How Many Lessons Per Day

How many lessons do you guys do per day? For the longest time I’ve only been doing 5, maybe 10 per day, but I recently heard of some people doing crazy amounts per day, like 20 or even more per day!!! Won’t doing that many per day hurt your retention? Or is it good because even if you forget a lot, the overall amount you remember might be higher?? Someone explain for me?

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I’ll take on maybe 10 radicals/kanji a week on average, if I had to guess. I just take a batch of 5 when I feel comfortable. Vocab I try to take as I get them.

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I just do enough to be usually hover around 100-115ish apprentice items. That can often mean more than 20 items in a day. I usually do batches of 15 to 20.

Not really that I’ve personally noticed. Might have a slight dip in accuracy if I do lessons too fast, but it’s usually just a few repetitions to start solidifying.

It’s neither good nor bad I think. Even if you forget something, it will simply come back sooner so you more opportunity to get it correct.

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Once you get the hang of it, you’ll notice that some of the words, particularly the vocab, seems like you already know them, particularly if they incorporate both the meaning and reading you learned with the kanji.

You’ll also notice it gets easier to recognize some kanjis.

That said, everyone’s brain works differently.

However, try to challenge yourself a little, and answer your own question. If you bite off more than you can chew for a few days, it won’t hurt you in the long run. You’ll just have a few extra reviews as you keep getting the one’s you missed back in your review queue. But you might surprise yourself. :slight_smile:

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This is something I’ve been wondering for ages! I do ten a day each morning however cause I’m a low level I don’t have that much back up so I don’t need to study all that much still. Also it takes ages to push through all the vocab. I sometimes have like 130 odd lessons waiting sometimes so levels take a long time.

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全部
全速力で行く!

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Your a mad man, I love it!

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Some people charge through the material, some take it even slower than just 5 a day.

I used to do them at about 5 or 10 a day like you do, but have personally found doing a lot of lessons on the weekends then focusing only on reviews throughout the week works really well for me. I typically do all the kanji for a single level in one sitting on a Saturday or Sunday, then spend the week studying them. I then split all the accompanying vocab over the next 2 or 3 weeks, again learning them in large batches on the weekend, and then each week just focusing on reviewing those.

At the end of the day you just have to do what you feel comfortable with. If you’re happy with how fast you’re moving, no real need to change. If you wanna push yourself, give it a shot, maybe you’ll remember more than you thought you would have. Or if you ever feel a bit overwhelmed, don’t feel bad about slowing down, taking a break, or even going back a level or two. I recently just reset from level 19 to 13 because I realized I was going too fast for a couple months and I was feeling overwhelmed by the reviews. It’s helped a ton, personally.

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I honestly try to do as many as possible. I always do all of my radicals and kanji at once as soon as they become available, but I usually only do 15-25 vocab a day because I slowly read through all the example sentences, and that takes a long time. If it feel like it and have the time, I try to do even more vocab if possible, though.

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It kind of depends on the day for me. I’ll do anywhere between 0 and 50 lessons a day. Once I start having trouble answering the quiz I normally stop, however, I generally get back into a lesson after a few hours of letting my brain rest.

My accuracy isn’t great, at all, but I find it makes it more fun and interesting for me. Plus, if you are consistent with reviews you will slowly get the hang of the words within usually a day maybe two.

Keep in mind I have my number of apprenticed between 100 and 250 at a time.

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I used to do 5 in the morning, 5 in the afternoon and 5 in the evening, and I got to a point where I was efficient enough at it that I could do a few levels in 8 or 9 days. I eventually started playing with the rules (like if the first lesson item is a radical I do all the radicals. If it’s a Kanji, I do up to 10 of those, and then if it’s a vocab I do only 5 at a time.)

If you’d like to just level up steadily keep in mind that vocab help reinforce the radicals and kanji you’ve learned but aside from getting through them they don’t block you from leveling up. You could just do all the radicals/kanji in your lessons, and then do the vocabulary steadily, at a slower rate, until the next level becomes unlocked.

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I guess I’m like everyone else. 5 - 10 a day depending on how my reviews have been going. Like when similar vocab comes around, like numbers, I can go through quite a few pretty quickly but right now, I have some for Copy that are tripping me up so I am back to 5 a days.

I tend to do all my radicals in one go immediately when I level up (since those take a couple of days to guru anyway), and then kanji/vocab 10 at a time every time I log into Wanikani to do my reviews. I feel like it keeps my brain going, and it’s very satisfying to see my lesson count being whittled down from like 50+ to 0.

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I think it just depends on problems you get wrong. I sometimes mistype and so I have a two or three kanji that I have to go back to later on quite frequently. The spacing of time till the next set is calculated though, since it’s supposed to help the vocab/kanji be placed into your long term memory. The more you space out the time for the next review, the more so this will be the case. Hope this helps!

I suppose I’m a bit extreme in that I do 30 lessons per day in order to maintain a pace of 8 days per level. I haven’t been doing WaniKani long enough to ascertain whether it’s hurt my retention (my first burns will show up in early November, so I don’t know if my long-term storage is affected), but my review percentages haven’t been impacted by my fast pace thus far.

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One way to figure out how many lessons you do a day is to figure out how many reviews you’re okay having to go through everyday. For a long time I wasn’t sure what to do with the coloured bar that tells you how many items you have at each level (apprentice, guru, master, enlightened, burned), but paying especial attention to your number of apprentice items can be useful. So, figure out what number of apprentice items results in a review number you’re comfortable with (100 seems to be a popular one), then decide whether to do more lessons or not based on how much under or over that ideal number of apprentice items you are.

Looking at the number of reviews for the “next day” can also help you gauge what you should do.

I also asked a similar question when I was in Level 6, so you could check out this thread for the responses people gave me. Just in case it might help:

The number of lessons I do has fluctuated greatly over the course of my time doing WK, from 5 to 21 lessons each morning - finding an amount that is sustainable over the long run, including when things outside WK are less than smooth-running, has been my biggest challange.

I found that there was an imbalance in mental workload between radical & kanji lessons and vocab lessons, so I recently installed this lesson filter script. This allows me to do some radicals &/or kanji, plus a good chunk of vocab each day. I have only filled in the batch and vocab numbers so the rads/kanji filter in according to what is lined up by WK.

Just yesterday I did a bit of number crunching to figure out the best ratio of vocab to rads/kanji and will adjust that every 10 levels as the proportions change considerably between initial and end levels. It’s not elegant, but if you’re interested…

Excel chart of items, levels, ratios

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15 lessons a day for radicals and kanji. 15-20 lessons for vocabulary depending on how difficult/irregular they are. Any more than that and I start getting too sleepy to concentrate. Keep the Apprentices below 100 and try to keep the Gurus around 500 (I’m over 600 right now which bothers me). That pace ends up giving me about 120 reviews a day and level up in less than 10 days. Seems to work for me.

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I usually do them all as they appear. It is pretty hard when 80 new lessons appear from leveling but even then I still do all of them within the day, maybe 40 morning and 40 at night.

Sure the next 1-3 times they come out as reviews I completely forgot most of them but after 2 days I usually remember most of them. (I do my reviews maybe 8 times a day so lol)

I personally prefer it this way because there’s always some kanji you easily remember and some that for some reason won’t stick in your head and that way I can clear all the easy ones and focus on the hard one.

You could always give it a try and see how it goes but personally I have a good memory which help gets through it.

Oh, I also do all my reviews on Kaniwani which helps remember them even more, thought it’s only for vocabulary.

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I did between 20 and 30 a day on average on slow levels and between 40 and 50 a day for fast level. I had a “solid” foundation of Japanese (passed N1 level a year before that), so I knew most of the content up to level 50 anyway.