So, approximately 60 days in to WK, I reached level 3. I used my coupon (because it expires soon. Smarty-pants of them, that’s for sure) and subscribed monthly. Isn’t 2 months a bit slow to level up only twice? At the start, I handicapped myself to 5 lessons/day, and only did review once a day. Now, I’m doing 10 lessons max, and doing reviews every time I have them.
Isn’t it still a bit slow?
-I want to know that, since I don’t want to be committed to the crabigator for my lifetime, and want to reach level 60 some day
(P.S. I feel like I’m in a cult already, and I didn’t even pass level 3 yet!)
Only you can really answer that, in the early levels there aren’t a lot of reviews to do so it doesn’t seem like much work
however later on, as burns and the such come back you find the workload massively piles up
I did 10 lessons per day and was leveling up about every 14-15 days and I had around 150-200 reviews to do per day, so maybe 20 minutes or so doing reviews (mind you I was using a third party app and anki mode for a lot of it)
I found that manageable for me workload wise, but still felt like I constantly making progress.
Mainly based at older users here- does my math check out- once you’re a few months into learning, your reviews are 8x the number of lessons you’ve been doing (since each item is repeated at least 8 times in the reviews), maybe 9x to account for some incorrect reviews. I’m doing about 20-25 lessons right now daily, but don’t want to go above 200-225 daily reviews (I currently get around 125 reviews a day).
You sure you can handle that many lessons a day? I understood that number will seriously pile up in the future for you (from @pembo ‘s comment earlier).
I pledged myself to the crabigator over 3 years ago and my daily average of lessons is definitely below 10/day. Yet here I am, currently at level 43 and well on my way to 60.
What matters isn’t your speed, but the consistency. As long as you show up every day without fail, you’ll get there eventually.
As for the pace, as @pembo said, only you can answer that, keeping in mind that items will start piling up later. You can try to make it a precise science, or you can just listen to what your brain and body are telling you. You feel bored and think you can do more? Then do more. You are starting to feel a bit overwhelmed and the big pile of reviews scares you? Tone it down until it seems manageable again. You’ll eventually be able to tell what pace is sustainable for you before you get to the point where it’s too much or too little.
If you haven’t yet, I recommend checking out this guide.
At some point you’ll also find out that kanji by itself isn’t quite enough and will want to engage with the language in other ways. In that case I recommend joining the book clubs.
To answer your post, I would consider two questions.
For the lower bound: When do you get to level 60- is it 2 years, 3 years or 4 years. Example case of 3 years: you have around 9000 total items to learn (radicals, kanji and vocab). So divide 9000 by (365*3) which is around 9. So you need to finish 9 lessons a day to reach level 60 in 3 years.
For the upper bound: consider how many reviews you’re willing to commit to everyday. Then divide that number by 9 to get the max number of lessons. So if you can do 150 reviews a day, your maximum number of lessons should be 16 per day.
So in this example case, you should do between 9 and 16 lessons a day to reach level 60 within your target time without burning out.
That is also a great answer, this helped me a lot.
What a wonderful community! (and sorry for everyone I didn’t mention…)
I think I’ll currently stay on 10/day, I’ll say where it takes me.
If your account goes ahead and levels up several times without you, then you’re going too slow and need to hurry to find yourself. Otherwise…
Really, the speed of leveling is a function of how much time you can put into it, how many lessons you do, whether or not you’re “optimizing” the lessons, how frequently you do your reviews, and how accurate you are on those early radical and kanji reviews before guruing them.
With that said, the pace you work at needs to be what is right for you, and ideally leaves you time for life and your other study goals as well. I know I was at a 10 day pace per level for a while, started dipping near 8 for a few levels, and then intentionally slowed down to try to get to 14 days so I could prioritize other study.
I’d just say as early as you are in the process, don’t worry too much about pace or structure yet - just focus on remembering why you want to learn the language and figuring out what things you’re trying that you think will help you.
unless you go very slowly, based on what i’m hearing, i tend to doubt that doing fewer lessons per day actually does much more than spread the workload more evenly throughout the week.
i’ve been going at a roughly 7 days per level pace since level 13, mostly guzzling every lesson as soon as it unlocks. what i’ve noticed recently: most days have ~100 reviews, with the exceptions of Wednesdays and Saturdays, which have 200+. This is because Wednesdays and Saturdays are the days that I am able to Guru a bunch of cards for the first time and consequently also load in a bunch of Apprentice cards for their first reviews. (I believe this is also because the Guru II / Master reviews tend to come around one or two weeks later.) Tuesdays and Fridays are particularly light, since the last Apprentice-level review cooldown is more than a day iiuc.
some of the very light days have review sessions which are basically entirely leeches, which is its own special kind of fun.
granted, i won’t start having cards come up to be burned until early next month. at that point i suppose the thing to expect is an additional ~100 cards per week on top of what i’m seeing currently?
I changed the max lesson to max in the account settings and I try to do wanikani every single hour that I’m awake
When you do wanikani every single hour, it breaks up the stacks into smaller ones so each stack other than the first one of the day can be done like under 5 mins
