Best way to study

Hi. I’ve been using wanikani for half a year now. I’m on level 17. I’m really enjoying it but it’s getting to the point where my reviews take up to 2 hours. I want to know if anyone has any studying advices. Sometimes I end up exhausted from studying wanikani that I can’t continue with my normal grammar Japanese studies. Anyone got any advice or tips on methods or ways to space the study load?
Thank you

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I took a look at your WaniKani profile and your Apprentice and Guru counts both look pretty good.

Are you seeing similar number of reviews every day? Or do you have some days with barely any reviews and other days with a ton of reviews? If you do all/most of your lessons right when you level up you’ll get those weird spikes, so if you’re seeing that it’s best to spread out your lessons (with something like [Userscript] WaniKani Lesson Filter if you want). Of course, I’m just guessing, and maybe you’re already doing this.

Other than that, if you do fewer lessons you’ll get fewer reviews, so you can slow down. You’ll level up more slowly, but this should reduce your daily workload as well.

Of course there’s leeches as well, but since your Apprentice and Guru counts look fine, I’m not sure if that’s a big issue right now. You can check your leech counts with something like [Userscript] WaniKani Dashboard SRS and Leech Breakdown. If it turns out you do have a lot of leeches, you can give them extra attention with [Userscript] Self-Study Quiz and [Userscript] Additional Filters. But again, whether that’s needed depends on how much leeches are impacting you. And of course this could actually add to your workload (extra studying for leeches) until you start to get a hang of them, at which point you’ll have fewer reviews and should save time.

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Thanks for your reply. When I do the lessons with a 24 hour space in between it’s usually fine, but if for some reason I leave it for day and a half or miss a day, then I can have up to 350 kanjis. I just want to know if people have a certain learning method with Wanikani to fit different studies throughout the week (kanjis, grammar, speaking, etc…) because kanji is taking most of my time even though I try to do it everyday so the workload doesn’t increase. I’m only at beginner level, so I can’t imagine how it will be when I get further along the way.
I will check the links that you send. I’m not entirely sure what the leeches are. Are they reviewed kanjis that I get wrong and keep on coming up, or something along those lines?
Thank you

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There is no special method. Once you’re doing a level you should keep going until you finish it. It should take roughly a week if you do ~20 lessons daily and have 2 review sessions 4 and 8 hours apart. That’s your 1-2 hours of WK per day. Ideally you should add an extra hour to do grammar, maybe every other day.

If you can’t, then you could take a week off of lessons and use the freed up time for studying grammar. Then start working on new level items next week. But make sure to do your reviews at least once a day even when you aren’t doing lessons.

If you feel that wanikani takes too much time, you could do less lessons or alternately you can assign how much time you want to spend doing reviews and stop when you reach it disregarding how much reviews are left. You can even start from grammar and then do reviews. It all depends on what you decide to put priority in.
Also, how much time it takes you to level-up and what is you general accuracy percentage?

maybe have a look at My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 )
anyway the best way, is your way, imo.

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Thank you for your reply. It usually takes me about 10 days to level up and the average is about 90%. How do you divide your studying hours? how long does it take you to level up if you don’t always finish your reviews?
Thank you

Thank you for you post. I’m assuming that you were learning the language alongside Wanikani. Did you have any special ways to divide your studying, did you have specific days only for Wanikan or did you just reviewed everyday? Did the workload got too intense after certain level? Is your spoken Japanese as good as your reading?
I’m Just trying to get an idea because I kinda hit a wall at the moment.
Thank you

10 days and 90%? Seems good. Only other thing I can think apart from reducing general wanikani workload is to not skip review days even if you do less in one day.
My own experience might not be very helpful to you, but since you asked - quarantine interfered with my courses and doing it in the form of homework didn’t click with me, so right now I’m taking a break from grammar studies and concentrating on wanikani. Right now I level-up under 8 days, doing 200 items reviews a day in average. I didn`t bother to see how much time it takes. :smiley: Before when for a time I didn’t study on wanikani as consistently and skipped some days entirely I level-uped in 12-15 days.
As I said it depends on what you put priority in. I felt that my kanji knowledge was the limiting factor for me, so I decided to concentrate on kanji for now, but your case might be different.

Yep that’s right. They’re called “leeches” because they leech away your time since you keep reviewing them over and over again.

Yeah that must feel terrible. I myself also hit that wall once or twice in the past (almost gave upon Wanikani, maybe two times?)

Did you have any special ways to divide your studying, did you have specific days only for Wanikan or did you just reviewed everyday?

Yes, I do review Wanikani everyday. Once when I commute to work in the morning, one at lunch time and one final time before going to bed.

Yeah this should sound imidating and kinda stressful. However, don’t overwhelm yourself, you could take a lazy day or two (as I often do xD). The key here is to try to review everyday. I try to clear all the reviews of a day before going to bed (you could spare a day or two, but generally srs method requires consistency).

Did the workload got too intense after certain level? Is your spoken Japanese as good as your reading?

Yes and No, sadly :durtle_hello: If you keep your Apprentice items 100~150s then you are good to go. The workload does get intensive if you are being lazy after a couple of days, and your memory retention goes down as well. So, don’t skip doing reviews (again, consistency is the key here).

Well my speaking skills are bad compared to my reading ones(in short it’s :poop: ). I think it depends on your goal and how you approach Japanese

I didn’t read the replies because (lazy). So i want to tell you what i did. I stopped for a week clearing up some apprentice items. Then whenever i am done with a review session i do 5 lessons then go finish grammer study(i use bunpro) then go study vocabulary(tori).
I am usually exhausted after all this. But i get some breathing time after all this. I repeat this 2 or 3 times a day.

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