I am just getting started with WaniKani. I’m in the middle of Level 2 I think, and I am loving it! However, I think I might like it so much that I’m getting ahead of myself. I have an app for this, so every time a new review is available I’ll immediately do it. Then every time a new lesson is available, even if I still have a lot of reviews to do, I’ll go through them too.
Now I’m at a point where I have like 90 reviews per day and new ones become available every hour or so. This last session I had I also did worse than I had before, and I think it’s because I just tried to learn too many at once.
How many reviews/lessons do you guys think I should do a day? Should I try to just not do everything at once just because it’s available? I just get so excited and want to learn as much as possible, but maybe it’ll be more productive if I take it easy… ha
The quicker you go the more your review stack will pile up. Finishing wanikani, in my opinion, is more of a marathon than a race so it’s best to pace yourself if you want to make it to the end.
A lot of people on here will limit themselves to 15-20 new lessons per day so that way their review pile does not get insanely large. If you’re overwhelmed, try to keep your apprentice level between 60-80 and adjust from there whether you want to go faster or slower.
That sounds good, I’ll try to that 60-80 thing. I’m almost at 90, so maybe closer to 60 would be good until I get more comfortable. Thanks a ton for the reply
Yeah that’s what I was thinking too. I definitely want to keep doing it every day. Five lessons after a review seems like a good idea too, I’ll have to try that. Better than racing through 20 in a row right when they’re unlocked!
Truth is, you don’t really get monster reviews until level 10 or so, assuming you always keep the same pace of doing reviews multiple times a day or as soon as you get them.
Then one day you’ll wake up to 130 reviews because your usual pile just coincided with a pile that’s moving to Enlightened and another pile that’s moving to Master, all of it while you slept.
Then you’ll shrug, and spend an hour doing them because your OCD won’t let you leave reviews undone.
Yikes. Guess I better enjoy these lower levels while I can…!
Is there a way to just do part of a review and come back to it later? Maybe I’m just doing it wrong, but it seems like it expects you to go through all of them (no matter how big it has gotten) in one session. If I exit it, it will start me over. Is that how it should be?
in addition to the wrap up button tester said, you can exit at any time and it saves your progress. At one point I was like 80 deep in a 100ish review pile and I lost my internet connection. I could have cried. Thankfully when it came back on everything was saved where it was so no worries there. I usually use the wrap up button though just incase ^_^. Since meanings and readings are not usually back to back, wrap up will try to recall those that one of the two still need answered and bring them to the front so you can answer them so they count towards your completion (you only get credit for the item once both are answered correctly so wrap up helps a lot).
I had my levels reset from like 8 or 10 or something? I don’t remember. But I learned to learn from that, I do every lesson I can so I can guru the radicals to unlock the kanji, to guru the kanji to unlock the next levels. I do my reviews every morning, so then later in the day I can come back to do more. I used to go way too slow with my levels, I wonder if I’ll be able to get the coveted 7-8 day level-ups.
Review counts of 50-200 are pretty common and it’ll only stack up more overtime. The better you remember, the less reviews you will have to do. Since words will come up more slowly for each SRS level you surpass with the given words. Try writing the kanji multiple times after clearing the reviews if you have trouble recalling.
4H + 8H + 24H + 3D (4.5 days) is the shortest amount of time it will take to guru something. Afterwards, 1W, 2W, 1M, 4M. It drops off pretty quickly after guru, meaning if you Master something then next time it’ll come up is very far into the future. AKA less reviews. If you have trouble with reviews, try in batches of 50-100. I’d recommend just doing all of them especially at low levels. But if you have like a stack of 500 or something crazy, take it a bit slower. Focus on the kanji. If you have trouble with words, the way I’d do it is write it down multiple times or study it frequently throughout my day.
It definitely adds up. I’ve done (almost) every level until now at close to max speed. Around level 25-30 I noticed that my Next Day review count stopped going below 100, almost for good. It’s super rare for that to happen now, and if it does, it’s always above 90. Right now I’m looking at the highest Next Day count I’ve seen yet, at 321. It doesn’t go 300+ very often, normally it’s around 150-250 per day. It’s normal for me to have reviews every half hour, for a few stretches of time every day.
It’s a lot, but I almost never feel it’s too much, personally. To keep it from feeling like it’s too much, I knock out at least the big batches of reviews as soon as they’re available (like tomorrow I have 64 scheduled at 9:30 AM, gonna do that immediately), so my day doesn’t snowball. And generally I even do the smaller reviews ASAP.
I hope this was helpful! Something like this is what you can expect if you go for speed. It’s up to you though, no one way is the right way. Do what works for you.
Using the re-ordering script has been a big help for me with this, as well as the “made a mistake” script to help myself through the unofficial radical “names” that really aren’t important, and for breezing through the early kanji readings to get to their vocab quicker, as I find it’s a lot easier to remember your kanji readings by simply learning their vocab with them as soon as possible, instead of just trying to learn the readings out of context before being taught any vocab for that kanji… (and it helps you remember many of the readings at once, instead of where you usually just try to remember the first reading in the list). That’s one part of WaniKani I don’t really agree with.
But I agree it can be hard to just put it down and let the reviews build up a bit haha. I have the browser alerts Chrome extension as well… so as soon as they pop up I’m right on it ;_;
The best advice I can possibly give you is to stop caring whether you miss some review items sometimes. This is my second time on WK; last time I was up to level 12, and I used to agonize over each answer and experience an actual jolt of painful anxiety whenever I’d get one wrong. That sucked a lot and eventually led me to quit. Now I try to just enjoy it when I’m right and shrug when I’m wrong.
It doesn’t matter if you get one wrong. In fact, it’s just an opportunity to get more exposure to the item. No one is monitoring your performance so you’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about when you miss something easy. I posted a screenshot on Facebook when I got a 250-item review 99% right, but if I’m 70% or whatever then no one has to know.
The only things that really matter to get right in terms of progression are the radicals and the kanji, not the vocabulary, so you can feel free to get vocab wrong as much as you want and it doesn’t matter. And whether you level up in 8 days or 12 days… who cares. It doesn’t matter. As someone else said, this is a marathon and not a sprint.
Be happy and proud that you’re making progress and just do what you can when you can. The devil’s trap in this is that you try and care so hard that you get overwhelmed and start letting reviews pile up because you’re afraid of how much you don’t remember and are afraid of making mistakes. But then you drop WK for a year (like I did) and you regret it. Just make the mistakes and learn from them and keep pressing forward. You’ll be amazed at the progress you make.
75% recognition of 2000 kanji is 100% recognition of 1500 kanji. How many kanji do your friends know? Your parents? You’re way ahead of the game if you just keep moving forward.
Btw I know my response above was off topic from your original question, but I’m looking ahead to where well-intentioned, over-eagerness often seems to lead on WK. It’s great that you’re hungry for reviews and rest assured they will keep coming and coming and coming. For a little while I prided myself on getting reviews done immediately and finishing levels in the shortest possible time, but now that I’m back at 10 it’s just too much to digest at once. I took a day and a half to get through the level 10 lessons this time and, guess what, it doesn’t matter. It’s actually nice to have the reviews spaced out into a slower trickle instead of giant boluses all the time.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions and advice! You’re all super helpful
Sounds like I shouldn’t stress about it and just take it a little easier if I feel overwhelmed. I appreciate the help though, seriously
Is there a way to just do part of a review and come back to it later? Maybe I’m just doing it wrong, but it seems like it expects you to go through all of them (no matter how big it has gotten) in one session. If I exit it, it will start me over. Is that how it should be?
Don’t worry about it. If you answer half of an item (just the pronunciation or just the meaning) and then close your browser, after a while it’ll reset and forget that you got the first half right. But whatever… that just means more practice with that item. This only becomes truly annoying when you have monster reviews (200+ items) and it’s hard to stop midway through because you have no idea how many half-answered items you’ve done so it’s potentially a lot to lose. But whatever. More practice. And I think there’s a “wrap up” feature for this, although I’ve never used it personally.
