How can people level up in ~ 8 days?

I study every day (1 or 2 hours) do my reviews about 150-220. For my new lesons I always answer correctly the radicals and kanji. BUT it still takes 12-15 days a level. How can you even get avg. 8 days/level? Don’t understand. Maybe I’m doing something very very wrong.

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The amount of time to guru an item is I believe around 4 hours + 8 hours + 1 day + 2 days = 3.5 days (rough estimation). To complete a normal level you’ll need to guru 2 rounds, so that’s 7 days minimum.

Delays can come from various reasons. Firstly, you might enter wrong answers. Second, every time you do not do your reviews while they are up, you lose time as well.
In your particular case, if you truly have 100% correct answers on radicals and kanji, it has to be that you lose time by not doing your reviews once they pop up.

Now I don’t want to encourage you to go out of your way to increase your speed. 12-15 days on average is a fine speed. The risk of increasing speed is that the quality of your learning decreases. WK is not a competition for speed.

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Welcome to the forums! Please read @jprspereira 's Ultimate Guide to WaniKani!

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Most people who level-up in 7-8 days use the reorder script for their lessons. It allows them to do the radicals and kanjis as soon as they level up, and then work on the vocab from past and current level, which allows them to go at the fastest speed possible.

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Do all of your reviews as soon as you get them, and don’t get them wrong after the first few apprentice rounds.

@Kawa-Cocolada Sure, but spending an extra half-hour on doing the vocab for the last level before getting the radical and kanji for the new one adds just that, half an hour.

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Oh yeah but what I mean is that it depends on whether they do 30 lessons/day or less, if they do their vocab lessons from past level (so around 50-70 items usually) at a 30 lessons/day pace before they get to their radical+kanji stage, then they’re gonna take much more time, even if they get every answer correct thereafter.

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They study more than 1 or 2 hours is my guess

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Oh, yeah. But you have to do all of your lessons when you get them (or most of them) if you want to level up in 8 days, anyway. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I agree, for me it would be impossible to maintain my <8 days speed without postponing vocab lessons by a day or two using reorder. That script is the most essential one, it would really hurt retention if you had to do 100+ lessons in one hour to cover all the radicals/kanji required for level up! I think even vanilla WK should prioritize Radicals > Kanji > Vocab in lessons. I typically do not use reorder in reviews.

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No, you only need to do the radicals, which are always less than 20.
I was doing only 20~30 lessons per day and still went at 7 days per (normal) level.
Doing so keeps the review count much more consistent, which is nice too.

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That’s not necessarily true. For the first round per level, yes. But once you guru the radicals, you need to do the newly unlocked kanji immediately for the fastest speed.

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Which are < 10.

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@sapitamas96, please read chapters 4-7 on my guide and you’ll get how things work right away :slight_smile: I suspect you’ll level up faster and with less daily work.

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Thank you for the answer

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I used to be wondering like you but now I manage to do some levels in 8/9days (according to wk stats I did the 15th in 7days, 22h).
Here’s how I do :

Whenever I lvl up, I first learn the new radicals, even if I’m at a coffee shop or wherever place (or mood) I’m at.
The reason is : there’s always 2 phases in each lvl (at least so far lol) :

  1. you get a bunch of new kanjis and radicals, you learn them, and when the radicals are gurued or mastered (don’t remember which is which)…
  2. you get a second batch of new kanjis… that you have to guru/master in order to lvl up.

So… I rush the radicals no matter what and the next morning or another morning (depending on your personal/work schedule) I learn the kanjis.
You get a comfortable time span to schedule your kanji learning because the deadline is whenever your radicals will be gurued/mastered.

Another important thing for me is to do your lessons early in the morning because WK’s SRS gives me 4h, then 8h, then 1 day, etc. So If you start your lessons at 7 or 8AM you, get your last review 12h later, and then the next one will be 24 h later. And this means you’ll never get reviews in the middle of the night and loose time in your progression. (DISCLAIMER: actually you will because you’ll eventually make mistakes and move some reviews forward)

And last thing but pretty straightforward after what I just wrote above : do your reviews in time !
I know some of you can get pretty busy (I do most of the year) but sneaking 5 minutes or going to the toilets and hitting that review button is worth it in the end.

Sorry for the long post, hope this helps !

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Most might, but the reorder script is definitely not needed. My average level up time is 7 days and 8 hours and I’ve never used the script. It’s all about proper pacing and studying the lessons well enough so that you aren’t constantly getting reviews wrong.

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I have never used the reorder script. I just do my reviews every single hour

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What I do as well is to blast through the lessons (between 6-9AM) then for the first review, I split the amount in half or so and finish the rest an hour or two later so they won’t return bundled together and give me a burnout lol (I use Reorder sometimes but don’t neglect vocab). As @athomasm said, reorder isn’t needed.

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So sorry I didn’t read your response carefully!

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The reorder script might not be needed, but improves your pacing.
I do all my radicals and kanji lessons as soon as I level up. A few hours later I do the vocab lessons. If there are more than 50, I split them up in two batches and do the others the day after. So, the reorder script does help in this situation.

Same for reviews. If I have a pile of 150 reviews and 30 are apprentice kanji, I reorder the reviews to prioritize the kanji over the vocab or I can prioritize apprentice items that need my immediate attention over the higher srs levels.

The reorder script changed how I do WK for the better, and I’m glad I started using it early in my journey.

I also use the self-study script a LOT. Whenever I level up, I go through the kanji just learned a few times, and just a few hours later I already know all of them by heart. I couldn’t do this with the regular SRS timings, especially when you have to memorize almost 30 new kanji at the same time.

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