How fast should I be progressing?

WaniKani
#40

One danger of going too slow is that you start to forget material that was burned. It is good to go at one’s own pace, but going at a pace where it will take 7 years to go through the material is far too long. There has to be a middle ground, and to be successful it will require you to push yourself a bit.

The early level material is more important than the later level material, I think there is some benefit to going through the first 25 levels at a pretty decent pace (no more than 2 weeks/level), then slow it down. I completed 27 levels in my first year, but ultimately took 3.5 years to reach 60. The slow down was partially to keep a reasonable workload, but mostly due to leeches. Be mindful about keeping leeches under control - this crept up on me before I realized what was happening and ultimately I ended up powering my way through only to deal with a huge mess now.

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#41

Basically what Ish3rd said.

I would power through the first 25ish levels. Try to get a new level as fast as possible.
What I used to do was doing all reviews in the morning and before going to bed. If I have time I do some in between but that’s pretty hard with a job.
around level 25 I had a huge workload and leveling slowed down considerably.

I can’t recommend using scripts. But that’s just my own opinion

I recommend starting reading easy Japanese content around level 20 - 25. With my level so in the 30s you can really read a lot of stuff. I HIGHLY recommend you to start conversing with Japanese people around level 30. Trust me you will snowball grammar and vocab so hard. + it is a huge motivation to continue studying and before you know it you are addicted to it xD

My leveling slowed down so much but at this point I really don’t care anymore. I think the next 5 levels bear useful Kanji for me but the rest isn’t as important as normal reading experience.

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#42

True, but that only applies if they are only using WK. Im sure there are some people that take a long while (maybe not 7 years), but are reading and exposing themselves to japanese outside of WK. If they do so enough it will reinforce burned words that they may have forgotten, assuming they come across them.

#43

Speaking of Japanese outside of WaniKani, when should we start exposing ourselves to things (grammar, reading, listening, speaking, etc) outside of WaniKani? How did this affect your WaniKani leveling pace?

I’ve started reading simple articles, listening to grammar podcasts, and doing vocab flashcards on top of WaniKani, but there’s only so much time in a day to learn Japanese.

#44

ASAP. I make sure what I do outside of WK doesn’t affect my pace, but I wish I had started sooner. People recommend starting to read more around level 20, but if your grammar is good enough, there isn’t any reason to not start sooner. Most low level stuff uses far more hiragana, so not knowing kanji wont be as much of an issue.

Sounds perfectly fine to me. Just try to use what japanese you do know and recognize your shortcomings through that. No one is really a perfectly balanced learner, so one of your skills is certain to be bottlenecking your ability. Just focus more on that skill so it doesn’t lag too far behind. For example, for someone of my level, my grammar and knowledge of words that don’t use kanji reallllly hold me back.

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#45

Here’s the tutorial:

I believe there’s been some problems with one of the programs that allows you to use scripts on Firefox. Not sure which one it is, since I use Google Chrome. If someone knows, please let @rumade know (in case they use Firefox).

I suggest you to try and find a 5 minutes interval to do the first reviews on that day’s new items around the middle of the afternoon. I would also highly suggest you not to finish that day’s reviews at 2am. The midnight reviews will last until 12:59am, so try to finish with WK for the day around that time. You might think you aren’t really that tired, but if you try to do the reviews with a more fresh mind, you’ll see a big difference :slight_smile:

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#46

I was already using most of these scripts, but your schedule write up is great, I didn’t think about it! I’ve stayed with 8 items per day and got through all 248 items this month. As of this writing, I’ve got 110 in Apprentice, which is a new record for me…

My previous approach was basically doing a WaniKani review at any point possible, multiple times per day, but because the schedule was flexible, I think I indeed reviewed things often after, as you said it, I’ve already forgotten it. Due to that, I noticed that I got things going back to Apprentice more often, items staying there for longer than before and having plenty of leeches.

So I’ll stay with 8 for next month as is the max comfortable number at the moment and will try to define a proper schedule as you wrote about. Hopefully, that will make me do less mistakes and progress items between levels faster, which should eventually lead me to less items in Apprentence bucket, which in turn will allow me to start doing more items per day.

P.S. wow do you have a lot of Instagram followers :smiley:

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#47

Glad to see things are improving :slight_smile:

To reduce the number of items coming back to apprentice, it is very important to take at least 1 minute in each lesson as to make sure you had a healthy first approach to the item. For 8 items/day it’s 8 minutes. For kanji, if the WK’s mnemonic doesn’t work, don’t fall into the mistake of thinking it’s okay not to have one. Try to create your own story and make it simple (envolve both the radicals and the reading and meaning in it). Example:

https://www.wanikani.com/kanji/乏

乏 (lvl 30) has the radicals leaf and hills. A hill having only 1 leaf is sad, isn’t it? Well, you’ll have to bow (ぼう) to the hill’s God in order for the leafs not being scarce.

Also, if you’re creating your own mnemonics, keeping the the same reading connected to the same idea works best. For example, every kanji with the きょう reading, I connect it with Kyoto. (きょうと) :slight_smile:

Let me know if I can help in any other way.

EDIT:

Well, I’ll try to start posting more frequently this next month :slight_smile: Let’s see if both of us can achieve our goals :stuck_out_tongue:

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#48

I’ve tried using the script which loads user-defined mnemonics as when I used Kanji Kohii before I discovered WaniKani, they had fantastic stories. I find WaniKani ones are not that great most of the time, so I do come up with my own stories. My problem is usually now having so many 1) Similarly looking Kanji 2) Having like 3-4 readings for a kanji… Knowing the story, I still think “is that the one”. But yeah, I need to improve on that front

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#49

What your suggestion would be to establish constant schedule when I already have a messed up one? I’ve got 100+ items across different apprentice levels. So my reviews happen multiple times throughout the day, obviously with no clean 4-8-etc hour intervals? Should I just ignore current items and establish new ones using a new schedule? Or go through things I currently have to clear apprentice bucket, before starting new items and making consistent schedule work?

#50

Reviews sort themselves naturally by the times you do them on - you can just artificially create those intervals, and within a few days you’ll end up with your reviews coming in at regular times.

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#51

It seems that this site largely teaches you to distinguish kanji from other kanji.

So it seems like it might more effective if you move quicker, and have less items in burned… otherwise you have fewer kanji to get the ones you’re learning mixed up with, so there’s less learning going on no?

I know it’s very easy for me to fall into habit of identifying a kanji at a fast glance, and then when I unlock a kanji that is similar structure, I have to spend time to learn to the differences. Seems like if you burn one first, you miss out on some of that learning.

Plus It seems like if you burn one first, there’s high chance of simply unlearning the burned one in favor of the newly learned one.

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#52

Don’t know if someone has already say it, but for me a very important thing in WK is to fail in your reviews, your brain needs those mistakes to remember some of the kanji or vocab, etc. There are some kanji from level 3 or 4 I will never forget because I always failed and that made a big footprint in my memory

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#53

This will always happen to everyone simply because no one gets 100% correct every time. Getting it wrong 1 time will change that item’s schedule to different one. That’s okay.

Now, with time this won’t be a problem. Why? Because your most recent learned items will almost always follow your schedule when they’re in Apprentice (if you get them right). Timing is important in these cases because doing a 8h review 4h after it gets available (12h total) means an increase of 50% . This of course, might hurt your ability to memorize it since the interval is significantly bigger percentage wise. With items in Guru or above however, this is almost pointless. Doing a Guru 1 review 4h after it gets available is a mere 2,3% increase. If we talk about a Enlightenment item, it gets funny: doing it 4h after it gets available is a lovely 0,13% increase :smiley:

Here’s my example:

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Check the white arrows below the bars. The bars that have a white arrow mean that I have items from my current level in there. See how everything perfectly fits before I go to bed. The 5pm review is a 1st review session. I’ll do that session at 5pm and then I’ll do it again at 1am, right before I go to bed. Tomorrow, they’ll be available at midnight, which means that it’s early enough to me that I won’t be stuck to the computer waiting for them.

The other reviews spread during the day are mostly Guru/Master and I’ve got some items to burn at 8pm. It doesn’t really matter if I’m there to do them or not. However, if I find myself in a situation like “I have 5 mins to spare”, I’ll open WK and do what’s available.

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#54

That’s interesting, its the other way around for me, things that I fail continuously and become leeches are usually due to the bad mnemonic, me not really thinking it through and finding a hook that will help to remember it, etc. No matter how many times I fail, unless I fix the underlying issue, it’ll keep on happening. So while I allow myself to fail at the start due to it being a new item (even if its especially frustrating), I try to quickly recognise when its not due novelity, but some problem.

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#55

I see, this makes sense. I’ll just go ahead with the schedule then :+1:

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#56

Well I am pretty much switched to good 8 (sometimes 16) new items per day and I feel comfy with that. SRS indeed adjusted pretty well and I am surprised I don’t have to review every 20 min or something. But I still don’t understand how people level up every 10 days?! By the looks of it, for me its going to be ~20 days per level. Which is 2x faster than my old average. I might be able to get it down to 15 days per level, but that’s really pushing it

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#57

You said it yourself:

I’m averaging 12-14 days per level without reorder, and I feel like I might have to slow down a bit when my burn reviews start showing up on Thursday. But hey, everybody has their own learning speed and WK isn’t a race, so here you go.

The important thing is you found your cruising speed, and that’s great! :smiley:

#58

If you do 10 items/day, you’ll take around 15 days for each level :slight_smile: Are you doing all the lessons at once? Not sure if I told you this before, but I would suggest this:

  • Half the lessons done during the mornings.
  • Half the lessons 4h before your last review of the day.

If you do it like this, you’ll do 5 items at once. I’m sure it will allow you to push through and reach the 10 new items/day.

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#59

But the number of items learned per day doesn’t equal faster level up rate. What matters is having a high rate of good reviews.

I can learn 30 items per day, but if I don’t review them well it doesn’t matter. And from what I’ve seen, more items I learn in a day, harder it is to review. Remembering 10 new kanji at once or 5 is a big difference.