So I’m currently level 36 after a bit more than a year of using WaniKani. Up until now, I’ve pretty much tried to do my lessons all at once - whenever I learn a new batch of kanji, I wait until I’ve guru’d all of them before starting any more lessons, and then I do all of those lessons at once. This way I typically only have 2 lesson sessions per level, each one having somewhere in the range of 70-90 lessons. I also try to start early enough in the day that I’ll be able to review them all 4 hours later, and then again after another 4 hours, so I can usually be sure I’ll have all the new stuff at apprentice 2 the next day. In hindsight, this seems like a pretty crazy way of doing things, and I kind of can’t believe I’ve been doing it like this for this long.
Obviously this way of doing it is pretty time consuming, particularly on the day I do the lessons, and as I’ve gotten higher up in the levels, it’s begun to feel less and less reasonable to do it this way. Since I’ve started working Monday-Friday recently, I’m also severely limited in when I’m able to do this, essentially only being able to do lessons on the weekend, so if I already have a bunch of reviews slated for Saturday or something, it’s pretty bad.
This has all lead me to feel that I definitely need to stop doing it this way and break my lessons up into much smaller and more manageable chunks so that I can be more flexible in when I’m able to do them and not have WaniKani take up massive amounts of time on my weekends. I wanted to ask how other people go about breaking up their lessons - how many lessons do you typically do per session? How often do you have a lesson session? Is there a particular way you like to split them up? (i.e. doing one session for all the radicals, another session for all the new kanji, and another for vocab? Something similar/different?)
If you’re aiming to level up quickly then it goes something like this. Reorder script helps a lot here.
On level up do all radical lessons.
Do 20 lessons per day until you’ve guru’d all the radicals
Do the lessons for the kanji you’ve just unlocked (at 20 per day you’ve probably already done all the earlier kanji, if not do them now)
Do 20 lessons per day until you level up
repeat
If you’re not worried about leveling up fast then just choose a number of lessons to do per day and stick with that. Around 20 per day puts you near full speed so adjust according to your situation.
Edit: Obviously fit this into your schedule and continue with doing the first review 4 hours after lessons.
There’s roughly 150 items per level. So 20 a day gets you through a level in 7.5 days.
Say you want to go slower and do it in 15 days, you do 10 a day…
Find the pace for you. but daily lessons>big batch imo
i did pretty much what Rihn said for the first 20 or so levels, until it became unsustainable for me
now i’m putting much more diversity into my learning, with grammar, listening, and lots of reading. but only 10 lessons per day, and taking occasional days off. i feel like i’m making more progress by not hyperfocussing on kanji
For the 20 lessons/day thing you can also spread out the kanji to make life easier. Since you’re waiting on getting radicals to guru anyway I found it easier to limit myself to 10 kanji/day for max speed levels and doing an extra 5 lessons in the second half of the level to keep up with vocab for the pace.
Personally, I’ve switched to a roughly 10 day/level schedule that’s around 15 lessons/day and it has let me drop to 5 kanji/day without much trouble so far.
Most of the apps have good lesson filters built in, and it’s much easier to toss in a 10-20 item review over a lunch break when following a daily routine like this. If you’re strictly on PC I’d recommend checking out this script as well.