Hitting the wall

I hope this won’t discourage you :smiley: I think we are mostly a lovely bunch, so it’s sad that the discussion took a weird turn. I hope you could still get some useful tips out of the rest :heart:

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No, you completely derailed my topic by providing a salespitch of the most well-known conman on the internet.

I found some tips that were useful, though, so thanks guys for that.

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I feel sad for you, too. Because I will rather be poor and not reach my goals, but be authentic and myself, without having to follow fake gurus.

I am actually doing quite well :slight_smile:

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Well, anyway,

I commonly read here that “you can never start learning grammar too early” but while kinda true I disagree to a small degree, because imho it is just way more fun and a bit easier learning grammar concepts with a decent amount of Kanji in hand - and for me that was around Wanikani level 15 or so, where I kicked into next gear with BunPro and my textbook of choice.

Another point I forgot to mention is also: if reviews pile up, don’t do them all at once but in smaller chunks. Otherwise such a big review session will create waves down along the SRS, haunting you for quite a while → sudden surge of maybe hundreds of reviews reoccuring until you finally burn the pile.

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I rarely use this feature, but it sure is nice to have sometimes…

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I cannot claim to have been in your specific place. However from my own journey, my guess is that steps 3, 4, and 5 (6 may also be tying into 5) are the main things to look at here. Going down those in order:

It takes at least 6 months for a review schedule to fully stabilize, and that’s assuming you go full tilt and do all reviews as they become available. It is important to keep this in mind when coming up with a routine for Wanikani. Your most numerous reviews in a given week will be your apprentice items, however. The key to being able to maintain a schedule is keeping those in check.

Since your level progresses that means you’re doing a good job retaining kanji and radicals. That’s good! However, if your reviews are piling up high enough to be daunting then it sounds to me like vocabulary items might be sticking around. If you’ve just leveled up but see you still have a large amount of apprentice items, I recommend holding off on the lessons for the moment. You don’t have to do lessons the moment they become available. Doing so can be a fast-track for Wanikani, but it can also be a fast-track to burnout.

Step number 4 is not your friend. Trust me, I know just how tempting it is to take a full day off. If you’re like me though, “a day off” is never singular. A huge part of getting through Wanikani is falling into a rhythm, a habit, for it. Even if it’s just some reviews, it’s important to keep that habit going.

Step 5 is likely feeding into 4. It may also be feeding off of 6. There are many services and textbooks for learning Japanese grammar. However, stacking additional workload when you’re already struggling may be counterproductive. I will instead link here what I would consider the bare minimum to be able to start putting what you learn in Wanikani into practice:

Japanese Sentence and Clause Structure
NHK Easy News

The first details the basics of how a sentence will be structured. It also has links for common particles you will see that tie things together. The latter is a news page designed for those learning Japanese. All articles feature furigana (reading guide), which you can turn off if you want to try and test yourself a bit. By level 8, you should be able to read half of the kanji found on the site. You will definitely feel progress as you continue to level up.

Do not be disheartened that you won’t be able to completely read articles on that site. I wasn’t able to do that until somewhere between 20~30 (at which point you’ll know 85~93% of the kanji found there). At first you’ll notice kanji you’ve learned, probably some vocabulary items too. Somewhere between 10~20 you’ll probably start finding you can get the basic idea being conveyed by whole sentences.

By the time you’re reading whole articles you may find that you want more material to read or noticing that your grammar really does need more than the bare minimum found at the link I provided. However, by then you’re probably somewhere between level 20 and 30 and the habit for Wanikani has already formed. Once that habit is formed and solid, you should be able to better judge how much time you can afford to put into learning grammar and explore more thorough grammar studies.

I hope you find some of this useful!

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reiterating what others have said, but—

I think schedule is very important. if you’re not learning language as a child (by osmosis) you have to work at it consciously over a long period of time

by level 10 I realized I would be praying to lord crabigator for years. I read somewhere that you should pick a number of lessons you can manageably do every day, and stick to it. I found this super helpful; it’s given me consistent level ups over the last few months (about every 11 days!)

personally I’m not worrying about any quick routes or 1-year runs. I do 20 lessons each weekday morning, and take the weekend to catch up on reviews. I aim to have <=100 apprentice level items, and that’s been fairly manageable with constant but low-effort work. generally I’m about 75% accurate with my answers.

the key is to find what works for you, and stick to the schedule until it sticks with you. but language learning is super rewarding—and soon you’ll be able to read packaging, pick up on song lyrics and dialogue!!

most important: ばんばる!:bowing_man::bowing_man::bowing_man:

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Some progress. Managed to clean up the huge pile of reviews, and bring the Apprentice and Guru items down.

It seems that the best advice from this thread is to do at least one review each day. Because it’s never one review, it’s usually at least 10 or 20. Starting is half the work. I waited with new lessons until I cleared my backlog, and started doing more lessons today.

The new “recent lessons” feature seems super useful, since I oftentimes do lessons and immediately forget what I learned. I guess I’ll try a new strategy: after doing a batch of lessons, immediately review them using the “recent lessons” feature. I am hoping this will give me the “bridge” between lessons and the first review session.

As for grammar, I tried Bunpro, but I think the recommendation to wait till LVL15 is warranted, since I encountered many words/kanji that I haven’t seen yet. Also watched this fantastic video: The Complete JLPT N5 Grammar Video(Game) Textbook - YouTube - although there were lots of things I had no idea about, I found many words familiar from WK. Yay!

I might turn this topic to a study log.

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