If you want to get to radicals right away or like a mix of radicals, kanji, and vocab, I recommend this script: [Userscript] WaniKani Lesson Filter. I think it’s better for this use case if you don’t want to actually reorder anything.
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You make it sound like it’s a bad thing, but apprentices are much more important to focus on than guru. Guru can wait a bit, but even one extra hour can be detrimental to accuracy on apprentice items.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by kanji over vocab. I did prioritize time critical reviews (so radical and kanji), because there’s no point spending more time than necessary on a given level. I do not use anything like that for non critical reviews.
Except for that point, I agree that spending time on grammar and reading is very important. The SRS by itself can only do so much, exposure is important to truly appropriate the kanji and vocab. And exposure requires to understand what you are exposed too, hence grammar.
Not at all, it’s one of many strategies. It depends on your definition of “completed wanikani” though - I don’t see that as level 60; For me, I’m defining that as when I “know” all the items.1 I’m not suggesting everyone do the same. However, that leads to a different level-up strategy.
If the end is knowing all the items (again, not a universal definition), doing all the lessons through level 60 is an intermediate step less than 100%. I’m not convinced max speed leveling gets the curve to 100% faster, it just gets to level 60 earlier at the expense of having more to do later beating down the leeches and vocab lessons. It’s what we call in my business “throwing the work over the fence”, re-linking the work to the next milestone when you want to call the upcoming one done earlier. But the work still has to get done.
I have no evidence that’s faster, slower, or neutral, it’s just my gut feel that it’s either neutral or actually slower to (my definition of) the finish line to level up at max speed. I’m also assuming reordering scripts of some sort to achieve that. I don’t see any drawback to max speed if you’re truly doing every review when it’s meant to be done and just plain getting them right that much.
1 I don’t think I’ll wait to burn all of them, though. I think I’ll be happy when they’re all in enlightened and not feel like waiting 4 more months.
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I agree with that too. But getting to level 60 means you unlocked all the items (barring radical->kanji->vocab dependencies) which feels like a milestone anyway. Milestones help stay motivated (for me at least).
Hm, I see what you mean. In another thread, someone else also mentioned the idea of using the reorder script to just ignore reviews for a while. That’s definitely hurting progress. And just getting to 0 reviews everyday isn’t enough if you are accumulating a crazy amount of leeches. Still, someone with enough time and motivation can just spend the required amount of time per day to work on everything. (Not recommended for the rest of us).
While I did reach level 60 in basically 1 year, I came (back) to it after 10 years of Japanese learning. That’s like an average of 2/3 lesson per day 
If I had to do it again, I’d probably go for 5/10 a day though.
Right, and the difference between your and my starting places means widely different things we were hoping to get. It’s totally understandable if you have no use for wanikani’s vocab and skip them all (hypothetically). For me, that’s part of “completing” wanikani, so throwing it over the fence to get to 60 faster doesn’t help any.
I was actually thinking of a different person who installed the ignore error script and (essentially, maybe not 100%) ignored their way to 60. Which, I guess? If that’s what makes them happy. It still leaves a lot of stuff to do. Or not! Depends what the goal is. They would say (and have said, IIRC) they got what they wanted out of WK and it’s more about other resources for them.
I think I’m wandering pretty far off the original topic. 
Originally in this thread I was just curious about the marketing-claim angle - what’s the fastest anyone has completed a stock WaniKani, no scripts, through all-burned? (I realize WK does not claim you can do that in a year). Which also wasn’t the original topic
My WK tips… Don’t waste too much time during reviews, answer faster. If I can’t remember the answer within one second, I just enter “aaa” and fail it. The answer should come out automatically, there’s no need to sit there trying hard to remember what does this kanji mean, wasting time. Yes, you will fail most of the apprentice items a few times after they are unlocked, but you’ll remember them better. My average answer time is ~4 seconds (including typing the answer), and a daily pile of 200 reviews takes about 25 minutes to complete, which is not much at all. Average level up time is about 9 days.
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Hey thanks! I’ll try to spread out the previous vocabulary at the beggining of the new level.
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Great idea, thanks.
It’s quite hard to type faster when on the phone, I got typing mistake often because of a slow phone. A new reason to buy a new one 
But it’s a good strategy when on the computer.
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