Just entered Level 11 today, I’ve been sort of dreading coming into the “painful” stretch of levels.
Is it as bad as it comes off? Any advice? Words of encouragement are welcomed XD
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Don’t worry, they are no different than the last few levels. The only thing that’s a bit different is that in these levels you’ll really need a good routine.
- Keep on top of your reviews
- Don’t do more lessons than you have the capacity to do reviews for
- Did I mention to keep on top of your reviews yet?
As one of my favourite Youtubers says: There’s nothing to it, but to do it.
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The level category names are mostly a fun gimmick but some get harder or more abstract than others. A lot of new people get to levels 15-25 and stop somewhere in there because of the workload and errors piling up. I was stuck on level 22 for a while.
Don’t worry too much as long as you’re doing some amount of it consistently every day and it’s not too much to handle.
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Join us here ! https://community.wanikani.com/t/till-death-do-us-part-hellos-to-the-painfuls/16622?u=sanshoo
If you made it this far, you are actually one of the few survivors already. all the other people got eaten by a huge crab-like alligator
As @KanjiOzeki said, from now on you should have found your rythm, things will get more intense too! The master/enlightened items will come back, and depending on your pace, it might add a certain amount of reviews…
My advice to you : do not hesitate to lower your workload, but never stop/quit. Burnout and stopping everything made me waste months / sometimes year. Now, when I feel down or lazy, I just lower my workload, as much as I need to. Even if you have to do one lesson a day, keep going!
Positive point: you will learn a loooot of useful words and might want to start reading very easy things with these!
(i wanted to put a stat out there but the images are not working for some reason. anyone else?)
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I think discourse made a change that messed up the image hosting. The files upload but aren’t displayed right. I hope they fix it.
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Thanks! The stat can be found here Wanikani Users Distribution by Level @GurenMusubi (not up to date or official I believe)
So that’s why it’s so quiet lately…
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Thankfully crabigators don’t eat pickles…
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I got to level 11 recently, and what people say about master+enlightened reviews coming back is true. However, it started hitting me at a lower level because I’ve taken WaniKani at a slower pace than a lot of people I’ve seen on here. That also meant I didn’t have as many reviews coming back, so it was a win-win for me.
For reference, I started in early January 2025, so I’ve been finishing about 1 level per month so far. I try to keep 45 to 55 items in Apprentice at any point, but sometimes I’ll go into the 60s if I learn a bunch of words that are easy to remember. Right now, I get about 50 to 100 reviews a day depending on how many old words come back again.
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Doesn’t seem so bad. I’m halfway though the new kanji for 12. I was told level 20 is when it gets exciting. It’s the death level lol.
Ah, it’s nice when you get under 200 upcoming reviews and you see Umbrella-Durtle again 
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Lmao the poor guy hasnt seen the sun in weeks at this point…
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I feel that their naming of the by-10 groupings of levels is mostly tongue-in-cheek. I actually found that I most enjoyed the 死 and 地獄 levels (20-40) and felt that the content in 天国 and 現実 (40-60) was a lot less compelling.
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Yes it is, I was quite miserable in the first 0-10 levels compared to now where I am cruising . But we are joking around, the 苦 thread is actually funny in this way… Bunch of guys in 苦 but loving the 苦
The earlier levels are easier because their kanji seems to be easier, but the later levels are more fun even if they are challenging because you have so many Kanji behind you that it finally starts to feel like you know enough to do stuff with it.
I came across a 5 pages of Tokyo newspaper, was wrapping an item purchased from Japan. I can recognize some of the symbols but otherwise its useless for now.