Hey,
I was just wondering why there aren’t more fast levels. I think many levels above 13 could easily be fast, since there are only like max 6 radicals/level and most of those you already know from previous kanji. And you learn like 29/33 of the kanji in a level before guruing the radicals. And you end up waiting for 1-3 kanji for 3,5 days to be able to pass a level.
Level 15 made ticked me off, since all the kanji and vocab are super easy and most kanji only have one reading, there is only 100 vocab and you only unlock 6 kanji after the radicals. Is there a good reason for making all the levels slow?
Also something else annoys me as well, why in hell do we need radicals that have already been covered by kanji? Why don’t they introduce them first as radicals and not 10 levels after learning the kanji?
I honestly think they’re more a curse than a blessing. If you take a fast level at full speed, the wave of new material is just too much.
Furthermore, the remaining kanji in the second half of each level are based on the new radicals you learned that level, so its illogical to immediately teach those new kanji after you haven’t even learned their corresponding radicals by heart.
Generally these ‘kanji radicals’ are quite complex, and are first taught by means of simpler radicals. At some point, having to use those 4 radicals every single time instead of just 1, makes making a mnemonic much harder for the mnemonic creators and the kanji learners.
Also, knowing the exact meaning of a kanji used in a different kanji sometimes helps with remembering that new kanji.
In general though, it is quite an artificial border, and it really sucks that you have to wait to get that 1 extra kanji to level up. But its done so that you can space things out more. Once you start getting those enlightened items back, things get really busy real quick. You can find plenty of threads on the forums of people getting overwhelmed from going max speed. I personally just spend 7 days on fast levels after a while, because the speed was just too much.
Also, remember that vocab is quite important. For starters, it’s their to not only reinforce all the readings that a kanji can have, but also to give you context and nuance for when such readings are used in the first place. This helps you get a feel for normal use of those kanji, and allows to even guess readings of vocab you haven’t ever seen in the first place
They could teach the radicals on a previous level, like they do for some.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that all levels above 13 should be fast. I just think that some should: maybe like 3 or 4 per stage. This way people could go faster if they wished to. And it wouldn’t stack up so much if the fast levels were a few levels apart.
But I have never been on a fast level so what do I know. I would just like more flexibility.
like 200-400 a day, which isn’t that bad. Takes me like an hour a day.
I think it is for pacing. You haven’t experienced the full workload yet as you haven’t started to get burn reviews.
I’d be happy to discuss it again in the future, once you get a few sessions of burns reviews (the first one are easy, so let’s say after 2 to 3 weeks), and once you get to the actual fast level.
Please @me.
I mean that sounds like an ok idea then, if that’s something that you can handle.
O_O You must be a typing god.
But as mweibel said, if you are starting to get burns, it might be good to see if you still feel that way. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but it’s not for nothing that most people start crashing around level 20-25.
Personally, level 14 was kind of a nightmare for me and so 15 has been a nice change of pace. When I hit level 14 I unlocked 120 items all at once, which took several days to get through, and many of them had weird meanings that I know will cause me trouble as they crop back up…
I get that it would be frustrating for anyone who just wanted to go faster, though. Even though I’m glad to be forced to slow down a bit
Although, some of that of course is that the high level material is just harder in general. I imagine it wouldn’t be quite as bad at the lower levels.
Anyway, I don’t think the Wanikani deliberately made some levels fast or not. It’s just a side effect of the system they created. And some levels have gone from fast to slow and back as they add and remove items.
Yeah, I can imagine. But I am a student and I have about 12 hours of free time every day. So honestly I would be fine with spending 2x the time. I really like doing wanikani, compared with doing grammar, which is very exhausting for me and I cant do more than 3 hours in a day.
I did like lvl 14. Especially the kanji for circumference, where the mnemonic asked you to measure the circumference of your shoe and email the results to wanikani, which I did. They replied with this gif
Although you are right, it did have some very weird kanjis like target the vocab of means like?
Also status was really strange, but I got around it by thinking of its meaning also as shape. Then the vocab made more sense for me. For example skeleton is bone shape, shape is shape like, personality is gender shape. Idk status just didn’t make any sense for me, maybe because I’m not a native english speaker.
While a fast level here and there isn’t so bad (as you’ll get in the 40’s) - doing back-to-back-to-back fast levels gets exhausting. This is coming from someone who got to level 60 at basically the maximum possible speed - 1 week per level and 2 fast-levels per week when available with absolutely no exceptions. I can tell you that level 50-60 flew by so fast that it even made my head spin, and I am someone who excels at quickly memorizing large chunks of information.
Trust me, there are plenty of other things you can do with your time if you’re serious about learning Japanese. I spend 5-6+ hours a day between SRS and immersion study, and I assure you that learning to recognize kanji is just one small piece of the enormous puzzle. Spend some time reading - you will learn plenty of additional kanji and vocabulary even before you encounter them on WK, which will only help you keep up max speed.
Doing fast levels sucks, don’t do fast levels fast. here’s the thing, you’re gonna do a few, and feel like “that’s not bad, what’s the big deal?” so you’re gonna keep going. Then when it really hits, you’re gonna be like “noooooo whyyyyyyyy”
So when you hit 60, at the very least, maybe alternate between fast and slow levels.
I don’t really know what you mean . Think of the fast levels as a kind of reward for completing the first fifty. It isn’t really necessary to move them around because you’ll ultimately end up doing them regardless if you continue with WaniKani to the end.
This is something a lot of people feel when doing WaniKani, but I believe it’s a slippery slope. Grammar is essential and it is really important that you don’t give yourself an unbalanced corpus of knowledge.
I can speak from experience, but actually the other way around: I did way too much grammar, whilst, to some extent, completely ignoring other important elements of the language.
To put it in perspective: I had N3ish level grammar with a widely disorganised knowledge of vocabulary (i.e. I knew a thin range of very niche vocab) and only about 200 kanji.
Hence the reason I began using WaniKani.
It actually sounds like you may be fine in this regard anyway though, as three hours sounds like a descent enough amount to balance your daily reviews. I just wanted to let you know, because I have first hand experience with a unbalanced body of knowledge.
Yeah, I only started learning grammar a month ago, because I had read from somewhere that you should get wk lvl 10 before or something, which I think is total bs now and I wish I had started earlier on. That being said I have almost completed Genki I now and will move on to Genki II, after which I will start reading books. I also decided to stop watching english youtube on my phone and watch only japanese (it is still very painful, but I think it will help a lot).
I don’t mean that we should move them around from the end, just add a few new ones…
I honestly think fast levels should not be a thing. It’s just one more thing to worry about for most users. A lot of them end up messing up by going too fast and let’s say that at level 50, any other Japanese studying you have to do is more important than doing Wanikani.
I think if there were more of them early on it’d be an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot and burn out prematurely. Good to save them when the end is in sight.
Learning a foreign language, Japanese in particular, is a long term venture. I think it’s important to commit to that in your head. Don’t worry too much about finishing this stuff in the absolute minimum allotted time.
