I was reading the ultimate guide and in it they said “those 5-10 minutes of review should be the only thing you focused on.” How does someone speedrunning wanikani complete 100 cards in 5-10 minutes? Am I doing something wrong? It generally takes me 30 minutes to an hour. Like what should be my takeaway here?
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Realistically a review should take a couple of seconds, if you’re spending a long time trying to decipher back from a vague mnemonic then the original learning didn’t do its job correctly.
3 seconds a review x 100 is 5 minutes
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There’s nothing wrong, by the way, of taking the time to make sure your input is correct , but that realistically only increases things by a few more seconds, even 10s per review is 16 minutes for 100
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Mine are usually 30 minutes for 100 items. It really depends, on the items and their relative complexity to your Japanese level, and how long the English takes to type. “Hole” will take less time than “Congratulations and Condolences”. I think you’re probably doing fine, it just depends on if you have the time to spare. If your reviews are taking too long decrease the lesson number a bit.
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It probably takes a little more than five minutes but 100 reviews in 10 or 15 minutes isn’t unreasonable if you know the item and type quickly. You don’t need to go that fast. I know someone who does only 50 reviews a day on average, but you can go fast if you want to get things done sooner. I recommend using the back to back option on Tsurukame or through a script so getting an item gives you the reading and the meaning at once rather than having them split up across reviews. That’ll make it faster because you’re not interrupting the continuity of each item.
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The term speedrunning makes me think you’re taking every lesson you possibly can, which means you have a lot of items you’re unsure of in flux at once, which means each piece of new information when you get something wrong is competing with many others to stick around, which slows the process down. If you’re more confident on each item, you can answer quicker, and then do your reviews quicker. Maybe you need to slow down on lessons so you can speed up reviews?
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true, but a hundred cards means 200 inputs for both meaning and reading
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Nope… That’s not true
When you are extremely focused and your reviews are “easy” (as in the first 10-15 levels), you can crunch reviews at a great pace, maybe 100 items in 15 to 20 minutes.
Much later, when you have items in different stages of learning, you would need more time to recall meanings and writings, I usually had to study 2 to 3 hours EVERY DAY in latter tiers to maintain a sustained 7 days per level.
And remember… Silly things like your mood, sleep quality, daily life problems, a phone call, even room temperature 
can put you in delay so; don’t feel bad 
and keep working your way to kanji master 
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Hehe… Nice example.
I added an abbreviation as synonym for that specific word: CnC (for congratulations and condolences), to avoid writing it every time
慶弔! 
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弁慶だ, That sounds like a intelligent way to handle it lol.
If you do your reviews twice or thrice a day you probably wont have batches of 100 reviews but more like 40-60.
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As other people have said, it does depend on a lot of factors, but to be honest, if you’re taking 30 minutes for 100 reviews, that sounds fairly normal to me. For a point of reference, I average around 5 minutes per 25 - 30 items (both meaning and reading), so that would put me at about 20 minutes per 100 reviews. I have a very consistent 10 days per level average - not sure if that counts as speedrunning. This is also my third attempt, having reset to L1 twice, once after reaching L33, and again after reaching L37 and then drifting away into long breaks, so most of the material I’m working on at this point is still stuff I’ve learned before.
If you are concerned about going too slow, one thing I’d suggest is that you set a time limit for how long you let yourself think about a particular item. When I do reviews, if I don’t immediately know the answer, I usually only give myself 20 seconds max to think about it, usually less, before I deliberately enter either my best guess or a wrong answer and then move on.
IMO, if it takes more than a few seconds to pull the answer out of my memory for the review, than it’s better to get it wrong and get extra practice the next time it comes up for review. After all, I’m learning because I want to actually use the language - trying to read a book or have a conversation with someone and having to pause and think for several minutes for every word just isn’t going to work!
In any case, I think the most important piece of advice anyone can give you is this: There is no wrong way to do this! 
What works for other people might not work for you, and that’s perfectly fine so long as you’re enjoying yourself and (hopefully) progressing towards your own goals!
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If you are planning on speed or something, the size of reviews you can do in one setting is more important than the time spent. Sitting and doing SRS for over an hour every day, and your body won’t be able to hold. 30 minutes might be more reasonable. tbh, on a tiring day, I might not survive 15 minutes. (Though I can still do multiple sessions.)
Back-to-back mode and Lightning mode (with Double Check script or a mobile app) could make each review faster, but I don’t use either of those, instead showing information for everything (plus a script to show JP definitions), actually.
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I just did 119 reviews in 27 minutes. With a small break in there for answering a text. Stayed at 89% accuracy so the speed isn’t hurting my recall too badly. Just wanted to give a more exact number to it. You definitely can do 100 reviews in 30 minutes. 10 or 15 would be a real rush. It is fine to go slow and really think about it when you need to, I just like going a little fast because it forces me to try and think of the meaning as if it were in real time rather than taking a minute to sus out the radicals.
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As a comparison, I just timed myself and did 63 reviews in a little under 8 minutes, 98% accuracy. For 100 reviews, that means about 12 minutes, which aligns with what I predicted beforehand.
As others have mentioned, in order to reach speeds like that, you need to type fast, stay focused and remember the vocab well.
If for any reason that’s not possible for you, then you won’t reach those speeds. That’s nothing bad at all, being slower or faster at something so specific as doing WaniKani reviews doesn’t really mean anything for your Japanese ability imo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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I think it’s easy for people to forget how hard learning kanji is when you first start and how much easier it is to learn after 8-12 months of practice. I guess some people start out much better at it as well.
I average about 5 seconds per answer, so that would be 16-17 minutes for 100 reading + meaning items. A large part of that is how slow and inaccurate typing on a phone is, so I can see how that would be 10mins at a keyboard.
As long as you stick to an effective strategy for memorization, eventually you’ll be much better at it and be able to rattle off reviews. I think the takeaway would be to make sure your strategy is effective.
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At the beginning of the day I am usually around 80 to 100. It takes me about 15 to 20min. Then throughout the day it takes 2-3 minute reviews here and there.
You need that find a pace that you can sustain.
It’s okay to try what other people are doing but be honest if it doesn’t work for you and try something else.
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It takes me also more like 30 min for 100 reviews. But I do read up sentences and explanations again and also write down kanji, which I got wrong. (I just felt like looking more closely and seeing the differences helped me, and this worked best for writing it down. Especially in later levels, where some kanjis just have a radical as difference.)
Maybe I would be faster, if I really just write and move on. No idea.
But yeah I do feel very slow. XD Especially when I compared it to the time people spend on each level, they were all so much quicker than me. (I mean this thread here Drop your level up chart here 📈)
I think it would work better, if one tries to stick to the time, where one can review things again, I sometimes didn’t do every day and thus forgetting things. It probably would also be best doing reviews throughout the day. (Then likely you won’t have 100 reviews at once though, unless maybe you added all the new items right away.)
I take more time than this, but you may decrease your review time by:
- using the computer and type on the keyboard
- Activate the Anki mode script, and do the meaning + pronunciation setting for a single review
Before answering any questions I click on the “last 10” button. This chunks my total items into 2-5 minute bursts of 10 items guaranteed (which ends up being between 10-20 total questions depending on the mix of item types). If I’m feeling good then I’ll do another 10. If my brain is fried I’ll defer for an hour.
This practice has dramatically improved my engagement with Wanikani because I feel I have more control over the length of my review sessions.