This is me when I realise I have tonnes of reviews or unlocked new lessons but it’s midnight
I’ve stopped doing them all at once right now (level 5) because of exams at my uni and also because I want to improve my retention rate. I’m not in any rush to learn Japanese as quickly as possible as I got burned out before, so now I’m just trying to take it easy. I’ll get there when I’ll get there
Yeah, real-life stuff obviously impacts the rate at which you learn. I think people who have subscriptions like me rather than lifetime are also more likely to go fast, due to the cost
Level 7-ish, when I got 211 reviews in one day and decided that was too much. I now do 15 lessons a day, and get 150 reviews, except for the days where levels 1-7 items get burn reviews, when I get 200+.
4 more weeks of sweat, and I’ll be averaging 15 burn reviews / 155 total a day, which is is pretty much as many as I have time for during the week with leech self study, grammar & reading on top, making up ~3hrs/day total.
Which seems a lot, now I think about it.
That’s one of the reasons as to why I just went for the lifetime when it was $100 off, now I don’t have to feel that I need to rush to spend less money, on the contrary, the more time I take, the worthier the money I spent becomes xD
(I was going to do just this 絵文字 but Discourse won’t let me post without 10+ characters)
Somewhere around level 7. Due to not spacing things out I could have 50 reviews one day then have over 300 the next day, which was simply unmanageable. On those 300 review days I’d just burn out and start making stupid mistakes, causing a big drop in accuracy. Now that everything’s nicely spread out review counts are a lot more consistent, making it a lot more manageable. It also doesn’t really affect my level up speed too much, so there’s not much lost from spreading lessons out a bit.
Whenever I level up or get the first set of Kanji in a Level up to Guru, I usually get about 60-70 lessons. Before Level 10, I did them all at once, but as I level up I’ve spaced them out across a couple of days. It’s impossible to learn all of them at one go.
The “people who do what I do because we have lives” argument is the dumbest argument. “There’s many ways to do things, but only if I agree with them”.
i do the time-sensitive lessons immediately (or at the latest after a night’s sleep), the rest i space out more or less evenly.
in other words: i do the radicals immediately, then space out the first bunch of kanji and the vocab over the next three days. then when the second bunch of kanji is unlocked i do those immediately, and again spread out the new vocab from the first batch of kanji over the next few days.
doing all lessons immediately doesn’t make you go faster, as only some (maybe a third?) of lessons are important for going fast. on the other hand, if you do all lessons immediately you will have huge piles of lessons on level-up day (all the vocab from the last kanji, all the radicals, all the new kanji), which might well decrease your accuracy (thus slowing you down). aditionally, that will contribute to the huge piles of reviews on certain days which people talk about.
though all the above is a bit aspirational. i have health issues which mean that some days i just can’t do much, so i’m being quite flexible about it, and am okay with things taking a little longer.
I am not sure what argument you are referring too. I was opposed only to the “fast, otherwise you are weak” phrase, just in case you didn’t get that.
Between levels 1-30, I would do all of the kanji lessons as they became available, but limit vocabulary lessons to 20 or 25 per day (because after finishing a level a large number are unlocked).
At level 30 though, I deliberately slowed my pace down to 10-15 lessons per day, regardless of the kind, so that I could reduce the daily review workload. This set up a 2 week per level schedule that I found very sustainable in levels 31-42.
Usually I try to spread it out through the day. Like sometimes before work I’ll do some reviews, then on breaks at work I’ll do some more. At lunch at work I have an hour, so I’ll usually do a bunch then. Then I’ll usually do some reviews right before bed. However, when I start my day that’s when I’ll do my new lessons and stuff. Because I’m good at doing reviews at night, not so much learning something new.
There isn’t anything wrong with slowing down. I’m sure I’ll hit a point where I’ve “had enough” and slow down more. But, take your time and just enjoy it. You payed for the program, it’s no one else’s business about your pace. Keep on keeping on man, keep your head up.
I always did the items needed to level up right away (radicals and kanji), but around the 30s+ I had to change things up for the vocabulary and used a method that worked for my WaniKani strategy of doing short review sessions at the beginning of every hour. I would time lessons so that that they would appear in the hours that had fewer items to review. For example, 6pm only has 7 items, so I would probably do 5 lesson items at 2pm so that my first review would appear then.
I think around level 10. I wanted to be able to go through all my lessons as soon as they were available, but I quickly learned that it wasn’t sustainable for me. I was having over 200 reviews a day and my accuracy was dropping hard. I also wanted to spend more time on grammar and conversation. I think I’ve found a good pace now of about 12-18 a day. Sometimes only 6 if I’m starting to feel burnt out . Usually I’ll have a day or so a week I’ll churn out more than normal to catch up. It’s important to stay with it for the long game. And it wasn’t until I started really putting effort into grammar that I found I was actually learning anything useful. Wishing you all the best in your Japanese learning journey!
I have to admit that I never even started! I have trouble keeping my accuracy up at 85% as it is…
Pretty much immediately, lol. I started WK during winter break, and got to level 4 by the time grad school started again. Now I only do new lessons on weekends, as on weekdays I’m too tired to do multiple review sessions.
I also chose not to play around with lesson reordering, since leveling up is less important for me than really taking my time with vocab. It takes forever to level up this way but respecting your limits and not overextending yourself is worth it in the end.
I think the point was that what you were saying sounded a bit like “slow, otherwise you don’t have a life” which is just the other side of the coin and therefore not really a better thing to say than what you were criticizing
I know it probably wasn’t meant that way (just like that original one was a joke) but if we’re already talking about this, might as well agree that everyone has their own pace and they’re all fine, right
I only did level 1 radicals and level 1 kanji in one batch. When I leveled to 2 I adjusted to a fixed number of lessons per day, the availability of which I’ve been enforcing with the reorder script since level 5.