Lately, I’ve been beginning to feel like I’m hitting a bit of a wall with my kanji learning. I see people talking about managing to rush through Wanikani in a year or two, but that hasn’t been the case for me at all.
I’m currently level 23, and it’s getting to the point where it’s taking me around a month per level, which seems a lot worse than what I’ve read from other people. I realize that language learning isn’t a race, but I can’t help but wonder if I’m just doing something “wrong.” I spend 30-60 minutes each morning going over my reviews, and usually try to do 5-10 new lessons per day, depending on how many reviews I had for that day, although sometimes I’ll do 0 if the reviews are beginning to feel suffocating. For context, here’s my stats:
For what it’s worth, I am balancing Wanikani with grammar studies, vocabulary studies (a combination of Anki and the Tango textbooks), listening practice, and biweekly conversation practice with a native. I’m about to wrap up my second year of learning Japanese, and I’d say I’m about at an N4 level, although I’m making my way through Quartet I and hoping to be N3 at some point this year.
I guess the point of this post is just to see how unusual my slow progress with Wanikani is or if anyone has any advice. Thanks in advance!
There’s plenty of people taking wanikani slowly, you’re not alone in that respect. The mid-20s are relatively known for being difficult too. I don’t think you’ve anything to worry about, especially with all the other studies you’re doing.
Well, if you really want to go faster through wanikani, my suggestions would be:
Try to add in a second round of reviews in the evening
Consistently add new lessons (e.g. for starters, commit to 10 a day for a while and see how it feels)
BUT having said that, I passed N3 at roughly level ~20 and wanikani was basically my kanji study method. I didn’t do super great but it was alright. So I think overall your kanji progress is fine and doesn’t seem to be lacking behind your other areas of study. If you are happy with your overall progress and you don’t feel held back by kanji in particular you might as well keep your current speed if that’s a pace you can comfortably maintain
Thanks both for the responses! It’s nice to hear that my progress isn’t too out of the ordinary. I suppose I just started to fall into the age old trap of comparing my progress with others lol. Overall, I’m not disappointed with my progress or anything, but just wasn’t sure if I might be approaching WK wrong.
This is not typical I think, it’s just the minority of speedrunners who stand out because if you’re willing to dedicate a lot of time to your Japanese studies then you’re probably willing to dedicate a lot of time talking about your Japanese.
Hopefully these stories can be inspirational, but sometimes they can also make you feel like you’re doing it wrong if you go slower which is just not true.
The speed at which you progress should be proportional to the amount of lessons and reviews that you do. So I guess the question is: why don’t you feel like doing more lessons/reviews?
That’s amazing, and at level 23 you should have about 75% kanji coverage on “standard” Japanese text. You don’t mention doing reading practice here, if not you should really consider trying. “Going slow” is only an issue if you’re not enjoying yourself and are just grinding grammar points, textbook lessons and SRS entries. At your level you should be able to engage with things you actually want to read, like videogames or manga for instance.
It’s also good motivation to keep pushing in my experience. I still remember attempting to play Final Fantasy VII early in my studies, having to look up basically every other kanji and encountering the word 一緒 which stuck with me for some reason, I think mainly because it’s made up of 糸 and 者 which I had already learned on WaniKani. I also remember that discovering that the kanji 緒 is pretty far up on level 28 was both sobering and motivating: back then I must have been level 15 or so and level 38 felt so far away that it was a bit frustrating, but also I knew that it meant that by the time I reached that level I would be able to read all that vocab and that was a good motivation to keep going as fast as I could.
Thank you for the feedback! I am actually doing some reading practice, which I forgot to mention. I try to read at least one article from NHK Easy per day, and I do find that I have a pretty solid level of comprehension for most articles. My strategy is usually to turn off furigana, read the article, use a translator to see how accurate my understanding was, and then read through it one more time with the narration playing.
That’s really good actually! If you look at most “speedrunners” they often don’t do much outside of WaniKani and end up with extremely one-sided knowledge of Japanese. They can read 泌尿器 but not necessarily conjugate adjectives. Your knowledge appears to be much better rounded.
If you have a manga that interests you, that may be worth a try. The casual speech is a bit challenging at first because it’s not the type of language you usually encounter in textbooks (or NHK for that matter) but using translations and context cues you should find that it’s not as daunting as it may seem at first. Aim for something in the low-20s on Natively and work your way up from there! Looking into the various book clubs on this platform (or Natively) can also be interesting if that’s your thing.
Honestly as soon as you start reading seriously I don’t think you should worry too much about WaniKani levels. Let your practice guide you: if you feel like spotty kanji knowledge is the main issue, then you’ll have the motivation to push on WaniKani. If you feel like grammar is the main problem, or kana vocab, or kansai ben, or historical knowledge or whatever then you can decide how to best invest your study time into things that actually matter to you in the short term.
Thank you so much! I hadn’t heard of Natively before, but that’s going in my bookmarks; it looks like an awesome resource. This is all super helpful, and I think I’ll even start looking into finding a book club.
For your question here “Is my progress too slow”, I think there’s three ways that you could call someone’s learning progress “too slow”:
External Deadlines - If you e.g. needed to pass N2 for a job opportunity by the time you finished a period of education or some fixed term employment and weren’t on track to achieve that
Personal Satisfaction - If you’re personally unhappy with your progress
Running in place - If you were learning so slowly and had no revision going on that you were forgetting more than you were learning.
(I realise a list of items with bolded headings comes across as ChatGPT-ish, but all I can say is that it’s not here)
From what you’ve said here, I don’t think you’re in the first or third situation. You haven’t mentioned any external need to reach a certain level of Japanese at a certain date, so you can’t be said to be going too slow for a deadline.
You’ve also mentioned that you feel you’re at N4 level after two years and on track to N3 level - this means you’ve made forward progress and are continuing to do so, and you have external activities like textbooks and nhk easy to benchmark that you are understanding some Japanese. So I think it’s clear you’re not running in place either.
So really, the only way you could be said to be going too slow is if you, personally, are unhappy with your progress.
If that’s the case, it’s probably best to think about why you’re worried that you’re too slow. If you’re seeing people on the forums going faster than you and wondering why you can’t go that fast, then there’s a couple of things to say:
As @simias mentioned, on the forums you’re going to hear the most enthused and most likely to both share their progress and make rapid progress. There’s plenty of other users who learn Japanese without rushing (or in some cases, even using) Wanikani. (It’s not surprising that one can learn Japanese without SRS, much less one specific platform of course, the only surprising thing is how they found these forums lol)
My guess is that the actual most common time to finish Wanikani is “never” rather than “1-2 years”. This could be because of things like the user that gives up after not being fluent in a month, or the user who switches to a competitor, or the user who reaches a point where they feel that other learning activities become a better return on time. So I wouldn’t feel a need to compare yourself to the most visible users.
Consistency is better than speed. Marathon not sprint, etc. etc. Some ways to make faster progress in WK levels would either require more time which might sap your motivation to learn Japanese or take away from other activities that might be more beneficial towards those goals.
Now with that said, if after reading all the above, you still feel you want to accelerate your WK progress, here’s a couple of things to think about:
An hour of reviews a day at 0-10 lessons a day sounds like a lot. You haven’t shared any stats about your queue sizes (especially apprentice items) or your accuracy, but it may be worth thinking about why your reviews are taking an hour
Are you giving too much time per item? Like if you get an answer right, but it requires spending a minute to recall one item, it may be worth just marking it wrong, reading the answer to remind yourself, and letting SRS do its thing and quiz you later.
Is your accuracy too low? There’s a non-linear relationship between accuracy and how many times you have to review an item, so the lower your accuracy, the higher your workload for the same number of in-progress items. Maybe some practice when you do the lesson beyond just chucking it into the SRS can help in this case.
One review session a day is not ideal for making fast progress through Wanikani. The first two stages, Apprentice 1 and 2, have intervals of 4 hours and 8 hours. So an ideal review cadence might be one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the later evening. Even one in the morning/noon and one in the evening would be a big improvement in your WK speed
This doesn’t need to mean more time per day. Like if you could split your current 1 hour a day into 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening, it would still help progress items through the queue quicker.
Of course it will at least initially mean more reviews, as some items will make it into both your morning and evening reviews, but if that improves your accuracy then it kind of balances out, or at least that was my experience.
Reading is a pretty strong accelerator for Wanikani too. Both because you’ll come across some words in your lessons that you’ll have already found in reading (@simias example of 一緒 is a good one - if you do reading you will certainly encounter and learn this long before you get to it in Wanikani), and also because it’ll reinforce things you’ve already learned which will reduce the rate at which they get sent back down levels.
Thanks for such an in depth answer, along with the suggestions for improving my pace! To answer your question regarding accuracy and queue sizes, here’s my current tier distribution:
I do feel like I have an issue with getting things to ‘enlightened’ and then forgetting them and having them get knocked back down to guru. There are also some items that take longer than I’d like in order to come up with the correct answer. Just to provide a bit of clarity, I think that a full 60 minutes is on the longer end of how much time I dedicate to WK daily, but it does occasionally happen.
I think I’m going to experiment with spreading my reviews out through the day, with at least adding a second session but maybe even a third like you mentioned. While I’m not in a rush to work through the entirety of WK, I do think that breaking it up into chunks throughout the day could help with making 100+ review days feel a bit more digestible.
I heard that after level 30 the kanji would get less useful so I wanted there fast and the review amount I got from that sprint wasn’t worth it. If I didn’t do the reviews on the hour they came, they would turn into mountains that just crush any motivation.
Still did those and after that hard journey I’m inching towards the end.
About reading, I think, try to read things without Furigana by default. Also, get into the habit of reading both base text and upper text if there is Furigana, like in manga.
Another thing is about article length. No need to restrict yourself to minimally short reading everyday. (I am not sure about the different pole opposite either, but I don’t think the habit of doing just-the-least is good.) So, finding a feel-good one in Natively that are willing to read is good.
In the end, you might need to remember in advance to get to reading without all the phonetic keys, and that could go along with WaniKani studies, as many of Level 21-30 vocabularies are common and interesting enough. (Again, willingness to remember vocabularies, and you will find them everywhere.)
WaniKani strategy of remembering – doing 2 times a day might do the magic.
There was a thread a little while ago where someone did a bit of mathematical modelling and the conclusion was that the big gain is from going from one review session a day to two. The “fastest possible” tactics you need for a speed run demand three carefully spaced sessions, but they don’t add that much on top of a two session strategy.
your wk level matters less than your actual overall language knowledge improvement. Maybe youre just learning kanji a bit slower or being challenged to remember things. Maybe your brain currently is having an easier time with grammar or vocab. As long as youre having progress in the language, youre doing well
I used to get worried about this as well. The main reason was the lv60 posts of people doing one level every 3 to 7 days which is beyond my capacity.
That being said I remember it was taking me 4 to 6 weeks to level up. And the reason was that I was on auto pilot and too comfortable with the amount I was adding. After tracking and making some adjustments my current level up is in 2 weeks.
I think doing 2 reviews is what works best for me. I do one when I wake up, which has around 200 items and takes me 40min or so. And then I do on in the afternoon around 2pm. I introduce new items after the first review and I alternate between just kanji and just vocab days. Usually 6 kanji and 25 vocab.
On the days I’m motivated I tend to squeeze a 11am review, if I managed to do the first one at 7am since it gives the 4h interval.
As many people mentioned, it’s about finding a pace that suits you. What I’ve come to terms with is that your pace will change over time. Either because of life changes or just internal changes. Accept those moments and adjust accordingly
This is so well put! After struggling with native written material for far too long + realizing the main thing holding me back is kanji, I have huge motivation to push forward here on Wanikani.
The good news is you can probably start crashing through stuff that uses clear everyday language like shounen manga (if you accept losing out on the intricate power descriptions), basic RPGs like the early Dragon Quests, and kid-oriented anime like Anpanman.
On top of the common “max 100 Apprentice” rule, I keep to a “max 1000 overall” rule. That way when I fall off for months and come back vaguely motivated, I have at most a week of catchup.
Wonder if I’ll make Top 10 slowest users when I finally clear 60. Glad I got lifetime first. I knew myself
hey, most people already give up before getting to your level, i have taken a ungodly amount of time on lvl 2.
cause i dont do my reviews often enough
debating whether or not to pay for wk and I’d wait for the new years/christmas discount so i have no reason to rush to get lvl 2 and lvl 3
it doesn’t really matter how long it takes as long as you learn new things and are enjoying it cause once you burnout from Japanese learning its difficult to come back
I am N5 level, I will do the N4 in the end of this year or next year. My goal is to study around 150 reviews a day or do 15 lessons. Sometimes is impossible. I take like 29 days to level up. And I heard that japanese learn kanji at least for 8 years. So, I don´t really believe that 2 years of kanji without writting is a big advantage. Just study everyday, I would say I will finish WaniKani in lesse than 8 years and it is ok. I tallked to a japanese friend these days and asked him if the internet is making japaneses unlearn how to write. He said that they spend so many year writting kanjis that they dont unlearn. Maybe they dont know all the kanji, but the daily use is ok.
I’m also struggling with progressing. I’ve been signed up for 3 years and have been studying on and off due to major demotivation. I’m trying to stick to 5 lessons a day at the moment. I’ll push to 10 if I have more motivation. BTW, where do I get these graphical visualizations of my WaniKani stats?
