Hi. I just purchased the lifetime WK and reset to lvl 1 from my HIGH level of 3 since I didn’t remember everything and had many reviews.
I was determined to learn all the Jōyō kanji (or at least most of it) in 6 months, but then I realized that I get new lessons so rarely that I won’t make it in that time.
Is there any way to make the lessons come faster or in larger quantities?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Nope.
Nope. Fastest you can finish WK is in about a year
There’s your warning sign right there. If you reset because you can’t remember levels 1 to 3, what makes you think that you’ll be able to learn 2000 kanji in 6 months and be able remember all of them? (And re:“too many reviews”–if you slack on doing reviews, then you won’t be able to make the kanji that you learn stick in your memory.) Memorization is a process that takes time; on WK, although there are users who do the year-sprint of doing the fastest route, in general, slow and steady wins the (memorization) race.
If you want to “learn” kanji at a faster rate, you can just find a list of the jōyō kanji and tackle them one by one. It’s free! But you probably won’t be actually committing them to memory. What did you just spend $200 on? A system for learning kanji and making them stick into your memory. The steady pace that Wanikani locks you into is part of that system.
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Step 1. Do your lessons and reviews as they come up for level 1 and 2 since they are the quick levels (you can finish both of them within a week)
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Step 2. Think to yourself “I can totally handle this, I’m already level 3, I’m 1/20th of the way there and I barely get any review session under 99%”
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Step 3. Get nervous about not getting a radical wrong because radicals are the gateway to kanjis and kanjis are the gateway to vocabulary.
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Step 3.5. And who even cares about “purples” anyways? what are they even for? learning the actual language? that’s irrelevant, blues are life, pinks are priorities, purples are whatevs.
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Step 4. (2nd - 3rd week) Get your first ten thousand wrong because you thought it was direction.
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Step 5. Cry.
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Step 6. Since WK smells fear, after hitting you with a wrong 方 it will ask you for the meaning of the radical spirit. Breathe easily because the answer is obviously pelican. But it’s not pelican… it’s 2019 now… oh god… you got a blue wrong, you just set yourself back 3 months.
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Step 7. Don’t cry… don’t let it see you cry.
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Step 8. Get 玉ねぎ correct (But who cares? Jesus Christ… what has tamanegi ever done for you?)
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Step 9. The world is cruel, do things in your own style, post on the forums, laugh at other’s misery.
Unless your goal is strictly limited to Jōyō kanji learning, you can invest your extra free time in grammar (which is mandatory for language understanding). I find grammar more difficult than kanji learning so far.
Speed wise, one of the best guides on speeding thru WK is here:
I suspect the author was spending more than 4 hours per day most of the journey.
Nothing prevents you from peaking ahead of WK timeline - locked items are still available to learn. You will not get automated reviews, but you may use Self-Study userscript for that (the guide above describes all about userscripts).
Upon reaching 200 reviews per day (which will happen in 3-4 weeks if going full speed), you may not feel that WK is that slow. It’s fast..
Funny you mention “方” I found that kanji super easy since I have seen the following quite often “東方”.
I reached lvl 3 quite a while ago and stopped doing wk because I didn’t pay for it. After some months I came back and realized that I don’t remember much of the lvl 3 stuff since I had not reviewed them as much. If I had kept on reviewing I’d have them in my memory
I did something similar once I hit the limit of free. As you can see by the 3 month or so gap in my heat map here. Although I managed to burn quite a few as you can see. Although considering the gap I have used the self-study quiz user script on my burned items to make sure they really are burned. I have resurrected some that felt I was not confidant with. (Aka got wrong or had to think about a long time).
Is there something in particular you’re aiming for by trying to learn the jouyou kanji in 6 months? You definitely won’t make it there with just WK since the max pace seems to be just under one year, but you can supplement doing WK lessons/reviews with other sources to cover the kanji you won’t reach within that timeframe.
Ah yes a classic Touhou song.
You can use something like Anki to learn at a pace you want instead of WaniKani’s predetermined speed. There’s plenty of Kanji decks out there. You could conceivably even do it alongside WK since that way you can learn vocab too . Up to you.
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