"Done in a Year" (First Post)

WaniKani
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Hey there. I’ve been plugging away at WK for a few months now, on and off. As of this writing, I am very close to being done with level three—which feels like it has taken far longer than it should’ve.

I’m here to ask the veterans how on earth anyone is actually supposed to be able to finish this program in a year.

Is it a skill issue thing on my part? I have a part time job and I’m in school right now, and yeah, there are days where I don’t touch WK and there are days when I only do reviews and no lessons. But this still feels as if it’s taking far too long to progress. Is this “program in a year” situation similar to the “you can lose weight at Subway” ad campaign? Where the mascot of the campaign only ate subs with turkey and bread and also worked out a lot? Most people don’t just get bread and meat at Subway, but technically you could lose weight if you did that. Most people don’t have the time to do all their reviews and lessons every day but technically you could finish the program in a year if you ignored your commitments. Is that what’s going on?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the product. I think this is a really useful tool, and I can’t imagine trying to learn kanji without this thing. But I saw another user post that it took her almost a third of a year just to finish level 22 or something. Is the “program in a year” claim deceptive or I just need to buckle down and make more time? What’s your experience with “done in a year?” Thanks for taking the time to read this.

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Exactly right :sparkles: Welcome to the world of marketing :sparkles:

Here’s a good overview post (scroll down to the second post if you want tips):

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Finishing in a year is technically possible and there are people that have done it, but to do it comes with a large workload (you’ll be spending over an hour a day on SRS) and is kind of inadvisable - if you had that much time for japanese study, there are better ways to spend it than speeding up wanikani

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Yeah - it is technically possible and many people do it, quite a few by using ‘hacks’ but only a very small percentage of users do it that way. It takes a huge time commitment that most would recommend would be better used with other forms of study, even if you have that time and energy.

My opinion: slow and steady is better; try to do some everyday, preferably finishing all your reviews; try to keep your apprentice levels low to manage not being overwhelmed with reviews. There are plenty of threads and posts about the numbers of lessons people do every day: even one or a handful keeps progress ticking over. And the first 20 or 30 levels are the most useful to be able to start some reading, so from early (possible very early) or mid levels, it is best to deprioritise and slow down Wanikani (still doing it) while branching out into reading (and other study).

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Doing it in a year is incredibly hard, but also lots of people tend to do the first few levels kind of casually, not knowing how the SRS works properly (I was one of those), so while a year seems very very difficult, if you optimise when you do lessons/reviews a bit then you can definitely finish in maybe 2 or so years at a semi-reasonable pace, if you have 20-30mins to spare every day and are consistent.

Have a look at when you do lessons and reviews if you want to speed up a lot with not so much extra effort - a level every 10 days or so near the start is a pretty reasonable pace, gives you like 5 days to guru your radicals, then 5 days for the remaining kanji. Do the new radicals immediately when you level up, and then do that level’s kanji lessons before you guru the radicals, and then do the next lessons for the remaining kanji soon after you guru the radicals. This cut down my pace from like 20 days some levels to like 8 or 9, but you can mess around and figure out what pace you can actually maintain.

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@Malinkal

Typo? I think you mean “a level every 10 days” near the start.

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Yes thank u for spotting lol, a lesson every 10 days might take a while!

220 years

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To give my perspective, I finished in 1 year and 2 months when I decided to do WaniKani. I knew about WaniKani and Tofugu 3 years or so in prior, but didn’t get committed or decided to learn Kanji specifically then.

A lot of time was taken each day. Not only because of WaniKani, but also other aspects of study alongside, like other vocabularies, grammar, reading and other forms of immersion.

It’s not in a year, but just for the first year part, I think first 30 levels are more intensive and worth rushing, or at least get committed and not taking too much of forever. Even if it ends in 1 year and not reach Level 60, it still worth midway.

About doing every day or not, and so reviews would stack up, I think it’s about review/leech management. In olden days, there was Reorder Ultimate that visualized the review pile well and reordered exactly what I wanted for each moment. (I think now there is version 2.)

Also, there are benefits to doing reviews more than once per day. Recently learned items can be reinforced by short-term repetition, rather than just mnemonics. tbh, I needed mnemonics only when in a pinch, and I would create a new one if I have to, and so, mnemonics didn’t have to be strong.

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Like other folks have said, I’d say WaniKani’s “program in one year” is unrealistic for most people, but I don’t think it’s as deceptive as saying “you can lose weight by eating Subway.” Losing weight eating Subway involves ignoring a lot of the food that’s at Subway and doing a lot of outside work (exercise). Doing WaniKani in one year just involves doing a loooot of WaniKani.

Anyways, as per DaraM18’s post, I just want to reinforce that even if you don’t try to do WaniKani in one year, doing reviews every day is really valuable. It’s not just because any progress is good progress (which is true), it’s also because, at least in my experience, taking breaks from WaniKani actually makes it significantly harder.

First of all, the longer you spend between reviews, the more likely it is that you’ll have forgotten the item you’re trying to study.

Secondly, the way SRS works is it gives you new reviews based on when you last studied a word, so the longer you wait between reviews, the more reviews you’ll have to do at once. And since you did all the reviews at once, they’ll all show up at the same time next time they appear, along with any other reviews that pile up while you’re not doing reviews.

That’s how people end up with 400 reviews at once, get too discouraged to do them, and end up with 600 reviews instead as they keep piling up. Frankly I get discouraged if I miss even a single day of reviews, so I really try to do them every day – or if I’m really sure I won’t have time to do them, I’ll turn on vacation mode.

If you can’t find as much time as you want to do WaniKani, rather than doing lessons and reviews only sporadically, I would recommend reducing the number of lessons you do per day, which will, with time, naturally reduce the number of reviews you have to do each day. The Maximum Recommended Daily Lessons setting has been really useful for me – I was doing 10 per day for a long while, and now I’m doing 6 per day as I want to bring down my review count a bit more.

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Finishing within a year is a pretty tall order, but I found finishing in a year and change to be totally reasonable while working almost full time and having active hobbies/social life. The key is to review more often for shorter durations. Letting a full day or more pass means you’re likely to have forgotten newer items, which means making more mistakes, which means more reviews in the future.

In other words, doing reviews promptly minimizes the number of total hours that finishing WaniKani will take, while putting them off means creating more hours of work for yourself in the future and in total. So ironically, if you have tons of free time, you can afford to put off reviews, but if you’re busy you don’t have that luxury; twice daily is ideal but not always realistic, definitely try to never miss a day. From levels 50-60 I started prioritizing other studying methods and missed some days of reviews and paid a pretty heavy price for it time-wise, ending up doing hourlong review sessions every morning before work just to stay on top of all the items I was forgetting. Totally avoidable situation, wouldn’t recommend.

All of which is to say, SRS is good for busy people because it rewards the regularity of your schedule, not the emptiness of it.

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And executing that workload at very specific times. I.e. doing some amount of arranging your schedule/life around when things come due for review. And having a pretty high accuracy level.

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Focusing entirely on radicals before anything else sounds like quite the scheme. I might need to try that when I reach level 4. Thank you for the reply.

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Thank you all for replying. I appreciate all the feedback!

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Hi there,

I started WK 3 weeks ago and I just reached level 4 on Sunday (aus time). I calculated that at the pace I’m going I’ll be done in under 15 months, so not quite a year but not very far from it. I check WK multiple times a day and do the lessons as they become available. Consistency and application are the keys to doing it quicker than 60 months.
But if a level a month is all the time you have then that is ok because you are still making progress.

Good luck :crossed_fingers:

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