Context:
I stepped away from WK for several years (Level 16) and have spent the last couple of weeks powering through several thousand lessons and 500+ reviews. I still regularly have 350+ items in apprentice and 1000+ in guru and I’m realizing this isn’t really sustainable, so I’m going to stop doing reviews and focus on getting my apprentice items down to 100ish.
Question:
If I only do reviews when my apprentice items fall under 150 items then how long will it likely take me to level up? I’m trying to make sure I’m ready for JLPT N2 by December from a Kanji perspective.
I have a lifetime membership… is there any way to create a second instance of WK without paying additional fees to redo levels 1-16? I seem to have retained 80% of the information, but it would definitely be helpful to re-study items, especially the radicals. I don’t really want to restart.
Are there any tricks to help optimize leveling up? I thought I saw something about a script that has you do radical reviews first, which speeds things up, but not sure if that works for tsurukame or not, what the script is and any downsides to this approach?
Are you perchance getting lessons and reviews mixed up? Because you should definitely be doing reviews every day.
But to answer your questions:
Most people try to keep Apprentice to 100 or below, but if you can handle more daily reviews, any number including 150 is fine. Level-up speed is determined by how quickly you get the required number of kanji to Guru, and since you’re using Tsurukame, you can set review order to “ascending SRS level” whenever you have levelup reviews available to make sure you get all of them if you’re more worried about getting everything to Guru and less worried about higher-SRS stuff. That’s what I do to try not to get stuck on a level too long. I’ll do all radical lessons as soon as I get them (toggle “prioritize current level” in TK lesson settings), then every day do 5 kanji and 10 vocab lessons, then prioritize Apprentice-level reviews without worrying too much about if I can clear all outstanding reviews every day or not. If I stay on top of it, I think it takes me around 12 days? So doing more than 5 kanji lessons daily will cut down on that time.
As far as I’m aware, there’s no way of creating another account short of paying for the second one (or just sticking to the 3 free levels). However, there’s a self-quiz script that may do what you’re wanting, though I’ve never used it. Another option is creating a KameSame account and doing the WK lessons from those levels on there. KS also allows you to skip or manually burn items you already know, so you don’t need to review items you’re confident on.
On Tsurukame I haven’t found a setting that lets you do reviews of a specific type (unless you actually mean lessons here, in which case it does…) but setting review order to “ascending SRS stage” or if you know they’ve just recently come in “newest available first” and you’ll be able to clear those reviews earlier.
I’ll take you meant to write “lessons”. The answer is that it depends on your accuracy. Given a perfect score, even if you do all lessons when they come up, you shouldn’t ever get more than 150 apprentice items. There are 60 levels, about 9000 items, that means about 150 per level, and you mostly break these into two 3.5 day periods each.
No there isn’t, but you can use scripts to self study the earlier items.
I think tsurukame has that built in as an option. Don’t quote me on that though, never used it. It has the drawback, that if you get lazy and don’t do your vocab lessons, they will pile up, and the best way to reinforce learnt kanji is with vocab, so you don’t want that to happen.
I’m guessing you meant stop doing lessons and yes, that sounds like a sound start. I would also make full use of the recent mistake feature, to put some extra work into truly memorizing those items. It does seem like you have issues with accuracy if you’ve got those numbers?
There are multiple ways to optimize how you do lessons, focusing on timings on the day, to allow you to get items up to apprentice 3 within the day. You only really have to focus on the radicals and the second batch of kanji though, as that is what determines the speed of level up (assuming you by then have also guru’d the first batch kanji).
But for now. Just focus on getting apprentice items down to <100 and then try to keep them there. Focus less on speed and more on accuracy to make reviewing a better experience and help your retention.
I considered resetting to an earlier level, however I know the majority of kanji from prior levels and honestly for the next 10+ levels as well. What I don’t remember are the radical names since those are custom to WK.
One more question - I love the option to review recent mistakes, but I’m wondering if there is a way to make it so that once I’ve gone through recent mistakes that it only shows the items that I got wrong a second time?
When going full speed how many reviews do you typically have per a day? I’m hoping that I can get my reviews down to a sane level then go full speed again at a manageable pace
90% of N2 is Level 45. Basically, you’d need a level a week.
Self-Study. Use the following addons
Wanikani: Reorder Omega
WaniKani Open Framework
WaniKani Open Framework Additional Filters to self-study leaches
Any dependencies
Reorder Omega will help you prioritize apprentice items but beware any reordering tools as the less random it is, the more you can use methods other than knowledge to sus-out answers.
Follow this schedule to optimize to a 1 week schedule:
Day 1: Learn 8AM, Review Noon, Review 8PM
Day 2: Review 8PM
Day 3: <Pass / Leaches>
Day 4: Review 8PM, Learn 8PM, Review Midnight
Day 5: Review 8AM, Review 2PM (Flexible to 8PM)
Day 6: <Pass / Leaches>
Day 7: Review 2PM (Level Complete, 6.5 Days), Learn Vocab Only 2PM, Vocab Review 6PM
^ You could stagger and start new Kanji on Day 7, but it’s best to keep consistent
Starting at level 43 you can start doing 2 levels a week.
Personal Opinion:
If level 1-16 is overwhelming you now, consider toning it down to N3 by end of year so you don’t burn out. You’re going to have grammar and listening in addition to this schedule, otherwise you won’t be ready for the test. You’ll benefit from taking some breaks from lessons when things get overwhelming (just tone down frequency like, 5 or 10 / day)
Read some of the level 60 posts - a lot are completed by people who can’t read NKEasy articles in less than 30 minutes which really isn’t ideal, but it’s because they gamed the WK system to speed through levels and didn’t spend time in grammar land.
As for “full speed” - it’s between 200-400 reviews per day. You basically learn 100 new ones every level up, assuming an 80% pass rate, have about 100 in “leach” land and 100 Guru/Master/Enlightened each week from prior levels.
Thank you! This information is very helpful and I shouldn’t be too far off from passing N2 as I missed it by 1 point several years ago and have definitely improved in that time period.
I think I somewhat messed up my WK since I did it daily up to level 16, stepped away for ~3 years, then came back and did every lesson/review that had piled up as quickly as possible. You can see my current distribution below (have 98 lessons in the queue as well).
True, and given the time commitment that implies, it’s worth bearing in mind that “study 90% of N2 kanji on WK” is probably not the most effective use of study time towards N2 overall compared to more general reading, grammar and maybe vocab study.
If you’re using bunpro, if you opt into their beta version, they have vocabulary decks available to study!! Although I haven’t visited in a while, I know they have N5, and N4 at least, but if its kana vocab you’re worried about, the majority should be in those decks. Although, I would go through them and only add the ones you don’t know to your study pile in SRS. There’s wayyyy too many to do every single one of them. Just auto burn them if you want to know where you’ve gone.
Great advice - I’ll check it out. Bunpro is good for grammar, but I wish they linked more decent video explanations I find myself wasting time self searching for decent videos all the time
