I feel like this is a dumb question since I’ve seen people post that they’ve completed WK in just over a year (and it’s advertised as such by the app) but based on my current experience (lv11) I can’t see how it is possible.
There are 9226 items total in WK, and as far as I know there is a hard limit of 15 new items per day. With basic maths, 9226/365 = 615 days (close to 2 years).
Can somebody explain? This has been bothering me for a while…
Thanks
There is no hard limit to how many new items you can add (outside of what level your on).
How do I add more? After 15 items, I don’t get anymore appear until the next day
I deactivated vacation mode to check, I guess a lot has changed in 2 years. I’ll leave it to someone else to answer then.
In the WaniKani settings, you can increase the daily limit to 100 lessons.
(But yeah, the lesson limit is a comparatively recent… innovation.)
For the love of god, do NOT do 100 a day though.
The only things that you “need” to do to constitute leveling up is guru-ing the Radical and Kanji requirements- so theoretically you “could” do it in about a year but only if you allow a superhuman level of dedication to the site and effectively never make errors.
If you did every Radical/Kanji lesson the second they were available and reviewed the second items were available (practically every hour of the day at that point), never getting things wrong, I believe you could knock out a level in less than a week with how the spaced repetition works. 60 levels, 52 weeks a year, that math checks out.
If you did that method alongside all the attached vocab, you’d be looking at review pileups in the multiple hundreds- if not thousands- on the regular.
In my humble opinion the “WK in a year” advertising is a little idealistic to the point of being misleading- but it is technically possible. If it were me advertising this to someone, though, I think a year and a half minimum is what should be expected even to those dedicated to it all.
If you’re wanting to add more lessons on a day-to-day basis, the other users in the thread have your answer- change settings or click the advanced button to tailor as many lessons as you’d like. Just keep in mind that the more lessons = more reviews so it can become unmanageable if you bite off too much at once. The reason it defaults around 15 is just to make sure the average user doesn’t get too swamped with reviews as that can be demoralizing and overwhelming. Even on especially productive days I cap out at around 25 personally since those review waves get intense.
No matter how long it takes, I hope your journey to level 60 is fun and enriching just as it has been to me thus far. Keep it up!
Thanks so much! This was very helpful
if you really want to go at that pace (and i highly suggest going at a comfortable pace, especially if it is the first time going through this material) then as soon as new radicals are available, do those (use the advanced button mentioned earlier) and the kanji that are also in that first round of a new level. then when the radicals become guru 1; you will unlock the other remaining kanji. if you get these; it will average somewhere around 7-8 days per leveling up if you don’t fail too much and you do the reviews really close to when they become available. personally I also do vocab between the radicals and kanji (usually around when I get them that the next review will be 24 hours later, so as to space things out).
it’s not necessarily great for retention on the first go through wanikani. you are better served to find the right pacing to keep you going and not burning out.
I know if I wanted to, I could easily complete all of WK in about a year. I mean, it would involve heavy use of the re-do scripts and I wouldn’t know many of the vocab and kanji, and it’d probably also affect my ability to do other things to learn the language.
I think for the vast majority of us, we came here because we have a goal to learn Japanese in some way - for some it’s total fluency, some just want to read manga or play games, some may want to be able to watch anime without subtitles, etc. WaniKani is one tool to help accomplish these goals, but unless someone’s goal is to release a YouTube video in a year saying that they did WK in a year and should subscribe to their channel, I’m not sure it’s a relevant measurement.
The first 5 months of WK I had no scripts or redo tricks (refreshing) - just using the advanced settings in WK itself. And I was clearing levels in 8-9 days, without my retention being affected. But I also had previous experience, which means some of them were easier for me than a truly new person. And eventually I did take longer, not because of retention issues, but because of burnout and real life exhaustion. 150-200 review days are fairly common, and that’s fine for me.
I’m no longer on track to complete in a year, because I had a big burnout for 6 weeks where I did almost nothing, but I could have. 1.5 year is still doable, and much more reasonable.
So I think it’s fair to say it’s possible, and maybe even possible without hurting retention (mine is fine), but it would be much easier for someone who is adding extra practice from other sources. Ultimately there are a lot of factors and you shouldn’t compare yourself to someone else’s speed. Use the advanced settings and go as fast/slow as you want as long as you honestly feel it suits you and your goals.
Today’s Lessons & Lesson Picker has been made just Feb last year.
And so, the advertisement on the homepage is outdated. Nonetheless, you might not be able to see the message if you always logged in.
Click “Learn more”, it is now slightly longer?
It has been suggested by some users here, that 15 items a day prevents build up of hundred review days. So, the feature here is to prevent burn out.
But imo, WK should really update the ads messages.
Yes the feature helps to prevent burn out, but… at 15 lessons a day, you can still expect the requirement to build up to over 150 reviews a day, and if you are inaccurate, to maybe 200. If you are doing two review sessions a day, one of them will probably go over 100.
You get nine reviews per lesson if you are perfect (including the post-lesson review). With 90% accuracy you can add two extra reviews per lesson on average for knock backs. So multiply 15 lessons by 11 and someone who is that accurate can expect to increase to 165 reviews a day after 5 or 6 months.
Well… I’m not sure what you mean by “completed”.
To reach Lvl60 in less than 1 year is realistically possible, using certain techniques (some people consider them as cheats, but that’s another discussion).
https://community.wanikani.com/t/vanilla-wk-in-354-days-and-a-short-guide
On the other side, if by “completed” you mean to burn every kanji and vocab out there… I’ll tell you my friend, that is nonsense 
It is a normal thing for everyone to forget some reading or meaning sometimes so, you would probably need between 6 to 12 additional months to complete WK.
https://community.wanikani.com/t/scaling-the-1569-review-mountain-epilogue-four-months-later
Finally, let me say that WK is certainly not the end for your Japanese study. This is just a tool to read Kanji. You will need to enroll in other activities to be able to communicate in an effective way (grammar study, reading, listening, pronounciation practice, etc.)
See you around 
Also, it takes over 5.5 months to burn anything just due to the SRS intervals, even if you do every review as soon as it becomes available and get every single review correct (which is obviously not remotely realistic). Therefore, if you want to burn everything on WK, the theoretical minimum possible is about a year and a half.
And yes, WK is definitely not the end. You may find my Japanese study log of interest, as someone who speedran WK in my first year of Japanese, but am still studying over five years later, and in fact even reset and went through WK a second time.
I’m two years and nearly 200,000 reviews in, still haven’t reached the halfway point.
My friend did all 60 levels in 19 months.
It really depends on the person I think.
It took me 5 years to reach level 60, but I’ve never thought I was all that good at memorization. I have no regrets though! My goal is good enough retention to be able to read and I just had to go at a slower pace to achieve that. And now I watch anime with the Japanese closed captions on! lol
I even slowed my lesson pace down to 9 items a day and frequently skipped days if I was feeling overwhelmed with reviews.
I would have given up from burnout if I was overwhelmed with reviews all the time. You just gotta do what works for you!
You got to 60 and you post it here? You need to sort out a proper announcement so we can all cheer and revere. Until then… 
You got me! lol I’ll fix that in a bit
