Hi,
I’m only missing 2 kanji to go to the next level but while I wait for those to rotate through the set again, I have literally nothing to do. At midnight passing today I only got 3 new lessons.
Is there a point to this dead time? Is there a way to remove it?
Best,
Alper
Also this thing says I’m level 4 but I’m currently level 5.
It’s a known glitch - if you log out and then log back in it will display your current level 5.
To @alpercugun, there is a saying, “Be careful what you wish for!” 
You seem to be one of those speedsters who will race through to Level 60. If so, @ThiagoIanuch’s screenshot is a sample of what you will have and quite possibly even more so!!! Good luck to you
Presumably you want to learn Japanese, not just get to level 60. So study grammar or try reading some stories. Wanikani shouldn’t be your only time spent studying.
The point of dead time is waiting for the possibility of forgetting. There is no point of repeating old things more than necessary.
And yeah, there are other required skills for real world language use. Arguments can be made for just too many vocab and Kanji not being helpful.
if you are trying to pace your lessons per day, you can also be strategic about which lessons you do first (if you aren’t already doing so). in order to level up, you need to clear all of the radicals Kanji, so my lesson priority is based on that.
I do all of my radicals in the first day or two of leveling up, then complete all of the available Kanji lessons. then I do some vocab while waiting to guru the radicals. once the rest of the level’s Kanji are unlocked, I finish those lessons before doing any more vocab. after that, I am only about 4 days away from leveling up again, and there is plenty of vocabulary to study in the meantime.
because I am doing the Kanji as a priority, my level up time is relatively fast, and I have a little bit of a backlog on vocab lessons to do. I’ve found that I actually need to slow down my leveling up in order to not get too far behind in vocabulary.
for me, having a consistent number of reviews to do each day is important, so I am trying to make sure I never run out of lessons- I’ve had about a 4 level run of it so far with my current method. hope this is helpful : ]
I have the Same Problem. After I found Out about advanced I did the Radicals and Kanji as fast as possible and have now still vocabulary of Level 5 undone. Since I’m on Level 8 I prioritize Vocabulary over Radicals and Kanji.
No I already studied to N4+ in a different way and want to catch up quickly to where I was.
No this is purely because there’s an arbitrary cut off between levels. This would not be there if it was continuous.
OK. That’s helpful.
It’s an arbitrary cutoff of 90% of each Kanji list, to be exact.
You can question WaniKani decision of having to be good enough at each Kanji list, but that’s what WaniKani is, made for perfection of Kanji.
You can’t have a single bad level of Kanji, and that would be difficult to implement if WaniKani is continuous.
i don’t understand how these questions come up at least once every week. 
before i registered on wanikani and especially before i paid for it, i made sure i knew how it was supposed to work and if it was what i wanted.
and the whole srs theme is, as far as i understand it, one of the selling points 
but i guess most of the community is more patient with these questions than i would be 
My 2cents as someone who’s just started. There is a lot of knowledge to learn before starting WaniKani and that is compounded by the amount of knowledge you’re already learning when starting a new language like Japanese.
I think we live in a internet culture where everything is instantaneous and if you want something now, you can have it in seconds. Gone are the days (cynically I would say that we never did obtained knowledge by taking the time to learn), where people will tend to spend hours of reading and learning. I spent probably ~20 hours in just learning about Japanese on Tofugu’s guides, which include understanding how Japanese is different from English, and the history of Japanese as it relates to the influence by Chinese scholars. This was done during my study of Hiragana and Katakana. Why spend ~20 hours reading when I can just have someone tell me what to do and get the results. If only it were ever that easy right?!
It’s sad, but for the most part, we can be our own worse enemies and sabotage our development because we just don’t know the consequences of our choices either because we’re ignorant or arrogant. I think this is just going to be a continually loop that we will always be in.
but i guess most of the community is more patient with these questions than i would be
I agree, I’m so thankful for the people who are very patient with helping members build compression and knowledge. It’s often a thankless job but it’s so important because individuals like myself who have questions will have those support me with answers. That’s the positive, the negative is when people argue. That’s the taxing stuff that I think makes helping people in the community such a difficult job. Why invest time in someone who doesn’t want to take the time to learn themselves? If you figure out the answer, you’ll have unlocked some pretty powerful learning tools.
I follow this same strategy, but I don’t let myself move on to the next level’s radicals until I’ve worked through all of the vocab lessons on my current level. The vocab is important! At the end of the day, I’m not here just to learn kanji - I’m here to learn how to read Japanese written in kanji. That means learning the readings and meanings of the words.
It’s true that there are many vocab words on WK that may not be practically useful right away (ナポレオン三世?), but even those serve an important function by demonstrating and/or reinforcing the kanji readings.
This is an interesting situation. I’m curious what you mean by “where I was.” To get past all of the N5-N4 kanji, you’ll need to work through level 27 (or, more practically, at least level 16), but by that point you’ll have also run into much N3-N1 material along the way.
I’ve struggled to interface my WK study with other resources for this reason; the WK kanji and vocab lists don’t seem to match up well with anything else.
I am reluctant to say, add more vocab related to learned Kanji (Anki? Torii?). I think it’s not something to worry about, generally, in Level 1-30. Kana-only vocab, maybe, but it’s too all over the place…
I can sympathize, though. L1-10, too slow. L11-20, getting faster. L21-30, too many? It’s a pretty common complaint for this app.
But more importantly, self-assessed N4 is somewhere you should also strengthen grammar and reading experience (or speaking/listening/writing). It’s not like knowing just a little would work well. Join a book club, a group of people reading, or something. Reading alone could also works, but amount matters.
When I started WK in October, I was definitely above N4 level (never taken it officially but I did mocks). I even had already read some books and games. I would estimate I had 200 kanji I knew very well already - meaning, onyomi, kunyomi, and common atejis. And probably another 200 or so that I knew fairly well but needed some brushing up. Then a trickle of others I knew but not well at all.
The first month or two was brutally boring. (And the patronizing article about the inability to skip was not helping). Thanks to the FAQ I knew how to level up quickly by doing all the radicals and kanji asap - I still did all the vocab but I was more willing to delay it by a day or two. But even then “quickly” meant about 8 days after the first two levels.
But I dealt with it and used that time to keep doing my grammar lessons on NativShark, and my podcasts on JapanesePod101 or YouTube, and read books. I read multiple books - though I wasn’t really retaining the stuff I looked up unless they happened to also be in those other sites.
And then I started seeing more words and kanji in WK that I wasn’t as strong in, and then I would see them in those books, and absolutely it helped. Each week reading became even more pleasant as I recognized more things I practice in WK. I was retaining way better, and seeing them in the books helped create a retention loop.
Now I don’t find it brutally boring, and it’s very helpful.
Enjoy the extra free time while you have it. If you are already at a higher level than some people who are starting from 0 then I would recommend diving into some books before WaniKani gets crazy, and trust me it will. You seem to be going at a fast speed, which is really effective if you can keep it up. I highly recommend it actually.
When I was at some earlier levels, I read books like the 十年屋 series, a book called ソーリ(personal favorite), a book called 神様のパッチワーク, and some others. Really until I was level 30 I was reading a lot of books/manga. Now I mostly have been reading articles and such which is great too, but I do miss some of the fun stories I was reading. As for news articles I would recommend NHK, but if NHK is too hard try the NHK Easy website. Like the others said your dead time should be filled with reading or other studies to really supplement WaniKani anyway. Assuming this matches well with your goals for Japanese. Anyway good luck!
Enjoy the break. Before long you won’t have the “I have nothing to do” problem. Here’s some things you can do:
-Practice kanji you’ve already had lessons for
-Practice grammar
-Practice hand writing
-Practice reading (when you’re ready)
-Practice writing, such as keeping a Japanese journal about your day (when you’re ready)
Later down the road you’ll find if you take a week off you’ll have 1000 reviews waiting for you… so don’t worry too much about going at max speed. I used to care about waiting on new levels, but now not so much. There’s so much stuff I can work on while waiting on a new level.
Same! It feels wrong to move to a new level before finishing what’s already there from the last level, but the strategy of doing radicals → kanji → some vocab → rest of unlocked kanji → rest of vocab definitely makes things a lot faster
待って… cool profile btw
