Say you’ve just leveled up and have 70 new lessons or something like that. I don’t think it’s effective to learn more than 10-15 kanji in a day, so I usually don’t do them all at once, usually doing 10-20 lessons per day as my schedule permits. However, depending on the level, this can take a lot of time. What do you all do? Do you race through all your new lessons in one go? Or do you spread them out?
That’s about what I did when I got to level 2. I’m still new. The kanji were much harder to remember than the new radicals. Interesting to see if I have similar issues when I get to 3. I’m thinking I’ll back off on lessons if I start getting below 75% retention on the 1st review.
I’ve been using KaniWani the last two days, and it seems to have helped with early retention rate. I find myself speaking my answers aloud, searching for the correct pronunciation, before, or as, I type it out. It reminds me of reading aloud in Reading class in elementary. If I ultimately end up stumbling less, I’ll be able to increase my lesson rate.
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Currently, I’m not doing new lessons at all. I took about a week off when I got swamped with other things, and when I came up for air, I had like 400 reviews.
I’m still way too busy to do all that, so I’ve been just trying to get that count down… but of course it’s hard, because every day there are 20-40 more added to whatever I got it to the day before. So it’s been about a month, and I’ve only gotten it down to 200. (And now I have to do at least 30 more reviews before bed just to keep it there.)
My plan is to keep pushing as hard as I can, until I finally clear out my reviews… then I’ll tackle new lessons again. No point in doing that now, when I can’t even keep up with stuff already in my review deck. Man, SRS systems can be brutal when you get behind!
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Originally I did not, I would do them all in one big heap.
At later levels that started to catch up to me and I was having way to many reviews in a single. So I started to do 20 lessons a day, while making sure I kept my apprentice items to below 200.
Do I understand… they all landed for review at once, and you preferred a steady review of smaller piles? The choice of 20 then resulted in a review workload you were comfortable with?
I do all in one shot. I get to a point every few levels where I have too many items in apprentice and Guru. That’s when I stop doing all lessons and just do reviews until apprentice <100 and Guru <150.
Practically, this means that when I’m slowing down, I have done zero lessons from my current level and will do all lessons in one shot when my queue becomes manageable again.
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I’m in the same boat as @Ataso… I used to do them all at once up until maybe level 25? then switched to doing 20-25 a day.
if you’re worried about slowing down, use a reorder script to do radicals first, and then do the Kanjis within the next few days.
of course, you should go as slow as you need to to prevent burning out or getting overwhelmed
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I did them all until about level 36.
I could probably continue doing all my lessons but I have picked up other resources and would like to spend less time on WaniKani than I used to.
Now I just refresh the lessons until I get my kanji while still learning the vocab and stop there until I’m ready.
I kept apprentice items under 200 after the initial level up.
Learn at your own pace. I already knew most of the items from levels 1-18.
I generally do any new lessons when I have no reviews available for hours. But at this point all of the Kanji is just review for me. Once I start encountering new stuff I’ll likely slow down.
When I reach a new level, I do all the radicals right away, and maybe a few of the kanji. The rest of the kanji and vocabulary I space out over the course of the next four days, so that by the time the radicals reach guru, I only have the last few kanji of that level in lessons. I do those straight away, and then repeat the process when I get to the next level. It’s been going pretty well so far.
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You’re correct with both statements. I chose 20 as an arbitrary number that I decided I was comfortable with handling on a regular basis. Any number works, but I felt 20 helped me get through all the lessons before I would level up/unlock the rest of the kanji for that level.
Wow. I didn’t even consider review numbers. That’s so smart. I just do like 20 because I get bored of lessons so quickly. @jstrout yeah I get that! I took a long hiatus from WK (beta user level 9 here!) so I had a lot of catch up to play when I got back. I still get items every now and again in my reviews where I’m like, wait, I learned this?? I still have trouble keeping up with my lessons, but at least the new ordering system helps.
No. I sit down, do them all in the morning while I drink coffee (like I’m doing right now), and then move on to other work. I check in on WK on my lunch break and burn down any reviews that have accumulated, then check again before I leave the office. I’m not saying this to be rude, but I feel like if you properly learn the material and review at least daily WK isn’t that much of an acute time investment. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than 20-30m at a pop, and it’s usually much faster than that. And honestly, why are you arbitrarily limiting yourself? If you’ve got 30 words to learn, sit down and go learn the 30 words. Language learning compounds, and the faster you learn the core material the faster you’ll learn everything else.
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Once I level up I use a reorder script to do all of the unlocked vocabulary (depending on how much it is I may break it into two chunks). The next day (I only go on WK once a day), I do all the radicals and some kanji. Then for every day after, I do 5-10 kanji lessons until they’ve all run out, skipping on days where I saw that my retention of the kanji learned the day before was bad. Once I get the initial lesson pile out of the way, I do all lessons as they come up until I level up again.
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I used to space out my reviews, until I realised I was spacing them out too much (like 5-10 a day, if that - I think I gradually started to lose motivation to do any because of this) and I was taking like over a month to level up. Now I just do all the radicals pretty much as soon as possible, try to do all the kanji in the same day as well, and just do the rest of the vocab anytime before the next level.
I understand where you are coming from, and I tend to get everything done as soon as I can, myself. However, be aware that at later levels this will all catch up with you, and if you take a break from WK (without setting vacation mode) you will have a huge review queue when you return.
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The vacation / unexpected break situation is a special case, though. I’m not begrudging someone for forgetting to set an alarm or needing to attend to life, but that obviously breaks down the system. Life happens.
What do you mean by “it will catch up to you?” Is there that much more content coming in? So far I’ve been resolving each level in ~10 days. What are you seeing?
depends on how much time I have 
I don’t feel that it’s arbitrary to limit myself to a certain number of kanji per day. After 20-25 new kanji, my retention plummets for all the new kanji I’ve learned. Vocab is easy once you learn the kanji (except of course weird ones like 皮肉 that require some gymnastics to memorize), but it’s the kanji that gets me, because you’re starting from zero. Even doing this many lessons per day, I can still get them all out of the way in 2-3 days.
As @Gaidheal points out, the content really steps up as you level up. The sections aren’t called “Painful”, “Death”, and “Hell” for nothing. Even starting level 9 I had 80 lessons (although including some vocabulary backlog).
That’s exactly how I do it! I also watch for my apprentice items to be around 100, so sometimes I just skip the lessons in order to reduce that number.
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