I’m almost halfway through L10. I’m trying to level up quickly and my procedure is the usual recommended to do that: do all radicals as soon as they’re unlocked, then do all kanji as soon as they’re unlocked, and do the reviews for those asap. For the last four levels, because I was moving and then got sick, I still did this but only did a few of the vocab (which are not needed for levelling up).
So right now, I have 462 vocab from levels 6-10 in my review queue.
What’s the best way to proceed?
Here is my current Apprentice/Guru etc distribution, in case that’s useful:
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Stop taking lessons from new levels and start doing vocab-only lessons from early levels.
The point of learning vocabulary here is to reinforce the kanji. It is pointless to go more than one level ahead if you still have vocab for older kanji. Going at full speed only works for you if you can keep up with the vocab lessons too, so 20-30 lessons per day. If you want to go slower, accept that you cannot go at full speed on kanji.
There is no reward for reaching higher levels sooner, so you don’t need to be in a hurry. On the contrary, it is bad for you to go forward with new kanji. Since you don’t have any words to reinforce the newly learned kanji, you are more likely to forget them.
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Yeah man, what @Angelodmage said. There are about 150 items per level. You’ve got to do them sometime*, now or later. Skipping the vocab for the level-up doesn’t make them go away. It’s like calling your week done on Thursday - guess what, Friday still exists. You still need to average about 150 items per level, even if it doesn’t make you wait for every vocab to be guru to level up.
So I see 3 options: 1) try to catch up little by little by doing slightly more than 150 items per level from now on; 2) stop kanji lessons and catch up, then restart kanji; or 3) decide you don’t care about vocab at all and “finish” wanikani with thousands and thousands of vocab undone.
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Do you mean lesson queue?
If you do mean review queue, then 462 is not a lot (I’ve been at 1000+ before when I had to take a break and didn’t turn on vacation mode). I’d just allocate some time to try to go through them everyday. Some strategy I’ve tried in case it’s helpful: (1) allocate 20-30 minutes, set a timer, then just go through as many reviews as I could in 30 minutes (you can use the “wrap up” button when you almost run out of time), (2) do 1, twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, (3) do 10-20 reviews at a time whenever you have some time.
It’s totally okay for accuracy to dip significantly (and for the reviews to stay high for a bit because of low accuracy), it’ll get better after a few weeks.
I also paused doing lessons while clearing my large review queues before, as adding even more apprentice words that you might not get to see for several days is not that helpful (unless you use a script to somehow prioritize those new words).
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I will just point out the vocab is not just for reinforcing kanji but also for teaching the other readings of a kanji. If you skip vocab then you skip part of the kanji.
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Thank you all very much. I’m aware that skipping vocab isn’t a good thing but it happened and I need to deal with it. I’ll try to as many additional vocab as I can and see how far that gets me.
I wasn’t aware of vacation mode or I’d have used it during the move and sickness - if I activate that, I can still learn the vocab but they won’t proceed to the review queue and everything else, like new lessons, also stops? I’m not sure that would be helpful in my case, or am I missing something?
When you activate vacation mode it freezes things in place (which prevents your review queue from ballooning while you are distracted by ‘life’ and not working on WK) - you don’t get to do reviews or lessons while in vacation mode.
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Thank you for the clarification!
I also have a backlog of 400+ reviews. I would like to have a setting where I stop new reviews from being added, so I can finish my current backlog - otherwise, this got to a point where it’s not fun anymore, with more reviews being added daily than I can or want to process.
Are mods monitoring these forums, or how else to ask them for such a feature request to be added to the settings?
There is a feedback section in the forum.
For ballooning reviews my understanding is that you can do a batch and then right away switch on vacation mode. Then, when you are ready to do some more, switch it off, do the next batch of reviews and once done, switch it on again. Rinse and repeat.
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Thank you, that sounds like it should help as well!
Hi,
I am in the same boat. About a week ago I levelled up from 11 to 12. But between my job and other stuff that I have to do everyday the reviews are piling up and I am getting overwhelmed. I am definitely committed and I can devote maybe two hours a day to my studies. But today I spent about 4+ hours clearing 400+ reviews. Now I have read that if the reviews are piling up, stop doing new lessons. And I haven’t had a chance to do a new lesson in almost a week. Is there a setting somewhere that lets you limit the number of reviews that get added every day? I cleared something like 300 and when i hit the enter after the last one 60 more had been added. I understand the importance of the reviews but is there a way I can cut back so I can concentrate more on what I am learning? Any advice is welcome.
Jim
My only advice is the same with what Shia LaBeouf said: JUST DO IT!!!
By the way, reviews are not “added”, they shows up on due. Which means its the right time to remind your brain about it. You can cutting back on lessons, maybe 5 a day is good and start to clear the backlog slowly but daily.
I do 15 lessons a day and the daily review is about 100 ish but I managed. I got N2 last July and the vocabs feels a bit easy right now so that definitely helped but building up a habit is crucial. I’m trying to build a long term memory and not blazing through everything to N1. My usual schedual is: Morning reviews and lessons at 9, Noon review at 1-2PM and night review at 9PM, on company’s time of course because I finish my work kinda fast and need something to act busy. Some days I feel too lazy though so I do everything at 9PM. Just keep it slow and steady and you’ll blow right through it.
Also, 4 hours seems a bit too slow on 400 reviews so I suggest giving yourself a limit like 10-15 seconds a review, if you can’t remember then accept the defeat and move on.
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Hi,
Well thanks for that. And what I mean is you are not wrong and I just have to get my ass in gear I suppose. On a more practical level, is it better to try to complete the lessons each day or the reviews? The reason I ask is that I somehow got the impression that the reviews stop accumulating if you don’t do the lessons, so i have been prioritizing the reviews. But perhaps I have it backwards?
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In a practical sense, doing the reviews is better than lessons for now because lessons will only add reviews. If you keep steadily doing your reviews the reviews will go down, or come back in a few weeks/months depending on what level they are. Lessons will only add reviews that come back within hours so it’s best to stop lessons and only do reviews until the apprentice level words are at a manageable number, I suggest 100~120 or so.
Good luck!
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