I’m still fairly new (Been at it for 7 weeks) and would love to know from people who have been through Wanikani before if it speeds up? I only ask as the emails with level-ups seem to suggest it’ll become easier instead.
I’m level 10, and looking at my stats spend about 30 - 55 mins on reviews a day, really, depending if I recently had new lessons or not. I feel I go quite quickly, but as I’m keeping between 90 - 95% accuracy, I think that’s fine. I’m doing all my lessons as soon as they become available. The thing is, I enjoy it, and I’d love to do more and go faster!
People’s experience would be good to know as if it gets more involved, I’ll be patient, but if it doesn’t, I will look at pushing myself and try to buy and read basic things even if it’s tough and I have to look up a lot.
If your circumstances stay the same then learning new kanji becomes easier as you go (although I hear the concepts become a little harder in the later levels), up to a point at least. But you’re already going at a good pace so rather than going faster I’d invest any surplus time/energy in learning other aspects of Japanese, or immersing. If you spend time reading that also helps reinforce the kanji, and reading becomes necessary in order to maintain your knowledge of burnt items so establishing that habit would be a good investment in your learning journey.
I think you’ve been longer at it than 7 weeks, since if you’re going at the fastest possible speed, that meens a week for the first 2 levels and then a week for the remaining 7, so you’ve been doing this for 8 weeks, but most likely a bit more
I’m mostly reiterating an earlier answer of mine, but once you start burning (6 months after you’ve started), it will stay about the same level of difficulty. It will fluctuate depending on the number of leeches you acquire, but in the long term, it will be about the same difficulty from then on. You easily get used to learning kanji. You’ll quickly encounter all the possible onyomi readings, and you’ll only have to deal with the occasional kunyomi reading, which will be increasingly rare.
What makes wk hard is that it takes a year at least, usually even more. It’s hard to stay motivated, and it’s even possible that the schedule you have going right now will be nothing like the schedule you’ll have when you finish. This makes it quite hard to turn it into a long term habit, since if you get used to doing wk at 1pm when you’re on lunch break and suddenly your day changes around and now you don’t really have lunch breaks or you need to use them for something else, well, then you need to replan your wk habit.
The other thing would be burnout. If you don’t vary the content you are consuming (or will be consuming), then you might stop caring as much and you might just burn out a bit. That’s probably the hardest thing to deal with in terms of wk, and it’s better to avoid it completely.
I feel that vocabularies are of mixed difficulty in the first place, but they can all be found in wild. If you focus on memorization, it will get harder as time goes by, because of workload and leeches. But you rediscover items in the wild, they will get easier, as you already learned items in advance.
Not to mention that rote memorization has tendency to forget later on.
Nonetheless, if you can bear the difficulty, speed run is doable; but remembering over years will not be doable without continuing studies.
Perhaps, take time, and adapt accordingly, would be the answer.
There is some really annoying vocabulary like Metropolitan Government and Metropolitan Police Office or stuff like that, which doesn’t really come up in the content I consume
In my experience, WaniKani actually gets harder not easier. The higher the level you are, the more reviews you’ll have to do. I get really annoyed when there are over 250 to review in a day. In general, if I don’t skip my daily reviews, I get to advance a level every 8 days. You can’t go any faster than that. Of course, if you treats learning Japanese is a “fun game”, then you won’t mind doing the reviews. And each time when you achieve a new level, there are TONS more NEW radicals, kanjis and vocabularies to learn… on top of what you must review on that day. So, good luck and happy learning. Do your reviews religiously will help you sail all the way through level 60. That’s how other 先輩様 did it.
Cool, that’s really helpful. And yes, miscounted, 9 weeks going on 10.
I’ll burn the extra motivation on trying to read, I guess. At least that way, if I get busier, I won’t feel too bad dropping back on the reading part. I find it harder to be motivated to learn more grammar without using it with more vocab. I feel I won’t retain it if I learn more without utilising it on a regular basis.
Whether or not wanikani gets considerably ‘harder’ has to do with the pace you set for yourself. A steady pace at a level that you’re comfortable with can be maintained for a long time without much of an uptick in difficulty. But if you start to do too much – whatever too much means for you personally, whether that’s 50 reviews a day or 400 – it’s easy to get overwhelmed and burn out. Pacing is the biggest control factor for difficulty.
If you’ve got motivation to burn and you like the SRS system and are looking for something that goes over grammar and vocabulary, might I suggest Bunpro? I use WK and Bunpro daily, with reading and listening as my motivation allows for.
(The ‘vocabulary’ on bunpro is technically in beta, but integrates quite nicely with the grammar reviews. For me, it also helps break up the grammar when I want to do more but know I’m butting up against my mental sponge’s limit for the day.)
The actual levels are not necessarily harder, it’s more that your baggage gets larger and you have to manage that properly before it balloons out of control.
My experience is that around level 6 you start getting more and more items to review every day. If you fall behind, you’ll find yourself with hundreds of reviews stacked up.
In my case, I was away from Wanikani for long enough that I had 500+ reviews waiting, and would occassionally work up the motivation to whack those down to ~100 or 200, but by that time I was only getting an accuracy of around 60% so I found myself really demotivated.
Here I am, starting myself over at level 1, so I can try to stay motivated and on top of my reviews this time.
At max speed, from what I saw from the stats posted by people who succeeded at it, the max charge seems to be around level 15-17 then is stays stable until the end (unless you speed run the final 15 levels, if you do, the workload sky rockets).
From my own perspective, the transition to from 14 to 16 was quite hellish (there is a change in how kanji are distributed, as you tend to get more of them in one go, earlier level it used to be split in half).
But now it seems stable. There is absolutely an increase in volume compared to level 10.
