When you level up in WaniKani, you unlock all the new radicals and about half of the kanji for that level, along with approximately 40-50 vocabulary words tied to previously learned kanji. At the same time, you’re also managing the vocabulary related to the last few kanji from the previous level as they reach Guru status.
There are several strategies for navigating a new level. I’ve noticed speed runners often prioritize radicals to unlock all the kanji for the new level as quickly as possible.
Lately, I’ve been tackling both the previous and new level’s vocabulary before diving into the kanji. I’m starting to question this approach, though, as by the end of a level, the only new items I have left to learn are the vocabulary for kanji that I’ve just gotten to Guru in the current level - that means I have this period of a few days where there is 2-3 things to learn at most.
I’m curious about your strategies—how do you approach the beginning of a new level?
For me I just do the new radicals and kanji first and then the vocabs.
But I usually clear the lesson piles in one day or two after I leveled up.
Note: I am kind of going for fast approach and I have a lot of time to review.
I do the opposite of @Remun
I clear all vocabulary (6 lessons a day at my level because it’s a lot of unknown words, but before level 40 it was 12 lessons a day) and also the radicals, then I finish with the kanji. That leads to level up after I have reached 0 lessons available.
So as you can see already there are many ways to do it I’m carefully not to have a big review pile because I want time for other things, but when I was level 12 like you are I didn’t mind doing a lot of reviews, so it all depends on how you want to spend your time.
I tried different approaches until I landed on this one:
learn all the new radicals ASAP
continue clearing previous level for 2-3 days
learn new kanji day before the second half unlocks, continue with vocabulary if needed more lessons
learn the new kanji as they unlock after radicals
keep doing vocabulary, adjust number of lessons to always reach new level with 30-50 words
When new level unlocks, that usually raises number of lessons in last level, but that is OK as you still need few days to unlock the new level stuff. I also stopped stressing about making mistakes with kanji. I did that for early levels and now when they came back, I messed up half of them in reviews. This also means I level up in 9-10 days instead of ideal 7, but that is OK, more time for vocabulary.
Don’t push yourself to the point you have no more lessons, it is important to keep steady pace, rather than going fast. It’s like overtaking on the road. No matter how many cars you overtake in a risky manner, you arrive at the destination only few minutes earlier at most. It is not worth it. Pick your pace and go with it, it is more important than clearing levels fast.
What I do is grab a single radical and/or a single kanji and then the rest of my lessons as vocab. But I’m going really slowly and if you want to go faster you’ll want to learn more than one kanji at a time.
I do all radicals first, the kanji 10/day-ish and then vocab up until my total lessons for that day are 20. If the workload is high, perhaps because of the amount of items still in progress from the previous level, then I may skip a day’s lessons
Personally I finish off all the old vocabs I’ve missed first, then radicals.
After those are done, I go for 5 kanji and 10 vocab a day since the vocab will always be more than the kanji.
However, I make sure to NEVER do more lessons if my “apprentice” level stuff is above 200, (currently somewhat lowering that to 100) this is to make sure that I’m not bombarded with stuff each day. Cause not sure about u, but I tend to sometimes forget old stuff and lower them down, and then I have this as a failsafe to make sure that it never gets too much for me.
Main idea is still to learn, so just take it in an approach u feel comfortable with. Don’t focus on speedrunning. If u don’t remember what u learn, what’s the point in learning it fast? xD
The first day after levelling up, I pick a mix of new radicals and kanji, then just let wanikani give me whatever 15 lessons a day it wants.
If the number of apprentice items is really low, sometimes I do an extra 5 items.
This usually is enough to reach 0 lessons right as I finish a level so I’m ready for the lessons of the next level, and I never let my apprentice items go over 100, and I manage a level up every 10-11 days pretty consistently which is fine for me.
My aim in the first 3-4 days is to do all the radicals, finish off the last bit of vocab from the previous level, complete all the vocab that unlocks at the start of the level and get a start on the kanji.
I find if I can zero out the first three before the first kanji from the level starts to guru then it allows me to keep up with the vocab unlocks and keep to my 12.5 days level up schedule.
I only started WaniKani a couple of months ago and am only level 6 but i rush the radicals and kanji as soon as possible. Then i usually learn the vocab while waiting for radical and kanji reviews.
I remember reading in a study once that people can best memorize up to 7-8 pieces of information, so i usually group the vocab into 2-3 times 8 and so far i haven’t been getting reviews wrong.
I do also sometimes give myself days where i don’t practice or study japanese at all and it sometimes feels like it helps me remember the words, kanji and radicals ive learned better when doing reviews and sometimes it just makes me feel like i forgot everything, probably because of the way SRS learning works…
I’m not sure if what i wrote was useful at all or if i just rambled but i hope it helps
I’ve been doing a 10 days per level schedule:
Day 1: All the level’s radicals
Days 2 & 3: 1/4 of the level’s kanji each day
Day 4: 1/5 of the level’s vocab, usually part or all of what was unlocked at level start
Days 5 & 6: 1/4 of the level’s kanji each day
Days 7 - 10: 1/5 of the level’s vocab each day (if possible)
If I make any mistakes on kanji, so that vocab lessons aren’t unlocked in time for days 7-10, I’ll split the extra vocab into small chunks of 3-5 and include them on kanji or radical days.
This schedule means that usually I’m only doing about 6-10 lessons on radical and kanji days, but a LOT of lessons on vocab days, often upwards of 25 - 30, which I think only works because I’m on my 3rd attempt at Wanikani - I’ve reached the mid-30s levels twice before drifting away into a long break and then resetting. So far, most of the lessons I’m doing are still review from my previous attempts, so I have a 97-98% accuracy.
I expect I’ll need to update my schedule once I hit fully new material and start getting more things wrong, adding additional vocab days as needed. As other people have said, the important thing is making sure I remember the material, rather than going fast, so if I end up needing to slow down in order to maintain accuracy, that’s what I’ll do.
I’ve been on a 7-10 day/level pace until now, and I ran into exactly the problem you mentioned early on (days without anything new to learn). To compensate for that I settled into a basic pattern on leveling up. It has to be said that I have several hours every day to dedicate to maintaining that pace YMMV.
On new level:
All new radicals - these tend to be the easiest thing to learn as it’s only an English association
~5 new kanji - so they’re associated vocab will unlock to help fill that empty time period. I will preferentially pick anything that I’ve already seen somewhere else (including previous radicals), this reduces the number of new things I’m trying to learn at once.
5+ vocab - using the vocab list for the levels I’ll look specifically for any vocab that seems ‘easy’. That is - I know the reading already and the meaning is fairly obvious. These add minimal cognitive load because I’m not really learning anything new. (example: all of the days of the week)
The next day I’ll add ~5 more kanji and
10-20 easy’ish kanji where the added complexity is minor. The meaning requires a little thought, or there’s a rendaku, or I need to remember which of a couple different readings might be relevant.
Repeat each day adding more ‘difficult’ vocab
Add all new kanji once the radicals guru - although at a slower pace I would continue to add these at 5-10 per day instead.
Disclaimer: At my pace this has led to a backlog of vocab from previous levels. So I think would work a lot better at a 10-12 day pace. (I have 81 available lessons and 3 days to level)
I started going over the list of new radicals and new kanji before I make any choices with the lesson picker to see which will be a no brainer and which will need more effort (new mnemonic extra learning and such), I try not to do more than 15 lessons a day, so I start with a mix of 5 previous level vocabs, 2-5 radicals, kanji that I already know 2-5
and if I still can ‘cause I haven’t reached 15 items, I add vocabs from the new level.
When I’m done with the radicals (I sometimes postpone finishing them on purpose so the new kanji won’t open and it keeps the amount of the overall new lessons low) it’s usually 5 previous level vocabs, 5 new level kanji, 5 new level vocabs.
Rule of thumb? New vocabulary is easier than new radical/kanji so new radical/kanji shouldn’t surpass 7 items.
Trying not to go beyond 70 in the apprentice preferably 50 and never go beyond 90.
It takes about 2 weeks per level this way, and leaves enough space for grammar, reading, gaming, watching, listening etc.
There are cases when I splurge and go up to 20 new lessons, but only if it’s items I already know so it won’t be an issue when they come back and increase the review load.
I have no problem with no lessons days either because I finished all the lessons and there are only reviews to do, it will overflow the apprentice level or I have other fish to fry so it’s a no new lessons day. As long as I am keeping up with my reviews I’m fine.
I don’t like focusing only on the previous level vocabs first since regardless of the level new words corresponds to the srs level of the newest kanji that made them available and waiting too much separate them for too long.
I use Today’s Lessons exclusively, set on the default 15/day. It takes care of all that for you, no need to get clever with ordering vocab, radicals, etc. Last 6 levels (since I started doing it like this): 10 days, 10, 10, 11, 10, 9.
I don’t know how many days you get if you change it from 15 to 20 or anything, I’m happy here. By the math, you’d think you have to end up at about 7.5 days/level, but that assumes it can make sure there are no “waiting” days, and I just don’t know because i haven’t tried it.
Notice that there are about 150 items in a level. You don’t have to do them all to get to the next level, but to not fall more and more behind over time, you DO need to average about 150 items from level to level. It doesn’t really matter what order you do them in. (Not coincidentally, ~150 items at 15/day is about 10 days.)
As a bonus, “Today’s Lessons” gives you a nice mix of vocabulary, new kanji, and a radical or two spread out over the days to keep every day interesting and avoid “vocab hell” when you’ve run out of kanji to learn.
Same, but it doesn’t change my lessons strategy any. I start skimming the pages a day or two before I level up, not trying to learn them yet, but only because when I see the lesson “for real” it isn’t the first time I’ve ever seen it.
There’s an extra layer to the choice I make, beyond managing my own energy level and whatnot, and it has to do with the way the lesson picker was designed -
at first glance it looks like these massive blocks of items, not something that makes you wanna read, but then I realized that when I go over the lists and come back to the lesson picker it becomes a game within a game of finding certain items in a pile of random items, and it also makes me read which strengthen my engagement with the material when doing new lessons, so it’s a win win on my side.
I do however appreciate the option to just let the app do its thing when choosing to simply go to lessons, and it is useful when I have only vocabs so I use it from time to time. Under different circumstances I would have probably do what you’re doing, but I am who I am so I’m grateful there are several ways to manage how to do the lessons so I can adjust it to my personal needs.
I would figure out where I wanted to be. So say I want to be half way done the vocab of the current level when I leveled up, I wanted to do 15 lessons a day. I have 84 old vocab from last level, 36 radicals and kanji from this level and half of this levels vocab is 90.
Add it all up. 84+36+90=210
Then I would divide that by 15, my daily goal. So it will take 14 days to learn all of those lessons, but level up is based on guru so it will take me four days after learning the last kanji to level up. So that means I what to learn all the kanji in 14 minus 4 days or 10. 36/10=3.6 a day or 4 for 6 days, and 3 for the last 4 days.
So I for the first 6 days I will learn 4 kanji and 11 vocab day, then for four days I will learn 3 kanji and 12 vocab, and then until I level up I will level 15 kanji.
This means that I am always learning kanji and vocab at a steady pace.
I also put too much time into planning these things.
I do all the vocab of the previous level before tackling the radicals of the new level. By the time I’m done with that, I’m also done with the remaining kanji of the old levels and I focus on the new level. When I am at the kanji-lesson stage of the new level, but I don’t have much time for the day, I sometimes just do vocab lessons of the new level instead since they tend to be faster for me.
I do all radicals lessons right off the bat, along with lessons for a third of the new kanji each day after I unlock a new level. So in theory, 4 days after I unlock a new level, I have all new radicals and all new kanji in my review queue (including potentially any new kanji unlocked if I Guru’d a radical within that time?)
I only move on to vocab once all the available kanji are in my review queue priorising older level vocabs if any, OR to pad out a few extra daily lessons: I always do 10 lessons a day if I have enough items available, so for example if a third of the kanji for this level is 8 lessons, I’ll add 2 vocab items.
I’m carefully not to have a big review pile because I want time for other things, but when I was level 12 like you are I didn’t mind doing a lot of reviews, so it all depends on how you want to spend your time.
