General Tips Needed

WaniKani
1

Hello,

it’s taken me about 2 years, maybe a bit less, to get to where I am now. On the website it says that the whole process can be completed in 1 year! what! can someone explain how this is supposed to work? I do my review, and then level up in about 15-20 days on average rn. Afterwords, I go through and learn the 200+ words I just unlocked and I typically get slaughtered. How much time do you guys spend a day? I spend about 1 hour a day. Am I doing anything wrong? According to WK stats
" 23

Time on Level:7 days, 0 hours

Level-up In:21 days, 8 hours

Average Level-up:28 days, 8 hours

Start Date:2018-05-21 (630 days ago)

Items Learned (Guru+):334部首 753漢字 2342単語

Accuracy

ReadingMeaningTotal

Total Reviews:38204/ 41551/ 79755

Correct:34517/ 38184/ 72701

Incorrect:3687/ 3367/ 7054

Accuracy:90.35%91.90%91.16%

Radicals:—89.57%89.57%

Kanji:90.93%92.82%91.86%

Vocabulary:90.17%91.95%91.05%"

At my current rate, it predicts 2023! thats 5 years =-=. Any tips? Clearly I must be doing something wrong. How do you review? Learn new words? Any help would be appreciated!

2 Likes
2

Rather than doing all the lessons at once, try to just do 20 a day. It’s basically the same as going at max speed (if you order lessons by item type), and is a lot less content to learn in one sitting :slight_smile:

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How long does it take you to do 100 reviews?

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@quadack The 1 year goal is extremely hard for an average person (full time employee with other things to do).

These are my stats. I didn’t stop doing reviews twice per day since the start (7+ months) and only paused last week (vacation mode, which btw, works well, but when you return things will be rough for a bit).

Its HARD. I basically lock 30 minutes before lunch at work and then review for 1-2 hours every single night. My intention is to keep this pace until level 30 and then…I don’t know.

Current Status

Level:24

Average Level-up:8 days, 18 hours

Start Date:2019-07-17 (208 days ago)

Items Learned (Guru+): 340部首 783漢字 2443単語

Accuracy

ReadingMeaningTotal

Total Reviews:353073770673013

Correct:323403509567435

Incorrect:296726115578

Accuracy:91.60%93.08%92.36%

Radicals:—95.07%95.07%

Kanji:96.09%97.14%96.61%

Vocabulary:90.59%91.96%91.27%

5

Hello Quadack,

I usually try to get the reviews done as soon as they come in. I’ve been living in Japan for years but still speak like a 3 year old so I gotta learn (even though it IS difficult for me because at work and home I speak English all time…).

So, I try to get the reviews done as soon as they come in. This includes before going to bed, on the way to work, during lunch, and when i can.

in the past 3 months i’ve reached level 7, so even with me going like this i wont finish in a year… I think anyone that does finish it in just over a year is either VERY motivated or already knows the language (at least fluently speaking) and just needs to learn the kanji or fill in knowledge gaps… and, in my opinion, is always on wanikani (maybe waking up in the middle of the night?!) to do reviews.

As for what Raephe said, I totally agree - I havent been doing that and probably will need to start taking it easy because i’m just getting bombarded now with new kanji and vocab.

My current plan is to have a break at level 10 and go over all the kanji and Vocab, and try to put the words in a conversation so they’re glued in (if not then they’ll just be forgotten eventually). - if you do the same, then dont forget to put wanikani on holiday mode so you dont get bombarded with 100’s of reviews when you come back!

Ganbarimashou!

Right here are my somewhat inaccurate stats…:

Level:7

Time on Level:7 days, 1 hour

Level-up In:122 days, 3 hours

Average Level-up:129 days, 4 hours

Start Date:2017-12-21 (782 days ago)

Items Learned (Guru+):179部首 226漢字 578単語

Accuracy

ReadingMeaningTotal

Total Reviews:5630661212242

Correct:5236635011586

Incorrect:394262656

Accuracy:93.00%96.04%94.64%

Radicals:—95.30%95.30%

Kanji:92.71%96.64%94.63%

Vocabulary:93.12%96.02%94.55%

**100+ days to go up a level…> looks like wanikani didnt reset that when i reset my account, instead its counting from account opening… 702 days on level 1 lol

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The above phrase troubles me a bit. Do you really get around 200+ vocab each time you level up? I get around 60-80 new items at level up, a mixture of radicals, kanji and vocab, so it sounds strange.

Also I am not sure if you use any reorder scripts, but if you do, perhaps it is worth trying to learn vocab in parallel to kanji? At least for me that really helps since kanji readings are not only tied to some (often super strange) mnemonics, but also to real words. For ex, I see 履, and I recall: Ow, thats り as in 履歴書 and also は as in 履く.

And as others mentioned, spreading your lessons to have 20-30 a day gives you a rather high speed of level completion. When I am super tired, I take only 5 and do not press myself - even with that the speed is about 9 days for level.

2 Likes
7

I’d highly recommend reading My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 ). It has a lot of helpful tips and information about how WK works.

For what it’s worth, here’s my wkstats. So far I’ve been leveling as fast as reasonably possible, apart from the first two levels when I didn’t understand the system yet. My goal is to hit level 60 on Christmas, which would be a little under a year since I started.

Current Status

Level: 7
Typical Level-up: 6 days, 22 hours, 59 minutes
Time on Level: 3 days, 16 hours, 9 minutes
Level-up In: 3 days, 6 hours, 50 minutes
Start Date: 2020-01-01 (40 days ago)
Items Learned (Guru+): 177部首 208漢字 467単語

Accuracy

Reading Meaning Total
Total Reviews: 5912 6395 12307
Correct: 5159 6169 11328
Incorrect: 753 226 979
Accuracy: 87.26% 96.47% 92.05%
Radicals: — 98.15% 98.15%
Kanji: 93.98% 98.61% 96.24%
Vocabulary: 85.26% 95.36% 90.02%
3 Likes
8

You need magic for a 1 year to Level 60 clear.

magic

The magic of scripts (and Flaming Durtles) that is!

To increase leveling speed:

  • Follow WK’s SRS timings, and have high accuracy on the required level up items. Depending on how fast you want to go, reviewing on a schedule (2 times a day at least, hitting the critical items on schedule) is pretty much required. Reorder script can be used to do level-up critical items first in any review, so review batches can be spread out more without affecting leveling speed.
  • In order to keep lesson batches reasonable (and actually learn something in them) while maintaining a high level up speed, the re-order script is absolutely necessary: reorder lessons to serve up the levelup critical items first.
  • To keep review batches reasonable, as well as keep closely to the “critical” review schedule, use a mobile app for WK.

*Disclaimer: I believe it is possible to do WK in about 1 year completely vanilla, but I can’t recommend it, due to how much time you’d have to be on and planning for WK to accomplish it.
*Note: @quadack your accuracy is quite decent, my guess is that you’ve just been running a non-optimal review schedule.

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You need to do lessons every day and do reviews 3 times a day (2nd review session comes 4 hours after the first one, 3rd review session should be 8 hours after the 2nd one).

But of course you can’t level up unless you get ~90% of the new kanji right. So, take your time during lessons.

After leveling up you should be doing all the remaining vocab lessons (usually around 20-30 items) and the new radicals.

Then on every consecutive day study about 10 kanji. When no new kanji are left study 20 vocab items per day. This way your workload will be roughly the same each day.

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When you’re done with the initial kanji lessons of a level, try to do all the vocab lessons over the next few days before you guru the kanji. Then do the lessons you unlock after you guru the kanji, preferably each batch as they appear, have them done before you guru the remaining kanji (from the radicals). Then when you guru those, you won’t get hit with a ridiculously high number of lessons and can reach the next radicals faster. While you guru the radicals, do kanji lessons. Repeat. You don’t have to be as fast as possible, but you can do it in 7-11 days realisticly.

11

I’m currently on pace (slightly ahead) to reach 60 in around two years, which seems a reasonable time.

Summary of what I do:

  • Every morning, do all available reviews.
  • Then do lessons until either I hit 20 lessons done, or I hit 100+ items at apprentice, whichever comes first
  • I try to do a lunchtime review session, but occasionally I don’t have time to do it.
  • In the evening I do all available reviews again.
  • After every review session, I quickly go over the items that I got wrong (just try to think of the meaning/reading, then hover my mouse over the item to see if I was correct, this only takes a minute)

All of this together takes me probably around 60 minutes each day. I can see myself slowing down a bit more if the load gets too much in later levels.

It seems like the main thing you should change in your process is:

  • Do a few lessons every day, not all of them at once.
  • Don’t wait until you get every Kanki to guru to do vocab lessons - many of them are available before that.

But also just do it at whatever pace works for you. We all have different life situations.

3 Likes
12

What mobile apps do you recommend? I didn’t think there where any (beside just doing it in your browser). And wow! I didn’t know about the reorder script, that would certainly speed things up. Currently I have to go through a ton of stuff (vocab mostly) when leveling up and doing reviews such that I just never get around to actually getting all of the kanji or radicals.

Thanks!

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Marketing. They neglect to mention the part where you need to do every lesson/review immediately, and get 100% accuracy.
But “in a little over a year” sure sounds better than “within several years”, so yeah. Not even Tofugu it’s free from marketing speak.

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I remember when I first joined the front page said something along the lines of “in under two years”, and I can see why they changed it, but also 2000 kanji in a little over a year is very aspirational, rather than a more realistic two years.

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15

Use WK Stats V2, it’s more accurate with the dates and times

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yeah read the forums, plenty of very useful information here. Start with that ultimate wanikani guide someone already posted. It’s very humanly possible to do a level a week with only around ~20 lessons a day, it just requires you to understand the length of the SRS intervals (4h, 8h, 24h, 48h to guru (3.5 days)).

First guru all the radicals (as you need to in order to unlock the rest of the kanji), then guru all the kanji, that will total to 3.5+3.5 = 7 days. Do all the radicals as soon you level up and all the kanji as soon as you guru the radicals. Do the vocab in between. Your daily schedule can be for example:
8am - do 20 lessons
12pm - review
8pm - review
Adjust accordingly, if there are 30 radicals do all of them.
This is how you can get to 60 in a year.

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I think I may be in the same boat as you, and what slows me down is the lessons. I sometimes leave them for another day, but they contain the kanji for the current level I need to hit guru to level up. Hopefully, that makes sense.

In essence to level up fast, get the kanji from the new lessons piles to GURU level asap to level up faster.

18

If you have an Android phone: Flaming Durtles by @ejplugge [forum post]
If you have an Apple phone: Tsurukame by @davidsansome [forum post]

I’ve only had experience with Flaming Durtles as I have an Android phone, but I’ve heard good things about Tsurukame. Flaming Durtles has built in “scripts” such as lesson/review reordering/priority, lighting mode, etc, as well as offline reviews, so you can always stay on top of things. I believe Tsurukame has similar features.

If you want to check out more web scripts that may help (or not, certain scripts can certainly harm your learning experience if you abuse/misuse them), see this compilation post.

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I don’t really want to install any browser extensions, so I’ve just been using the js console to reorder the lessons by hand when leveling up.

All you need to do is start a review session, then open the js console and paste in something like this:

$.jStorage.set('l/lessonQueue', $.jStorage.get('l/lessonQueue').filter(r => r.rad))
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Farout, do you honestly find that easier than just using a script?

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