I’ve read your thread for the 4th time now (no joke). However I couldn’t apply all the tips you gave since I was already into level 4. My schedule kind of got messy to be honest, since I’ve never did the 9AM/9PM thing. I used to learn 4 kanji a day, I didn’t know that it could be more than that. It’s been really challenging but I feel great. I’m still adapting tho. I decided to do 16(17 depending on the level) lessons a day. I really feel great about that.
I’ve also started grammar yesterday using Elementary japanese by yoko hasegawa (I both volume and they teach kanji up to N4. So it will reinforce my kanji knowledge even more)
Now what I don’t understand is how you’re able to day all your vocabs within seven days. It’s insane. I made a schedule for my levels up to level 10 but there’s something I don’t understand. I feel like I’m missing something. Is there a day when you do all of your vocabs? How can you do all of your vocabs before guru’ing all of the kanji needed to level up?
Righ now here’s what my level 4 looks like :
I do my lessons on my computer so I can use the reorder script and I do my review on my phone. So i can practice typing with the kana keyboard. (I used to type with the romaji one but I feel like I keep learning hiragana if I use the kana one)
There are a total of 8878 items in WK, so if you want to learn all of them in 368 days, the average number of lessons you have to do per day is 8878/368 = 24.125
(this calculation did not take into account how guru-ing radicals will unlock kanji etc.)
Well, I went at a similar speed as @jprspereira and it’s like @plantron said. I was doing 20~30 items a day on normal levels (usually 20 but I could throw in a day at 30 to ensure I got to 0/0 on every level) and 40~50 on fast levels. I think it average to something like 25 lessons per day indeed.
I’ll never able to keep that paste. I mean I don’t even know how my brain can learn 16-17 items a day. I also learning korean so I don’t think my brain can take this much (learning 10 words a day). I think I’ll try to do 10 days per level. We’ll see how I feel about this pace when I reach level 10.
I share a similar experience to what @Naphthalene and @plantron said: My overall average at all levels was around 24 lessons/day, but during normal levels I’d do 20 lessons a day except on the day where I’d do (most) of my kanji lessons.
Take into consideration that you usually always have vocabulary lessons from the previous level once you level up. The reason why you leveled up is because you guru the last few kanji, and its those same kanji that will unlock vocabulary lessons from the previous day.
My advice with managing leveling up speed (that is not full speed) is very simple: leave 4 kanji lessons and do those 3 days before the day you want to level up. In other words, if you want to level up on the 10th day, do the last 4 kanji of that level on the 7th day.
The reasoning is simple: you level up because you guru at least 90% of that level’s kanji. In 58 levels (except levels 5 and 6), Wanikani has less than 40 kanji per level, which means that 4 kanji will always be more than 10%. This helps controlling everything better so that you don’t level up too soon or too late to your days per level target
Some quick notes:
For levels 5 or 6, leaving 5 kanji to do 3 days before leveling up gives you that 10%.
Remember that the sooner you do the kanji lessons in the level, the sooner you unlock most of the vocab from that level while you’re at that level, which helps to prevent postponing most of vocab for once you finally level up.
By doing the 10% of kanji left 3 days before leveling up, remember that you will still have 3 days until leveling up. This means that having 3 days’ worth of vocabulary lessons for those last days means you’re up to schedule. You don’t really wanna have either 0 lessons or too many lessons to do. It’s a good way to help you understand if you’re balancing things well enough
10 days/level is still very good. I think consistency in speed helps making Wanikani a habit (which is what guarantees that you’ll reach the end of the program without giving up). However, there’s also another perspective: the kanji in the first 30 levels are much more common than the kanji in the later 30 levels. This means that you can go a bit faster on the first 30 levels, and then relax a bit on the speed to allow you more time to study other aspects of Japanese (reading more, grammar, etc).
As an extra perspective, 10 days/level is pretty amazing. It’s level 60 in less than 2 years! I think most people think they’ll take like 5 to 10 years to learn the kanji when they start with Japanese, but it can be much less than that and it’s great
Your name reminded me of this cute little video (which itself is based on a meme of a Japanese fisherman giving inspiring advice, you may have seen). So I just wanted to drop it here, but have no other contribution to make to the thread. https://twitter.com/kaynimatic/status/1243612432943046656
It was clear enough. You’ve answered most of my questions. The information about leaving 4 kanji is truly going to help me. Your threads are amazing. Thank you!!!
