It depends entirely on your personal background and study schedule (even on your ability to memorize things). There are people who breeze through the first levels because they already knew most of the kanji while there are people who would feel overwhelmed before reaching level 10. Also, there are people who know pretty much nothing when they start but they plan a schedule, implement their own resources and study accordingly… and do pretty good.
So it depends on you to build a nice experience for yourself
But for a succint answer, you’d find some difficulties each time you hit a new layer (master enlightened burn…) and when particularly difficult items come back (it’s not the same lvl 1 kanji than lvl 20 kanji).
I fail to enlighten more items than i’d like to admit. While doing reviews for my current level i’ve got an accuracy ranging from 96 to 100% but when i’ve to enlighten it drops to 80% or even less.
You must practice your knowledge outside here, it is crucial.
And i’m doing fine, i’m able to get the gist of a lot of texts, like for example just the other day a coworker was mocking me when he found a technical paper on geothermal energy in japanese and told me to tell him what i could understand (he did not tell me he had a translated version) to his and my own surprise i was able to understand about 80% of the first page, not because i knew the words but because i knew kanji and i was able to infer the meaning of the word and boy was it beautiful
Haha I thought it was just me, since english isn’t my first language either. Some of the mnemonics down right mislead me a couple of times like that cow would’ve def be remembered as something like こう…
The only word I can think of is Coward but I think having the mnemonic be “The river is made of your tears. Why? Because your a Coward.” might be a bit to aggressive.
Faced the 1st fast level just recently and it really worked me hard lol, after leveling. I think I am now going to properly divide the lessons in days so that I can still finish in 7 days but not do all the lessons at once (as I have been doing till now).
I got impatient once again because I finally wanted to focus on other stuff instead of WaniKani and I thought trying to go as fast as possible so that I could finally get it done would be a good idea. I even knew when I did it that it wasn’t but… well… people are weird.
So I finished 4 levels in 7 or 8 days per level, then I had a very busy work week, then a ton of burned reviews came up, I failed a lot of them and all that together was too much and I started not wanting to do reviews. Now I’ll spend around a month on my current level at least. Going to get my apprentice and guru count down before I take on any new lessons. And I’ll need a bit more time to review grammar before the JLPT anyway.
Going at full speed just isn’t a good fit for me but I bet I’ll try it again eventually just to end up where I am right now. But as long as I don’t quit and finish eventually that’s OK.
Just hit lucky number 13. Have a pile of lessons to move through, some leftover from my slacking a few levels ago, but otherwise things are moving along swimmingly. Using the the reorder script to get my reviews just how I like them has been a godsend in keeping the motivation going though!
I just started a couple of weeks ago and still very much in the beginning phase of learning Japanese in general. I am still lvl 1. I feel like Wanikani is a very good way to start learning Japanese and I am very happy to see such an open and friendly community. Looking forward to spend even more time learning after having finished school.
I got myself carried away with the whole Shia Lebeouf “just do it” attitude until a month ago and it got a bit burned with the pile of reviews that I was having for breakfast everyday (… and then for lunch and dinner ) .
Anyway, saner thoughts prevailed and I realized that I was by no means enjoying learning this way.
Fortunatly enough I’ve mantain myself doing immersion on the side this whole time (reading and watching); this kept the enjoyment in japanese and serve me as a way to keep learning.
Reached level 26 almost 2 weeks ago, I stopped doing any new lesson, both WK and Anki, no new vocab, no new sentence mining. Just reading and taking care of my reviews, which gradually started to shrink.
This week, my daily reviews are all healthy and zeroed, I have time to read and started with my first native book (it’s aimed at kids in their 1st grade, so only mild sense of self accomplishment there) .
This weekend I timidly started to put new words into Anki (coming from my readings) and got myself to do some sentence mining as well. Best of all, I enjoyed it. Did my radicals lessons in WK yesterday, so I will start WK lessons again, but with a slower pace.
I know most new japanese learning tools offer SRS as a great feature, but word of caution on how burdensome can they end up becoming
Well it used to be around 200 - 250 every 24h when I spread out my lessons through out the week. But now that I switched to doing all vocab lessons at once it varies from 80 - 350.
Hoo boy. Well, due to Adulting and some personal issues I’ve been having lately, WK has been on the backburner. I have about 400 reviews and 200 lessons - including the new Level 12 kanji - to get through but have been using vacation mode as and when I can’t make the time for WK to stop the reviews creeping even higher.
Last week I managed to get down to about 200 reviews, but then STUFF happened again and I’m back on vacation mode. Going to turn it off today and start cracking down on them again.
I have to stay, despite having other priorities right now and very little time, I’m so proud that I haven’t just thrown in the towel. I don’t want to give up WK, and I will get to Level 60 or so help me God.
So, in short: I’m trying to get back on track and I’m bloody determined to do so.
At that point, you will have unlocked almost all radicals, with around 2-5 new radicals per level, and most doesnt really matter much, since they are just radical version of kanji you learned before or ultra specific radicals, that only help unlock 1 kanji (see the psychopath radical in the kanji gloom). So already at the start of the level, you will unlock enough kanji to hit the 90%, unlike the ~55% you get around the lower levels. Hope this helps you understand.
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