I am new to this, and only Level 8 so far. I was wondering how you all level up so fast, I hear about 1 week per level, which is not the case for me. I am more around 3-4 weeks per level, even though I try do my reviews daily, and have a 90 % right rate…Am I doing something wrong?
I work 8-9 hours a day, have japanese lessons outside of WK and of course other life obligations, so is my tempo normal for that? Even IF i try to finish all my reviews in the morning, but the end of the day I have another 100, and I cant do them right away.
Also out of those 100 items for example, are a lot of verbs/radicals I have been given since Level 1…sooo that seems quite ineffective and I feel like its slowed down on purpose so I pay longer for the service?
Wanikani is not a magical tool that injects the kanji into your brain, and memorizing takes time, if you do one concentrated session every night, you can level up every 10 days if you don’t get your new radicals + kanji wrong. It takes 6-8 days if you do a morning and evening session. Mainly just focus on accuracy of new kanji and radicals over everything else, and try get everything out of guru and apprentice. This graph shows how most human’s memorization works. Good luck!!
You have to fight wanikanis of way higher level than you with higher level learners but before you take out the last HP point you swap your low level guy in and do the last hit
This is not enough to clear a level in 7 days. Those who clear in 7 days do the reviews several times a day, as soon as possible, for the items that lead to level up.
Example
Day 1 at 6am learn new kanji, Apprentice 1
Day 1 at 10am answer correctly on kanji, Apprentice 2
Day 1 at 6pm answer correctly on kanji, Apprentice 3
Day 2 at 6 pm answer correctly on kanji, Apprentice 4
Day 4 at 5 pm answer correctly on kanji, Guru 1, that unlocks new items, do them immediately
Day 4 at 9pm Apprentice 2
Day 5 at Xam Apprentice 3
Day 6 at Xam Apprentice 4
Day 8 at Xam Guru, level up
That’s how you can do it the fastest. Not something that I would recommend with a busy life
However another factor is the order of your lessons. If you learn all your vocab first, and then your kanji, then the level up is later. If you learn all kanji before, you level up faster but you get new vocab even though you’re not done with current vocab. I use method 1, I clear stuff and then I use 4 days on clearing kanji and leveling up.
For someone that has a full time job, 3-4 weeks is fine. The way to go full speed is by doing every radical and kanji lesson as soon as it becomes available. This results in several hundred reviews a day, neglected vocab lessons, a lot of leeches, and a destroyed sleep schedule. That’s not plausible for someone with a life outside of Wanikani.
Many people who level up in 6-10 days use a reorder script. The purpose of this is to allow you to learn all of your radicals and kanji as soon as you level up, rather than needing to wait until you’ve finished the vocab lessons from the previous level. I have done a few levels in 7-8 days using reorder scripts, but as others have mentioned, you will have many reviews to do a day if you do this long term, and you will need to set more time aside on days you level up in order to complete your radical and kanji lessons as soon as possible.
If you’re still confused, I would recommend this guide to get a better understanding of how the Wanikani SRS system actually works. After that, it will start to make more sense. It’s a bit of a long read, but it’s well worth your time if you plan on doing Wanikani for a long time
Try to finish the Reviews every day. Split into 2 sessions, if required.
Don’t try to do all Lessons at once. In particular, not all Kanji at once, but spread over several days. This is to reduce lesson count at a time, and eventual review workload.
Have you seen the Ultimate Guide? ^above.
IMO, finishing the reviews is the most important part of not delaying level up. Doing lessons is more about whether you can bear it or not.
Reordering the reviews may help with reducing the workload forecast; or prioritizing level up. That is, lower SRS first or higher SRS first. Personally I recommend higher SRS first, because it will make things easier for the future. (More tiring for now, though.)
Native WaniKani settings has reordering by lower levels first, not really the same as higher SRS first (with a script). But it might already serve the same function.
I agree with everything except vocab lessons. I can choose not to neglect.
Even so, not everything is about memorization. If immersion and recalling naturally doesn’t catch up… It might not serve the purpose of learning Kanji and vocabularies.
When I was doing WK at peak speed I’d do reviews and or lessons 2-3 times a day s as soon as they become available. It was necessary to optimise my life schedule around WK. All in all it took 1.5-2 hours every single day for 1.5 years straight.
It’s a big commitment and few people can change their life to accommodate it.
But if you don’t optimise the schedule one level is doable in about 14 days.
As someone who is going full speed with one level per week, I highly recommend that you do not do this unless you have a lot of time. I just recently started enlightening items and already have 130+ reviews every day.
About the how in your question, @Akashelia alrealdy answered that. My own schedule happens to be exactly the one (s)he put in the example
If I unlock a new level, which usually happens on Saturdays at 5 or 6pm, I do my radical lessons instantly, then I have my first reviews at 9 or 10 pm, then my third reviews at 6 or 7am the next day (Sunday), then 6 or 7am the next day (Monday) again and finally, I guru the radicals from the level two days later (Wednesday), at 6 or 7am. Then I instantly do my kanji lessons and have my first reviews on the same day at 10 or 11am, the next reviews later then, at 6 or 7pm. The next day (Thursday), I have the next reviews at 5 or 6pm, and then, finally, two days later (Friday), I guru the kanji for the level at 5 and 6pm and level up.
My experience with this so far: While this might not sound too hard, it is, and it is a lot of work if you do it properly (which means not skipping any vocab lessons). In the beginning, it might seem easy, but the workload will increase extremly fast. As I already mentioned, I have 130+ reviews every day, and I haven’t even started burning items yet.
I also use the lesson picker to be able to do my radical and kanji lessons first. Also, while I generally try to avoid using it for this purpose, I also have the Reorder Omega script (which is a userscript) installed, in case the reviews that are important for leveling up end up together with 100 or more reviews of other items. So far, I had to use it only once, but if you’re serious about going at that speed consistently, it’s a good thing to have.
Another thing you have to be aware of is that you have to be able to guru enough kanji to be able to level up. To level up, you have to guru 90% of the kanji on one level. This means if you fail to many kanji, you won’t be able to level up in 7 days.
Again, I highly recommend that you think twice before going full speed. It will require a lot of time, and the workload will be insanely big. And don’t forget, you have to be able to endure this for an entire year.
And even if you have the time needed in able to conquer this, don’t forget that kanji isn’t the only thing you should care about. Don’t forget, you need grammar to use the language, practice reading and also listening, although the latter two depend on what you want to do with the language (to be honest, though, reading never hurts).
I also recommend the ultimate guide for WK, which @langties also recommended as well. I personally have never read it, but a lot of people recommend it, so I assume it’s worth reading through it.
Anyway, regardless of how you choose to encounter WaniKani, I wish you the best for your learning journey!
Sorry, but I heavily have to disagree on this one with you. While it is true that you have hundreds of reviews every day (especially when you start burning items), I don’t neglect any of my vocab lessons, nor do I have a lot of leeches, nor do I have a destroyed sleep schedule. You only have a destroyed sleep schedule if you go for the true maximum speed, which is 6d 20h. On the other hand, 7d 0h is the fastest speed you can go at without destroying your sleep schedule.
I was able to average between 8-9 days per level whole working a little short of full time (about 35 hours/week) and maintaining active hobbies and a social life, reaching level 60 in a year and a half. It’s definitely possible to do it faster than I did, but I think my experience shows that with a reasonable schedule (plenty of people here with a lot more free time than me, and some a lot busier than me as well), it can be done without becoming too overwhelming.
My strategy was just to do all my lessons and all my reviews in the early morning, hit 0/0, go to work, then try to hit 0/0 again on the commute home. Again, not the most efficient way, but it got the job done. At peak, I think was averaging a little over 500 reviews a day, so I woke up an hour or so earlier for that stretch. I think that lasted a couple months or so tops. A few times I missed a morning if I was busy or hungover or otherwise not in Wanikani shape, and that just meant doing 1,000+ reviews the next day. Not pleasant, but not impossible, and I was careful to never miss two days in a row because that would’ve been actually difficult to recover from.
Basically, just staying as consistent as possible makes pretty smooth sailing of the whole thing. It’s a large quantity of work, but not hard work, especially compared to other parts of studying. That means it’s just a matter of finding the hours you need and sticking to the routine. And then you’re basically literate after a year or two!
Just to say this is also the case for me. I work full time and am attending Japanese night classes with homework etc… I don’t mind if I go slow. What I find is that I’m very excited when I encounter a word from wanikani in my Japanese class or elsewhere, then suddenly I can understand it!
But seriously it involved doing reviews as soon as they became available always unless I was asleep or in the middle of something that was somehow more important.
In other words, take it at the pace that you can reasonably achieve, keeping in mind your own obligations. Not everyone has the time or capability to be able to reasonably memorise 100+ words and kanji every week for a year, and that’s okay!
What you should do is make sure that WK is working for you (as long as you work with it), and judging by your accuracy, you’re doing quite well (90% is quite good). Taking it slow also makes sure you won’t get burned out quickly (I did near the end but pushed through).
Essentially, no. You are not doing anything wrong.
Mmm, my guess is that if the OP was going to change one thing, it would be to switch to two review sessions a day, morning and evening, rather than just one. Then adjust how many lessons they do to make that review workload manageable, and then see what their pace looks like after that. I suspect the early apprentice levels being hours not days in the WK system rather penalises a one-review-session-a-day schedule.
If you were to do every lesson and review, as soon as they became available (all reviews followed by all lessons, every hour) and without missing anything, for a year:
I haven’t ran the simulation, but I would imagine it would be very close to the same ~365ish days to level 60 as doing them every hour if you split it up into three sessions as follows:
Morning: Do all available reviews and lessons
Late Morning / Afternoon (specifically 4 hours after you did the morning lessons): Do all available reviews
Evening (specifically 8 hours after you did the late morning / afternoon lessons): Do all available reviews
In other words, do all of your lessons in the first morning session and then reviews in the other two, spaced out so that it hits the apprentice level timings. After that, all of the reviews will continue to become due at those same three intervals since they move to 24 hour intervals (well technically minus an hour, but that only helps).
Yes, that’d work. The key thing is that you’re covering all the review timings. It should be the same thing as the every-hour plot, actually; the other hours don’t matter because you’re not getting any new reviews anyway.
Edit: It won’t be exactly the same if you’re only doing lessons once a day because your unlocks will happen in the afternoon. It will be very similar, though.
You can see the difference pretty distinctly, actually. It adds a bit of time (a day for long levels, twelve hours for short levels) because you will unlock new things in the afternoon and leave them sitting overnight before you do lessons again. It’s still much faster than doing things once per day, though.
Not too much difference then, but definitely a little more than I would’ve guessed. It makes sense though after seeing that and thinking on it a bit since there are 4 apprentice levels and 4%3 != 0 which leads to some of them being unlocked in the afternoon as you mentioned.
I’m curious how the twice a day schedule fares – it’s not as optimally tuned to the WK intervals as three-times-a-day, but my prediction is it should still be clearly better than the daily schedule.
