Diary of a mad level 50'er

As you can see I have far less guru items than master items :wink:


However I often have more gurus than masters. If you go at a fast pace, you have a constant flow of new apprentice items, hopefully soon turning into guru. In addition failed master or enlightened reviews come back to guru, too.

For the last months my guru items have been staying at around 13% of all my unlocked items:
image

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I’ve had more gurus than master for almost my entire time at Wanikani. It’s really the failed Enlighten and Burn reviews and the leeches that do it. If you had 100% accuracy, you’d always have more Masters than Gurus, no matter how fast you go, since an item will spend 3 weeks in Guru and 4.3 weeks in Master. But the leeches tip the balance the other way in practice.

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Due to an inconveniently timed last minute meeting at work today along with excessive procrastination on my part, I didn’t complete my new kanji reviews until two hours later than usual, meaning that I’ll level up two hours later than usual next Saturday evening, which in turn means having to stay up two hours later than usual to the do the Apprentice reviews.

This means I’ll have to stay up well past midnight, which is going to suck. Ever since Thanksgiving, I’d been spending much of my free time playing Magic: The Gathering, which meant less time and attention to WK, as well as letting the reviews pile up more in general. It also meant that I often ended up not going to bed until later than usual and hence sleep deprivation issues. I decided to avoid MTG entirely at least until I hit level 60, but I’m only starting to get things back to normal. And now this. I’ll be staying up even later next Saturday than I have recently. Oh well. At least things will finally get back to normal next Sunday following my Magic-induced bender.

December 9:
Level: 57
Total time spent on Wanikani today: 167 minutes
Reviews in the last day: 556
Accuracy: 83.45% (464/556)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 289
Guru: 1495
Master: 1255
Enlightened: 2860
Burned 2476

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I remember one time a few solid levels ago I went for one last meal with friends before the second lockdown hit.

I had so much fun I forgot about my Apprentice 3->Apprentice 4 promotions. On my way back as I was riding down my bike listening to the Pikmin 3 soundtrack the realization suddenly hit me.

They tell that adventures are only fun retroactively, I bet you’ll look back on that in a while with a smile on your face. The coping mechanisms that the brain has are something else :blush:

It’s nice that in that 7 days we have 4 hours of grace period each week cause otherwise I’d be in tears that day. It took me a week to get back to my old schedule anyway xd

It’s crazy that after adding up the numbers today, my first reaction was “wow, only 109 minutes? What a light day.”

I haven’t talked much about it, but doing the long review sessions is really mentally exhausting. I often have to break them up into little bits and take a rest in between.

December 10:
Level: 57
Total time spent on Wanikani today: 109 minutes
Reviews in the last day: 446
Accuracy: 81.39% (363/446)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 272
Guru: 1516
Master: 1271
Enlightened: 2853
Burned 2491

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Well, you are getting close to the point where the review density will start going downward (level 60)! So hopefully then you won’t have 120 minute review days anymore and a few weeks later you won’t even have 60 minute review days.

Yeah, I expect it to start going down in a week or two. But for now I’ve struggling through the absolute peak of reviews and lessons.

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December 11:
Level: 57
Total time spent on Wanikani today: 100 minutes
Reviews in the last day: 453
Accuracy: 79.47% (360/453)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 266
Guru: 1541
Master: 1246
Enlightened: 2884
Burned 2502

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December 12:
Level: 58
Total time spent on Wanikani today: 160 minutes
Reviews in the last day: 564
Accuracy: 82.98% (468/564)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 265
Guru: 1566
Master: 1277
Enlightened: 2882
Burned 2513

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Congrats on the level up!
That being said, 564 reviews must have sucked a lot, there’s just a week left to go from now! :blush:

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Well I survived reaching level 58, despite having to stay up past midnight to do the reviews. It wasn’t as bad as I expected because I came up with a trick - I went to bed early immediately after doing the lessons and then woke up about two hours later. That way I wasn’t sleepy at all when it came time to do the reviews later.

Also, this log has now been going for over four weeks, so I figured it’s time to collect the statistics so far. I was shocked to discover that last week, for the first time, I was over 100 minutes every single day, and also averaged over two hours per day for the first time.

week 1: 126  78  91  86 133  96  85 total: 695 (avg 99)
week 2: 165  84  85  75 133  94  87 total: 723 (avg 103)
week 3: 142  98 100 110 155 112  93 total: 810 (avg 116)
week 4: 183 109 113 106 167 109 100 total: 887 (avg 127)
week 5: 160
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If you want to mess around with stats even more, WaniKani has an API that stores every single review attempt that you have made. People have been using that API to calculate leeches or to count your daily streaks for the items, but this data could be easily pulled from there too. You can then later put that data into RStudio or even Google Sheets and make some graphs of that, calculate stuff like mean, mode, standard deviation, WaniKani by itself is my favorite Big Data project I’ve ever looked into :eyes:

EDIT: One more note, this count doesn’t involve the lessons that you have made, so it’s only reviews starting at Apprentice 1->Apprentice 2 and ending at Enlightened->Burned. You’d have to combine the lesson and review data to get the most accurate picture there!

That being said, I’m not doing mine until I’m level 60, there’s still ways to go, I’ve only reached level 47 today.

I’m thinking of doing something similar to this thread myself, but maybe with some non-wanikani memories too, like posting a different photo every day or a song that’s been on my mind, we’ll see how it goes xd

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Don’t worry, I’m well aware of the WK api. I’ve built several scripts on top of it. In fact, I’ve been using a script I wrote to calculate all the stats I’ve been posting every night, except for time spent which I track and calculate by hand. (The apprentice etc. counts and review counts and accuracy come from the script)

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December 13:
Level: 58
Total time spent on Wanikani today: 109 minutes
Reviews in the last day: 401
Accuracy: 80.05% (321/401)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 279
Guru: 1579
Master: 1276
Enlightened: 2884
Burned 2521

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I’m so ready to be level 60. So ready. I just got off of a bit of a break I took (it was about 7 days) to slash my apprentice count since I had over 300 apprentice items and was consistently getting over 350 reviews daily. I just got back into it a few days ago after getting that down to 75, and this level’s been pretty easy. If I can average between 4 and 5 days per level, I can be done by the end of January. My God am I ready. I know I’ll have to keep going to burn everything, but 300 reviews a day is emotionally taxing (I’m extremely distractible so I can get up to 250 minutes in a day). I have 2 finals tomorrow and I’m sitting here with 270 reviews in my queue at 2 am.

Sorry for the mini rant. I’m just… really tired.

And this is one of the distractions. I should be either doing reviews or studying, but here I am on a WK forum complaining. Don’t mind me. I just make bad decisions.

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I haven’t really looked into it but is it really possible to go from the 7 day level up to 5 day? I assume it’s because each level you get all the kanji, none of the radicals, all in one big dump? Or is there some other reason it takes less time?

270 reviews is brutal. I had one day with 240 because I was being stupid with doing ALL my lessons in a day when I first started out. Level 1-3 or4, no problem! Do that on level 8? Oooffff. Nope.

Good luck though! Almost there!

Many of the later levels are “fast levels”, which can be done twice as fast as normal due to less than 10% of the kanji depending on same-level radicals.

You can see the current list of fast levels here: Wanikani fast levels report

Funny you should mention that. I ran into the same problem around the same time (IIRC, I stopped around level 6).

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December 14:
Level: 58
Total time spent on Wanikani today: 108 minutes

Reviews in the last day: 482
Accuracy: 80.71% (389/482)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 267
Guru: 1591
Master: 1256
Enlightened: 2914
Burned 2531

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Different strokes for different folks I suppose, I’ve been consistently hitting all lessons the very same day (and even the very same hour) I’m done with reviews for a level. Sometimes you get to a 150 lessons a day, but when you do, there’s nothing else you can do but endure and keep going :thinking:

If it hadn’t been for the self-study script I’d be doomed, it’s a life saver. Sometimes I spend the extra hours on Thursdays after level up to repeat the newly learned items over

and over
and over again
but when I’m done with that, I fly through the reviews on Friday and I remember the vast majority of it that Sunday and the week after that too :blush:

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Alternatively, you could get an Anki deck with the WaniKani words. You’d have to start from scratch with the times, but it might be nicer on the wallet than paying for a longer subscription.