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!