I made one of these for my first Master items so I wanted to make another update now that I got to this point! I started at the end of July, meaning I’ve almost been at it for two months now. Won’t lie, kind of feels like it’s been longer. I haven’t really been checking much on the forums because I started working again, which means I’ve also gotten to experience juggling WaniKani with other time obligations, so I wanted to share my current routine:
I have 2-3 main time chunks that I do WaniKani reviews during. In the morning when I wake up, in the earlier evening, then in bed before I go to sleep. I always do my morning reviews, and I’ll always do the evening reviews, but how frequently I check in depends on how open my schedule is on any given day.
I used to do my lessons as quickly as possible when they unlocked (sometimes staggered between a few hours in groups of 20 or 30) before realizing that that was unfeasible somewhere around level 4 or 5, so now I generally do 20 lessons a day when they’re available; 10 in the morning, then another batch of 10 approximately 4 hours before I go to sleep.
Since I still want to keep as fast of a speed as I can while not sacrificing the quality of my learning, I also often do all my radicals and kanji soon after I unlock them, though I’ve also started doing my kanji in smaller batches (at my current level, 7, I’m experimenting with doing them in groups of 5 to see if I’ll remember them that way, because I struggle with remembering their readings sometimes). According to wkstats, my average is 8 days and 15 hours per level, and my next level up is coming in a day and a half, but due to delays in the kanji I’m expecting it to take a little longer (though I don’t think it will be by that much?).
I’ve also been keeping up with both KaniWani and KameSame, but I don’t use the KameSame to review WK vocabulary, and instead when I have some free time I’ll take a placement test for a new batch of JPLT vocab, or sometimes random words I wanted to learn (like words from song lyrics or that I encounter in the wild). These take lower priority than WaniKani though, so if I’m swamped I’ll put those reviews off. I also recently started the free trial of Bunpro because I’ve realized my grammar is a bit rusty but I don’t really feel like it’s very strong as a tool to actually drill grammar into my memory. I might still use it, but I’ll be looking for something else to fill in that gap.
What else… I’ve seen people list the scripts that they use in the level 60 posts, and I kind of wanted to do that here too, since I do find them very useful :)
Favorites:
- Double-Check (I make a lot of typoes, also lightning mode and mistake delay are godsends)
- Ultimate Timeline
- KanjiDamage Mnemonics 2 (sometimes they stick in my head better than the kind of random feeling WaniKani ones)
Nice, but less important:
- Overall Progress Bars
- Forecast Details (currently broken though)
- WK Extra Study Mover (I have used this to remove Extra Study and Recent Mistakes completely because I don’t use them & KaniWani provides any extra review I need)
- Keisei Phonetic-Semantic Composition (I just started using this recently, since it was overwhelming to see when I was just starting out. Apparently it will continue to be more useful with higher levels, though, and I’ve gotten some use out of it already)
- Fast Vocab Breakdown
- Reorder Omega (usually I have this off because I don’t want to start procrastinating vocabulary from previous levels, but it’s useful once in a while)
There’s a few other scripts I use, but either they don’t work (or I couldn’t figure them out) or I find myself using them very infrequently, so I didn’t list them here. I would love to figure out how to use Jitai, though.
That’s all I can think to update! I’m still going strong, and I’m looking forward to advancing levels :) Like I mentioned before, I’ve started out Bunpro, and I’m looking into other ways to practice grammar as well as reading in general. I’m looking for things that are a little more gamified like WaniKani but I think there’s no way around the need to get some real practice with reading. I’m mostly looking into those sites that have articles written in simplified vocabulary right now.
