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.
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.
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))
Farout, do you honestly find that easier than just using a script?
I don’t really have anything to add with regards to how best to WK fast. Just wanted to chime in and say that your pace is also completely reasonable for most people. I’m at about the same time/place myself. 750 kanji, 3k words …
for some perspective, just tell anyone in your life how much you’ve learned and they’ll be shocked!
Keep at it.
Even a couple levels of WK probably gives you more kanji than you’d learn in highschool in a year.
in order to really learn a language you have to do it yourself though. No teacher in a classroom will make you able to learn a language if you aren’t willing to put the hard yards in yourself. They can help guide you but once you learn how to learn it’s so much more efficient just to go your own path and stick with it. You’ll find that you can go so much faster than in any classroom setting.
See what works, what you like and what you don’t, and most importantly have fun learning the language. Having fun is what makes you spend more overall time in the language, as I believe that’s more important than the overall efficiency of how you spend your time learning the language.
I’d strongly argue against reordering lessons unless you really know what you’re doing. The default order as far as I can tell is:
Doing it this way might occasionally delay your level up by a day or two, but IMO it makes sense to learn all of the previous level’s vocab before going on to learn new stuff.
There are a lot of stories on the forum from people who abused reordering and regretted it later.
That’s fine as long as you don’t mind leveling slowly, but if you’re turbo-leveling, you basically need to reorder your lessons, at least when leveling up.
The issue is that when you first level up, you’ll unlock 60+ vocab lessons from the previous level, but you also need to do all the radical lessons for the new level in order to continue progressing, which basically means that you have to immediately race through the vocab without paying attention, leading to a miserable time until you’ve learned them properly.
For the first five levels, I didn’t do any reordering, but at level 5, the Wall of Vocab Lessons led to such a miserable experience that I decided to reorder lessons and do the radicals first on all future levelups. I still do the vocab lessons over the next day or two, but there’s a big difference between doing them in small batches when convenient and trying to rush through all of them at once.
There are a lot of stories on the forum from people who abused reordering and regretted it later.
Well one advantage of doing it by hand with the browser console instead of installing a script is that you’re less likely to abuse it 
.
Fair enough. Although usually I get a couple of Kanji wrong at Apprentice 3, so I unlock most of the level’s vocab lessons (from other 80% or so of kanji that I got right consistently) a day or two before the level up, thus not leaving many vocab lessons to do after the level up.
With my current strategy I consistently have 80-100 apprentice items, I think any more than that and the workload would be too much. Respect to those who can go faster.
Slightly off topic, I noticed several people referencing states and charts and such. How do I pull that up on my Wanikani? I’ve looked through the settings and don’t see it. Do I have to get it from somewhere else, like an extension or separate app?
Yes, the website is wkstats.com. I went there recently for the first time, and the only way I was able to get it to load was to manually type in the old API code (that wanikani won’t let us copy, I guess because they want people to use API2 or whatever?) into wkstats.com.
But that’s as far as I’ve gotten with all this external stuff… am I the only person here who has no idea what scripts are or how to use them?
I think you’ll find what you need in here:
Off-topic, but out of curiosity, what’s the Wall of Vocab Lessons? I’ve just got to Level 5 but I haven’t started the vocab yet - am I in for a tough time? 
There’s actually a new version of wkstats that uses the v2 API. Just go to wkstats.com/v2/.
I also have a very rudimentary tool here which lets you see your review accuracy broken down by SRS stage.
Have you been doing all the radicals and kanji as soon as they are available? If so, you’ll get a massive number of vocabulary lessons that unlock at the same time that you reach a new level. If you’re taking it slower, you may not have to deal with that.
The “wall” is only a wall if you think the goal of WK is to reach level 60 as fast as possible, and this oh so annoying vocab is preventing you from leveling up faster.
Really the vocab is a tool to help you remember the Kanji better, and thus useful.
I agree that the vocab is very helpful for reinforcing the kanji (as well as learning words in its own right). I just wish that WK’s default setup gave you more control over the order and timing of your lessons.
I’m probably ok, as I’m not going very fast - I sat at Level 5 doing Level 4’s vocab lessons for a week before I even got to the radicals. I totally get the temptation to try and level up as quickly as possible, but I’m trying to take it slowly 
thanks, I’m only level three now but I want to get serious about WK at this point. I see a lot of talk about reordering, but honestly my goal isn’t to turbo through the levels (especially knowing how subject to burnout I am) I would much prefer to go at a reasonable pace and focus on learning, and maybe just level up every two weeks for now. (Also I’m pretty bad with computers specifically and am scared I’ll mess something up with the reorder script, or like you said; regret using it later)
but I don’t mean to speak negatively on anyone who uses it! It just doesn’t look like it’ll be for me in the long run.
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