I’ve been doing this up until this point, and it works well, but it’s just too slow!
At this rate, I won’t be finished until 2029!
So I’ve got to change something up. Hopefully my new strategy can speed things up a bit.
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I think you’re right, I shouldn’t worry too much about this, but every time I think about my projected end date, I can’t help but feel a bit defeated.
I appreciate your encouragement though! Let’s keep doing our best 
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Oh yeah, your accuracy is much higher than mine! You should be going faster than me at this pace. Maybe its how often you review? Do you review once a day? My schedule is to review at the start of the day (zeroed out), then 15 lessons, then review again at the end of the day (zeroed out). This lets me move the kanji up one SRS level within the day.
Optimally you would review 4 hours after your lesson and another 8 hours after that to get the first 2 levels of apprentice out of the way on the same day. Further, every hour on the dot of the SRS Timings. Realistically however, the only thing that matters is the first two because they occur within a 12 hour period of your lessons. Those two SRS steps go a long way to finishing a level early, especially with your accuracy.
As I’m sure you’re aware, leveling up is based on kanji. At 15 lessons a day with accuracy such as yours, you should be getting a level in 10-12 days no problem (if you review twice a day), and still have enough time to finish the vocab while you progress the next level’s kanji and radicals.
Finishing the vocab of the previous level shouldn’t really slow you down much (see my charts below), I never selected my lessons (never skipped words either), I always let it automatically decide for me (interleaved).
For reference, here’s my stats:
And my level up chart from 30 onwards:
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I understand what you mean, however, after the first few beginning levels, I feel as though some of the vocabulary words can be skipped without much of a negative impact on overall comprehension.
For example,
• All する words can be skipped. If you know the noun, you already know what the する verb is.
•私鉄
•鉄人
•山びこ
•山道
They’re all very niche words that I’ve never once brought up in conversation while speaking in Japanese. So while they are good to know, skipping these in favor of prioritizing more useful words would’ve saved a bit of time I feel.
But don’t let me stop you from completing all the vocabulary lessons! It doesn’t cost anything but time, which is what I’m so concerned about. If you’re not concerned about the time cost, keep up the good work!
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If it makes you feel better, I more or less stopped doing new lessons and took an entire year to level up for one level, and I actually feel really great about where I’m at with Japanese right now.
Part of the key is remembering that WK is just one tool. It’s for helping you learn kanji and it’s definitely great at that. I’ve started taking classes and I’m much better at reading then most folks. I took the N5 and by far the kanji was the easiest part for me. But kanji isn’t the only thing you need to learn for any Japanese goals so you need to figure out how to balance out using WK and doing the other things. And they’ll all feed off each other. When you see a kanji you learned here in the wild, it’ll stick a lot more and you’ll get more of the nuance. So you don’t want to go so fast that it’s the only study tool you’re using and you don’t want to get to the end only to realize that you can’t actually remember anything you learned. You’re doing great, just slow and steady on WK and the daily study habits you learned here can be applied to whatever you use along with it
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Ah! I think that’s what it is!!!
I’ve only been reviewing once per day, mainly on the weekdays (although recently I’ve been studying on weekends too.)
If what you say is true, than I’ve been unknowingly halving my SRS level up rate!
They way I’ve been doing things is by completing all of my lessons and reviews in one sitting in the middle of the day, each day.
But the way you’ve described it sounds like I need to be completing multiple lessons at different times throughout the day in order to increase the SRS level faster, right?
The problem is, I feel like the reviews don’t refresh fast enough for me. Or if it does, it’s not at a convenient time for me.
For reference, this is my current refresh rate for today:
Seems like I need to try to do the lessons as soon as I can once they’re available then! That must be it!
Although, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to since it doesn’t really work with my schedule 
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Yup! I’m pretty sure that’s why your pace is much slower than mine.
Yes, optimally you would want to review at the hours according to the SRS timings I linked above. However, if your day is too busy. Reviewing at least one more time at least 4 hours after your lessons, so that would be 4 hours after the middle of the day, should speed you up significantly.
Your review refreshes aren’t a lot because your accuracy is pretty high, therefore I’m assuming you have very little apprentice level items outside of the ones you just studied. You’re probably sitting at around 60-80 apprentice items.
So as I mentioned above, the only refreshes you should care about are for the lessons you did that day. Since you say you do 15 lessons a day, you should expect those 15 lessons to review 4 hours after your lesson. You don’t have to do it after 4 hours on the dot of course, just doing it within the day should speed your pace up significantly. Bonus points if you still have time to do reviews 8 hours after that 4 hour review to really speed up your levels.
Realistically, this kind of schedule is really tough for busy folks (most of us), which is why I always just review at the start of my day and end of my day. This ensures that when I do my lessons at the start of my day, I can review them at least once at the end of my day. I’d also recommend you review everyday without fail if you want to speed up progress (you mentioned that already but I just wanted to reiterate the importance of reviewing every single day).
TLDR: Review at least once more within the day, earliest being 4 hours after the lesson to have the review appear in the queue, at 15 lessons a day you should level up in every 10 days or so.
EDIT:
You don’t actually need to do multiple lessons at different times, just reviews. The time you do your lessons dictates when you see them again in your review pile. 15 lessons is more than enough once a day.
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I think WaniKani is more reading-focus than conversational, but it also depends on what you are listening to.
私鉄 and 山道 can easily come up in news, for example. Also after some time, you should a sense of both 私 and 鉄 separately.
鉄人 in some genres. Also metaphorical elsewhere.
Not sure about やまびこ, but there is a train for that.
Anyway, certainly, vocab choice can be better. WaniKani appears to try to get better at this in recent years (rather than intentional from the beginning, so more of a fix at lower levels).
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Hmmm…
To each his own, but I do like the する variations - just extra reinforcement of the kanji and vocab 
I’ve only read four books so far, but 私鉄 has already appeared in two of them 
山道 once so far. 山びこ indeed appears to be a rare one, but I’d sure like to see it as it seems cool to me
Okay, all of these may be unlikely to appear in conversation, but then I’m not sure WK is that useful for conversational Japanese? As polv already said, it’s more reading focused.
At least other vocab learning tools give you flexibility in what and when you learn (…if those other SRS systems work for you, that is).
That said, I go through each WK level on a two-weeks (14 days) basis, covering all items not just radicals and kanji:
~12 items per day (depending on the number of items in a level), 4-5 of those are kanji to ensure level-ups happen on time. One review session per day every morning, plus one additional review of the items learned in that day, 4h or later. That’s it.
(Disclaimer: I do use the Double-check userscript to get everything to Guru on time. I suppose one could use the “extra study” feature instead to ensure 100% accuracy on Apprentice items.)
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I’d recommend doing Radicals and Kanji first – and then doing a bit of vocab, like, 10 lessons per day. That would allow you to level up fast without completely ignoring the vocab.
But as people have pointed out, the important thing is to go by your own pace.
So, whichever method you choose, best of luck with your studies! 
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You’re not wrong but at the same time it means that these lessons/reviews will take no time at all if you already know the base vocab well, so it won’t waste a lot of time. Having a freebie from time to time also boosts confidence and morale in my experience.
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Mmm, somebody did some modelling a while back and while “3 carefully spaced review sessions a day” is necessary for maximum speed, doing 2 a day like that still gets you quite a lot of the speed improvement compared to a single session. It ought also to improve accuracy by having the first review effectively come up at more like 12 hours than 24, though accuracy doesn’t seem to be an issue here.
The “do all reviews and lessons immediately they appear” and “one session a day” graphs are in this post – on the theoretical optimum you get to level 60 in less than year, and at one session a day you’re only part way through level 37. The three sessions a day graph is in this post and is slightly slower than the maximum but still gets you to level 50 in a year. Finally, the twice a day graph is the one in this post and it gets you to level 49 in a year, so it’s almost as good as doing three.
(In all these graphs the assumption is that you do everything available at the time when you have your review and lesson schedule and that you get 100% accuracy, which of course you won’t achieve; in the real world three sessions a day is likely to improve accuracy a bit and also to reduce the amount of time a mistake adds to things.)
Incidentally I would suggest that even if you “only” got to level 37 in a year your kanji ability would probably be well ahead of your other skills unless you were doing a significant amount of other study on top of WK.
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I remember that thread! Anecdotally with my own tissue paper math and trial and error, I found that similarly, 20 lessons a day vs 15 lessons a day is very small gain in speed (roughly 15%) but very large increase in review load (assuming average retention), but going from 10 to 15 lessons a day cuts your projected finish time by about 40%, and going from 5 to 10 is 50% reduction in time.
Overall I find that 10-15 (15 if you have more time) lessons a day with reviews twice a day is the most reasonable and sustainable pace for most average folks (me).
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This is a really helpful anecdote whiterainx, thanks! I started at 5 lessons per day at the beginning and realised it was going to take me about 42 years to complete it. I ramped up to 10 which was comfortable, and now I’m at 10 or 15 depending on how much time I have. If I do 15 every day for a week I really notice the review load goes up significantly compared to 10 per day. I’m happy with my c 12/day average. (Edit to say this is about 2.5wks per level for me now).
For those that completed WK before they implemented the new lesson algorithm thing - the automatic interleaving has worked really well for me. I do 10-15 lessons every day, and never run out of lessons, while steadily progressing. I’ve never needed to use “advanced” to pick radicals first etc because it takes care of that for me. The mix of lessons varies a bit depending on if I’ve just levelled up (more radicals and kanji) vs getting to the end of one (mostly vocab). Steady progress every day is the aim…
And OP yes I think the trick for you might be clearing reviews to zero more than once per day!
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Technically you don’t have to do all the kanji as soon as they appear because most levels are gated by the locked kanji that first require guruing radicals. So you can do something like:
Day 1: all radicals, some kanji.
Day 2: 1/2 of remaining kanji
Day 3: The rest of the kanji
Day 4: Vocab
And then once the radicals come up for guru, then do those and the newly unlocked kanji asap, because those will gate you from leveling.
I would recommend doing the vocab, not just because they strengthen the kanji, but also because they teach the other readings. Also some of the words that aren’t used much in speaking are used in reading. I’ve seen loads of words that people make fun of while reading. (山びこ is one of them, for example)
You can actually level up at a pretty decent pace doing 20 a day if doing the above.
And check periodically throughout the day to go faster. However, even if you don’t and you only do reviews once or twice a day, that should only slow you down by maybe a few days, not by weeks. Don’t skip any days though.
I’m about to level up in a few hours, which means my current level took about 10 days, most of that was doing new cards reviews at night. Some days I was able to catch the first review 4-hours later, and some days I wasn’t (effectively the same as studying once a day). It didn’t slow me down that much, and most days I was only doing about 20 new cards.
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I think there is no really wrong way to go about learning the Kanji and vocab so long as you do them, and there seem to be two sets of opinions in that one side wants to optimize the words they learn for speed and there is nothing wrong with that.
I am of the different side in that I want to learn as many words as possible and yes some I may not use or even care about. In my native language there are a ton of words I know of subjects I have little interests in. Knowing of something is different than knowing deeply about it. I saw one somewhat comical example where someone deemed the word かき氷 to be useless, but かき氷 is very common in hot regions as a summer treat suggesting they’ve never gone out and secured one of these items.
Or another example where someone was complaining about covering baseball terminology but baseball is the national sport of Japan. So I think it is a wise and small investment in time to learn the terminology so at the very least you have the words.
Where are word might appear in the future is a big unknown and premature optimization of words is not effective in my opinion.
So therefore my opinion is that I would prefer to have as many words as possible even though they may not be so useful and it seems from my perspective at these lower levels all the words are useful and common. That isn’t to say that WK optimizes the levels for how common the words are, I think it optimizes for ease of learning the Kanji which leads to some words that are weird or strange appearing is because the guiding goal is kanji.
Finally, I think that a stable middle ground would be to give the vocab words a frequency rating so people can make an informed guess as to how important the word is and then they can study only vocab that meets their own specific frequency rating.
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From the replies I see you actually want to up your pace, and that’s awesome!
But in case you’re chill with that, here’s my stats.
I’m taking it slow as life gets busy - but it will indeed take a long time for me to finish it haha.
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Hello everyone, just wanted to give you guys a quick update!
I’m happy to say that, thanks to all of you guy’s wonderful advice (especially you, Simias and Whiterainx) for the first time ever since I started Wanikani, I have leveled up in less than two weeks!
I followed you guy’s advice and started focusing on completing of my reviews as often as possible, and thanks to the Smouldering Durdles app, I was able to receive push notifications on my phone about when new reviews were available, so it was super easy!
Also those userscripts very particularly useful, since, even though I knew the correct answer, I misspelled a few things occasionally which would’ve added a few days to my level up time.
With this new knowledge in hand, I should be able to learn at a pace that I feel much better about.
Thanks everyone!
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Outstanding work! Reviews are really the key, since they either show you know it or help reinforce it - and the SRS timing is set up such that being able to do them multiple times a day is a major accelerator.
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