By how much would being able to do reviews only once every 24 hours slow down progress?

I keep reading that it takes 1.5-2 years to get from level 1 to 60, but is that for people who do reviews immediately?

I’d like to know (especially from the experiences of the higher level folks) how frequently they’d do reviews and by how much this progress would slow down if the frequency was down to “once every 24 hours” or the equivalent.

I review once per 24 hours over the last year and get between 70-90% per review. It has taken me to level 13.

I have switched between gotta-go-fast and to-hades-with-this approaches to WaniKani a number of times.

There is a certain amount of frustration with one sitting per 24 hours when you keep forgetting particular items but this is a numbers game and it works out for the most part. I’m talking about the cases where some item keeps hitting rock bottom with a review time of 4 or 8 hours and you don’t see it again until the next day.

A well-kept routine is key to this thing.

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Thank you, both of these replies are helpful.

I’d like some kind of estimate as for how long it’ll take to get to level 50-60 with this approach. If progress is linear, then 12 levels per year means around 5 years to level 60.

But I imagine it is not linear. Any thoughts?

I’m four months in, on (almost entirely) one review per day, and just about to complete level 5. So that’s roughly 1.5 levels per month at that rate.

I can’t remember the exact numbers (and the first couple of levels use different numbers) but if you only want to do the one review a day then each level will look something like this:

Day 1: Do lesson (you won’t get to do a review)
Day 2: Apprentice lvl 1
Day 3: Apprentice lvl 2
Day 4: Apprentice lvl 3
Day 7: Apprentice lvl 4, Do new set of lessons
Day 8: New set Apprentice lvl 1
Day 9: New set Apprentice lvl 2
Day 10: New set Apprentice lvl 3
Day 13: New set Apprentice lvl 4 //End of level

So you should be able to finish a level in 13 days (and start the next level that same day). That said, you’ll likely take longer due to mistakes, A single mistake on a radical can greatly lengthen the whole level, as this will push the radical from guru’ing by several days (and therefore any kanji that unlock from that radical will be pushed back as well).

If you don’t mind having 2 days where do you multiple reviews then you can really speed things up. Change the schedule to something like this:

Day 1: Lessons in morning
Day 1: (4 hours later) Apprentice 1
Day 1: (8 hours later) Apprentice 2
Day 2: Apprentice 3
Day 5: Apprentice 4 // Lessons
Day 5: (4 hours later) Apprentice 1
Day 6: Apprentice 2
Day 7: Apprentice 3
Day 10: Apprentice 4 // end of level

As you can see, that is more efficient and doesn’t require too much more effort. Especially if you take advantage of a reorder script.

Find what works for you but if you care about efficiency then read about how levels work and about when new reviews come in. You will be using the system for a long time so you should get to know some of the specifics, knowing them can help speed up levels while keeping review sessions down.

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I wrote a simulation a long time ago to simulate workload and time-to-completion for various scenarios, including changing when and how often you do reviews, and what your accuracy is at each SRS level:

You can adjust the parameters in the bottom-left panel:

var accuracy = [80.0, 80.0, 85.0, 90.0, 95.0, 95.0, 99.0, 96.0, 97.0];
var review_times = ['07:00', '21:00'];

For example, the above settings mean the you want to do reviews at 7am and 9pm daily, and your accuracy is 80% on Apprentice 1 & 2 items, 85% on Apprentice 3, 90% on Apprentice4, etc…

I left several alternate settings in the script for reference:

//var accuracy = [90.0, 90.0, 90.0, 90.0, 90.0, 90.0, 90.0, 90.0, 90.0];
//var accuracy = [100.0, 100.0, 100.0, 100.0, 100.0, 100.0, 100.0, 

//var review_times = ['06:00', '12:00', '17:00', '21:00'];
//var review_times = ['21:00'];

You can try each the alternatives by removing the //, but make sure only one ‘accuracy’ and one ‘review_times’ line are active at the same time.

You don’t have to stick to the given alternatives. You can manually edit any of the lines, as long as you keep the form correct.

After you ajust your settings, click the Run button in the top-left.

For @Azolero, then, I on the other hand try my darndest to do each review as they come up (and have around 95% accuracy overall, 92% for kanji reading). I’ve been here for 3 months and am on level 13.

I had to slow down to reviewing once a day this year because of work. The problem is I do reviews once a day over breakfast but then am stupid about fitting in lessons. I’ve been leveling up once a month the past few months. Not happy with my pace :confused: I know I need to do lessons faster to speed up, but I deliberately slowed them down so I could finish all my reviews in a short time every day.

I do the bulk of my reviews every morning, it’s a batch of about 150 items (if I haven’t been slacking). Keep in mind there are other factors that go into how long it will take to level. I take about 15 days to level but I also take a few days to complete all my lessons which is the larger factor in my slow level time. I also make sure to do my 4 hour review on new items.

I’ve been doing wk for over 2 years now but the last year, due to life, I barely did anything and only leveled about 5 times. So at my pace I probably would have been done between the 2 and 3 year mark.

Doing reviews only once or twice a day isn’t really what slows you down. Having 89% of the Kanji finished for a level and having to wait 4 days to unlock any new ones because you missed the meaning/reading on your last 2-3 kanji is where the real slowdown comes from.

You can easily level up every 8-14 days only doing reviews once/twice a day…if you get the Knaji correct. But how often are you going to get the Kanji correct only seeing them once a day?

I pretty much do a giant batch in the morning, then whenever they pop up from 7-midnight…or another giant batch at night if I am doing stuff…but I also study the Kanji using the “Iversen’s method” for the first day/two of unlocks so that I have a much higher chance of them actually sticking (as opposed to just learning them by failing them every 4 hours for a couple days).

But if you goal is to actually learn Japanese, not just some Kanji…you’ll need to plan a lot more time for study than just blowing through Wanikani reviews once a day.

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You have distressingly high accuracies for the later levels. Based on my burn rate, I’d say my burning accuracy is like, 50%

Heh… actually, those were just some made-up numbers. While experimenting, I plugged in a wide range of scenarios to see how it affected workload.

[Having said that, my numbers are actually higher than that, but it’s because I drilled everything on a rotating schedule, especially during lesson time. And I’m blessed with extremely good memory for certain kinds of things, so that helps a lot]

Not sure how helpful this will be but …

For the past 10-12 levels or so, I’ve been averaging about 9 days per level. My routine is as follows :

I’m able to do my reviews in my free time at work so I pretty much do them as they pop up throughout the day. I also typically get up early in the morning before work to get any done that came up while I was sleeping.

When I level up, I do all radical lessons immediately, then I try to get any vocab lessons from the previous level done (if there are any) before doing any new kanji lessons. I use the reordering script to achieve this. It’s a life saver if you’re trying to control your pace. Once radicals lessons and previous level vocab lessons are done, I’ll do kanji lessons but I decide how many by what’s going on in my life at the time. Sometimes I do them all and sometimes I don’t but either way my level up time seems to remain the same for the most part.

I guess what I’m saying is, in my case, only doing reviews once per day would slow me down immensely. But your mileage may vary.

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