I’m just wondering if I’m doing something incorrectly. Everyone else on this forum has said that the average pace to level up should be 1 week per level, but I’m routinely taking 1 month to level up.
I do the radicals first, then the kanji next, and then the vocabulary while my kanji are reached guru rank, which I assume is the intended order, but I feel like I’m doing this way too slowly. At this rate, I won’t be able to finish this until 5 years from now!
I’ve read the long guide that everyone has recommended, and I feel like I’ve been following each step exactly, but obviously I’m doing something wrong.
This has been my timeline since I began keeping track of it:
3 October, 2024: Reached Level 7
1 November, 2024: Reached Level 8
10 December, 2024: Reached Level 9
11 February, 2025: Reached Level 10 (Was very busy with school and work that time)
10 March, 2025: Reached Level 11
2 April, 2025: Reached Level 12
28 April, 2025: Reached Level 13
Honestly I think a month a level is a good pace, but if you want to finish each level in a week you need to do all lessons as soon as they’re unlocked. How many lessons do you generally do at once when you level up?
I’ve been doing the daily recommendation of about 15 lessons per day.
I’ve also set the lessons to be interleaved instead of picking them out myself.
By doing every lesson when they come out, does that mean I need to do every single vocabulary lesson too?
It seams totally impossible to me to do them all immediately. Doing so would take me several days at least!
I think you misunderstood (or read some very bad advice), one week per level is the maximum pace you can achieve with the unlock system if you do your radical/kanji lessons and reviews as soon as they become available and you guru them as fast as possible[1]. That’s certainly not the average pace.
One month/level is not uncommon from what I see posted around here. And in the end the average pace is irrelevant frankly, it’s all about how much time you want or can invest into it.
Technically you can go even faster for a dozen or so levels towards the very end of the course but that’s not relevant here ↩︎
Technically you only need to do the radicals as soon as they unlock (because they gate the kanji you need to level up) and then you need to do enough kanji to unlock the next level. Technically the vocab doesn’t matter at all for leveling up, but of course I wouldn’t recommend accumulating a large vocab backlog.
I did do one level/week (including all vocab) for the first 40 levels of WaniKani, it is very intense and could only do it because I had a lot of time and flexible hours to dedicate to my studies. I think the average load was around 20 lessons and something like 200 reviews every day.
Actually I happen to have a screenshot of my review load around your level from back then:
I also have a very lenient schedule, but I guess because I haven’t been going over the 15 per day recommendation I haven’t been leveling up quickly at all.
My reviews aren’t very high right now, but in the past they’ve gotten decently high, nowhere near your level though.
Also, how did you view your stats like that?
This is the best I can provide.
Those screenshots were from the Flaming Durtles (now Smouldering Durtles) Android app. Highly recommended if you do a lot of reviewing from an Android device.
Don’t get hung up on the 15 lessons/day thing (it wasn’t even a thing back when I was doing my wanikani climb). It’s a decent default for newcommers but if you feel like you can do more, then just do more.
Correct.
Well, that’s one way to do it for sure, but keep in mind that many vocabulary entries are here to strengthen the kanji even if they’re not ultra-common words. I admit that I completely forgot what 私鉄 means but I could guess the reading at a glance, I think that’s the important part.
Personally I didn’t ignore the vocab, but I did make liberal use of “undo” (through scripts or Smouldering Durtles). I certainly wouldn’t care about forgetting the meaning of 私鉄, but you should be able to remember the reading and the meaning of the individual kanji. Of course it’s easier for me to make these calls now than back when I was on level 10…
Yeah unfortunately there’s no way around that if you want to go faster. I would recommend setting a short-term objective if you go down that route, like reaching level 30. I said I kept that pace to level 40 myself, but in hindsight it was probably a mistake, you really start hitting diminishing returns past level 30, you’re better off slowing down a bit on the kanji side and spend more time reading and studying grammar IMO.
Thanks for all of your help so far! I’ll definitely push my limits from now on when it comes to the amount of lessons I complete each day!
What do you mean “Undo?” And I’ve seen scripts being discussed here, but I’ve never even heard of them before I explored this forum for the first time, which in my case, is today.
I’ll look into scripts on my own time, as I don’t want to keep begging you for information that can be Googled all day, but since you brought it up, what is “Undo?”
Ask away, even if I get bored (or, more likely, sleepy given the hour here) somebody else will reply.
WaniKani by default doesn’t let you “undo” a mistake, so if you make a typo or just make a mistake but you feel like you were close enough and it shouldn’t matter, you’re still screwed and the item will be demoted to a lower SRS tier and result in more reviews later.
You can modify this behavior with userscripts like Double-Check or third-party apps like Smouldering Durtles which let you literally “undo” your mistakes and try again. Helpful for dealing with typos and also for cheating on entries you don’t really care if you get wrong, like the meaning of 私鉄.
There are also scripts like Reorder Omega that let you automatically prioritize lessons and reviews that matter most for leveling up, saving you some manual picking.
Keep in mind that I haven’t been using any of these scripts for now well over a year (since I reached level 60) so I don’t know if they’re still the best in town.
These seem pretty good to me! I’ll definitely appreciate being able to undo any mistakes I make. That’s seriously slowed me down sometimes, so it’ll come in handy.
The other scrips also look very useful, so I’ll see what else I can use.
Hopefully with all of these tips I can finish this a lot faster than the projected 5 years. Since I’m already about a quarter of the way there, I may even finish by the end of this year now!
15 lessons a day is pretty fast too. I think if it’s still taking you about a month per level at 15 lessons a day, it might be more of an accuracy issue than a volume issue, especially because you mentioned not being able to undo typos and mistakes. Highly recommend the double check script mentioned above and I think the Smouldering Durtules app has an undo function as well.
If you want to level up faster, try your best to not get any kanji wrong for that level, as that dictates your overall level up speed. I generally aimed for 90% in the upper right accuracy counter while reviewing, this let me level up in about 10-12 days. No need to reorder as well. As you’ve mentioned, if you prioritize the radicals and kanji you’ll have a large dump of vocab whenever you level up which can slow you down more.
But if you have no problems with your load now, don’t sweat it too much to be honest. It’s more important that you feel comfortable day to day so you don’t burn out.
I wouldn’t skip vocabulary- I find it useful not only for increasing my own spoken vocab but also for cementing the kanji in my mind. When I level up, I usually have some vocab from the last level. But instead, on day 1 of the level, I do the new radicals (depending on the amount half- all of them). Day 2 is either finishing the radicals and starting the kanji or doing all the kanji. (I’m going to start writing the kanji as I learn them to help with memorization). Day 3 is either finishing the kanji or waiting to unlock more kanji so its the perfect day to start work on the last level’s vocab. Throughout the rest of the days, I can do vocab from the current level as well as the new kanji as it is unlocked. I usually do 21 lessons a day, but sometimes the vocab is pretty easy so then I might do more. Also on new radicals/ kanji days, I might do like 15 radicals and kanji and then the rest vocab cuz my mind struggles to actually memorize 21 new words so it affects my accuracy.
Another important thing is to 0 the reviews. To be exact, Kanji and Radicals in apprentice, of the current level, should be finished as soon as possible (or just not delaying too much). At least, not 15 reviews per day.
Perhaps on a 2 week/day pace, you might need to do 100 per day on some days.
About max pace talk, Radicals needs to not just be taken out of lessons immediately, but also carried forward to Guru status. The first pile of Kanji can be divided by 3 days or so while Radicals aren’t yet Guru’d. Vocab are a good exercise of memory or not. I wouldn’t delay them too much.
When old items from months ago (Master, Enlightened) return to the reviews, the number could get high. Some sort of reordering study could be helpful. But with or without reordering, it’s still the simplest to just make the review count become 0.
I’d imagine that 50-100/day, finish the review on most days, with a good accuracy, could bring WaniKani down within 3 years or less.
I think the vocab are probably the most important part and second are the Kanji that support the vocab. Otherwise how will you read? I have unlocked level 6 but I have a big Vocab backlog from Level 5. I think the intention from the developers was that people would do all the kanji and vocab intermixed and then once near 100% completion move on but it was gated via kanji only.
It is indeed an insane pace and that’s why I think most of the folks who do this aren’t retaining much, or they are gaming the system or just have an extreme amount of available time to dedicate to learning Japanese.
That’s why I said I think your pace is great, if you feel like you’re retaining information. Most people seem to think a lot of the higher levels aren’t necessarily the most useful anyway, depending on your end goals, so I don’t think you need to be in a rush to complete WK.
I slowed down a huge amount once I got to around level 20, as I started putting more of my study time into other things. The system is really designed for you to be clearing all your reviews on a daily basis, so whatever rate keeps you comfortably doing that is best. Any time I start to have reviews pile up I just stop adding anything new, or I only do a lesson or two a day max, until things level out again, and that’s what worked for me. I really think worrying too much about pace has a negative impact on your learning here unless you’re trying to speed through for cost savings (which is why I think getting lifetime is really the way to go).
I’m sorry, I may not have worded that correctly!
I try to finish all of my reviews each day, until they hit 0.
I’ve been doing around 15 new lessons each day, mostly consisting of Vocabulary.
I always tried to finish up each level’s vocabulary before completing the new kanji, which, looking back at it, is probably a major factor of why my progress was so slow.
I’m going to prioritize each new level’s kanji instead of trying to finish up every single vocabulary from the previous level from now on. I’ll try to select the most useful vocabulary words to add to circulation instead of relying on the default, interleave option to select words for me.
I don’t think it’s an accuracy issue! My accuracy seems to be pretty high according to wkstats.com.
I think I’ve just been prioritizing the wrong things.
I’ve been trying to finish up each level’s vocabulary before finishing the next level’s kanji, so that must be what’s been slowing me down a lot.
There are some advantages, like spending more time studying certain words (maybe), but it’s just too slow for me! I would rather not spend the next 5 years doing this, I want to get it over with as quickly and efficiently as possible
