level below 90 always.
8 Likes
How long is “quite a while”? Wanikani claims that you can complete it in one year, and some people do, but the majority of people take 2+ years.
I’ve done 10, 12, 15, 16, and 20 lessons per day, and everything except 20 worked at the time. When doing fewer lessons, I spend more time reading than on WK. And when I start to notice that I’m seeing a lot of unknown kanji and it’s becoming burdensome, I increase daily lessons.
6 Likes
im at 9 per day in batches of 3. im only in the middle of level 2 but dont really want to get to a point where i have a ton of wanikani reviews as i already do a lot of anki lol. i feel like 9, bumping up to 12 sometimes, is manageable, and hopeully will be.
8 Likes
I’m getting my way through level 8 at the moment. It feels like things are getting more difficult, with the combination of new more complex kanji and old kanji that I didn’t learn as well at the beginning coming back for review.
My informal rules are:
- No new lessons if I have reviews due. Clear the review stack first, ALWAYS.
- Keep my apprentice stack less than 100
- If I ever feel like my accuracy is dropping (approaching 70%) stop doing new lessons.
- Learn things properly - if at the review stage the knowledge feels ropey then ‘banana bomb’ the kanji back to the beginning of apprentice, so it can have another go through the SRS.
This means I am tending towards 15 lessons a day, but in the last few days that has dropped to fewer while I get back on my feet. I tend to trust the Wanikani limit.
It’s been working so far. I tried doing more lessons than this and I can see how it leads to burnout. I’m living a life with a semi-full time job which also requires learning on anki, as well as part of a choir that needs me to know the music (which I am also working through on anki).
Hopefully having another person’s experience on here helps you make up your mind which pace is right for you. I think we need to stop saying whether there is a ‘right’ way or a ‘wrong’ way, only a selection of compromises which we think is acceptable. For me, learning at a slower pace is the compromise I want to take, because I want to prioritise long term retention and life-manageability. For you, going balls deep into more lessons a day may be more exciting and get you out into the world of reading native literature faster.
It’s up to you, I hope you enjoy whatever you choose.
13 Likes
I’ll give a slightly different perspective from others.
I do reviews about 5-10 times a day, which splits them into timy blocks, usually 10-20 reviews. I do them on PC, which is MUCH faster than on phone. I can write the answer in about 1 or 2 seconds most of the time. This means larger number of reviews doesn’t bother me.
As for the amount, it is dynamic:
- when new level unlocks, I immediatelly go over all radicals, no matter how many there are, they are easy anyway
- last level vocabulary goes before current level, even before new kanji, as I don’t want to drag old vocabulary words forward, learning the words reinforces kanji memorization
- when kanji are available, I do those before vocabulary
- if I feel like there are a lot of items I don’t remember right, or my accuracy drops to 80% or lower, I slow down to standard 15 reviews, or if it is really bad, or if I don’t have time that day
- I always do at least 5 lessons per day, never less
- on normal day, I do 15 lessons in the morning, than 4 hours later after their first reviews, I do another 15
This lets me level up in about 8 days. I find this pace to be quite managable, mostly, because I get to see variations of the same word, or kanji used multiple times, which lets me remember it better. Some vocabulary words are just easy to remember.
To be clear, I go fast to reach level where I can actually apply the knowledge. I expect that I will slow down once I am able to read something. I expect this to be level 20-30. I guess I will drop to 15 lessons + reading session. Possibly less lessons as I will be also looking up things from reading.
7 Likes
Instead of having a set number of lessons per day, I orientate myself by the number of apprentice items I have. I try to keep it at around 110-120, because that’s a. around the number going full speed naturally averages to and b. the load I’m finding most enjoyable.
4 Likes
The thing that is always tricky about this is that 15 lessons/day might be manageable at different stages. Once Mastered and Enlightened items starts coming around it might not be manageable anymore.
Accuracy with also have a big effect. If you have high accuracy and continue to have high accuracy then it is manageable, but again, if you get to level 18 and all the sudden you start failing more and more reviews it might harder to keep up with doing 15 lessons/day.
I do about 12.5 items with pretty high accuracy and I get between 90-125 reviews per day, which is manageable for me. At my pace it will take me 2 years to finish and I am happy with that.
7 Likes
I did 20 per day a few years ago and burned out around level 22. Left Wanikani and Japanese totally. When I came back now I decided to do 10 lessons per day from level 1. Much more manageable for me and my life. Only you can say what’s right for you.
Have you looked at the Wanikani Estimator? It will tell you approximately what your workload will be if you do X amount of lessons per day. It’s not perfect, but it gives a good idea of what happens if you add more lessons per day.
8 Likes
I did 15 lessons per day for almost all of my time on Wanikani, and averaged 11 days per level, with around 150 items to review per day. It took me 1.8 years to reach level 60. (These numbers will vary depending on your review accuracy.)
3 Likes
I think it depends on what is happening in your life and how much time you have to study. I’ll do 5-10 lessons a day unless I have a lot of apprentice items. I’m not worried about going fast, just doing my best as I go along. Sometimes I can go faster, sometimes not. So do what is manageable for you.
5 Likes
It honestly depends on how much time you have for reviews each day, and when during the day. I’ve been keeping to a pretty steady 15/day since I reset down to Level 1 back in September. At this point, well into having items that burn pretty much every day, I find it manageable. I do 15 in the morning before work - that doesn’t take long. I do the reviews for only those 15, if I can help it, during my lunch break. I use Tsurakame on my phone for that mid-day review, and have it set up to prioritize the current level, so that lets me limit how many old items that I might have missed coming back up at that session. Need to keep it short because work is busy and my lunches aren’t always my own! My evening review pile has been pretty consistently between 100-150 items since I started hitting burns a few months ago. I tend to have an uninterrupted hour I can use for it, and if it only takes a half hour, I just use the extra time for grammar/reading practice. For me, I need the consistency of routine, or I make every excuse under the sun to not do it!
My last run through this (made it up to level 52, but rushed a lot of it), I was very inconsistent with numbers of lessons. I would have days I didn’t feel like it, and do none, then would have days I panicked and tried to catch up by doing 40. Those big days always led to review panic later though because it was just too much, so then I wouldn’t do lessons for a few days, and well… it was a vicious cycle. Then I tried prioritizing kanji so I could keep leveling up, but taking the vocab out of the mix meant I had no way to reinforce the kanji, and my old brain NEEDS reinforcement. Would not recommend skipping the vocab, personally.
I agree with other people who have said 15/day equates to roughly 10 days/level if you’re getting the kanji correct at each review. I do spread the kanji out over a few days; it just makes it easier for me to remember them in smaller batches. So 5-7 kanji + 8-10 vocab daily until I run out of kanji for the level, then just 15 vocab until I level up. (The radicals are the exception to my system, I do them whenever they come up, but they’re easy so it doesn’t really add to the review load in any significant way) Doing less would make it take longer, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing! To be honest, if you did less, you’d have more time to add in the grammar and reading practice that is so necessary to make things stick.
3 Likes
I think it really depends on your time management and mental load.
I find that doing batches of 3 kanji with 2 vocab is far easier than 5 kanji. I do several batches throughout the day. Meaning I’ll do more than 3 batches (>15 lessons).
When I’m done with the kanji and radicals I usually clear the left over vocab in 1 or 2 sittings since I find vocab extremely easy to remember comparably to kanji.
Just remember after a lesson is learned the first time it will appear in your reviews is 4 hours later. So if you time manage well and/or deal well with 50+ review sessions I think you can raise the lesson count.
At the end of the day you should push yourself and whatever your limit is, deal with it and don’t compare yourself to others.
1 Like
Don’t worry about the levels. How many you should do depends on two things:
- How fast you want to finish through level 60
- Your tolerance for review load.
Addressed in turn
-
There are 9226 items to do as lessons. When you’ve done all 9226, you’re done with lessons. Levels have nothing to do with it. (Except if you’re trying to go SUPER-fast, and then the levels limit your speed)
-
Your average review load will be about 8x the number of lessons you do every day, plus failure do-overs. Certainly 10x should be a conservative number. So if you don’t mind doing 150 reviews some days, 15 per day will probably work for you. Adjust to your preference.
The failure rate is somewhat amplified, since the re-reviews are themselves work, but also that you tend to fail more when you go faster.
I’m liking the 15-a-day pace. I spend the extra time when the reviews run out to either read something, do bunpro grammar practice, or just drill the “recent lessons” a few extra times, which tends to lower my failure rate overall. I get 90-100% on the reviews with frequent 100’s, which wasn’t the case when I was “going fast”.
4 Likes
I want to second what many people here are saying about workload. More lessons now is faster relative to finishing in a year or whatever if that’s your goal, but be realistic about how much you think you can handle in mounting reviews because more lessons means getting more reviews. Maybe 100 reviews a day isn’t bad for you, but what about 200? Think about that question seriously because when items come back for burn reviews, it’ll increase your workload.
For me, I was doing 30 a day back when I was going fast last year. That was in hindsight a mistake, but it felt fine until I suddenly didn’t have the mental energy to keep doing it. At first I thought I was just tired enough not to be getting up as early, but I think at some point I’ve had to admit that maybe wanikani had something to do with it. 15 lessons a day should be fine, maybe do your radicals as soon as they’re available and kanji when they unlock, but try to focus on making a long term habit that can stay consistent. If you do make it to level 60 in a year, that’s cool, but are you supplementing that kanji recognition with reading in context? If not, maybe that’s a better use of time than putting in more wanikani hours.
5 Likes
I do 10 personally.
2 Likes
I used to do at least 20 lessons a day for some time but I recently turned it down to 15 because work got busier and I’m also doing bunpro now, so I felt myself struggling to remember enough with 20 lessons. 15 is working alright now.
As others said, it really depends on your plans and situation.