Hi! I’m new here.
I’ve read a lot of posts about making sure you don’t have too many reviews, so I’ve been taking my lessons slowly and doing around 10 a day, but I’m not sure if this is too slow or not?
What do you guys do when you have a bunch of lessons to go through, and what’s recommended? I’m scared about just finishing all the lessons and then being overwhelmed and not being able to remember ANYTHING.
Thanks!! ありがとうございます！！
Do as many as you feel comfortable doing.
If 10 doesn’t feel like enough, after you get them all right (or most, even) on your 4 hour review, go ahead and do a few more. If those are all good on that 4 hour review, go ahead again.
Just remember that it’s harder to remember them if you miss the first couple of reviews (4 and 8 hours later), so try to make sure you only do lessons when you know (or are at least reasonably sure) that you can hit both of those time points for each and every session of lessons you do.
Also, you’re at level 2, so now is a good time to test what your limits are before you start getting old items coming back at the Master, Enlightened, and Burn levels. If you can figure out your comfortable workload by level 4 or 5, you’ll be doing yourself a favour in the long run. Also, you can always adjust it later too, although that adjustment will not take immediate effect.
頑張って!
Thank you!! I’ll test out the waters and go until it seems like it’s outside my comfort zone.
There are two methods to learn or teach, you can slowly pile things on hoping it never falls or just fling shit at the wall until it all sticks. You can choose which one is comfortable but I find the less comfortable I am with the new lessons the more I try to make myself get it, and getting it wrong in a review is more compelling than self study in the lessons. Do whatever.
My recommendation is to do as many as you can while still keeping up with your reviews (and making sure not to burn yourself out), If you have lots of free time then do lots of lessons, if you have other commitments (eg. tests) in the near future then take a break on lessons. For the most part I did lessons pretty much immediately after getting them for the early levels (largely because the kanji are generally easier and I knew a fair bit already) while slowing down a lot as I got to later levels as the reviews per day went way up and I got a bit bored of Wanikani.
I think it depends on you a lot, for example do you know any kanjis already?
I knew about 300 kanjis, and so I know most of them already and I am only starting to see some I don’t know. Still, I do about 15 lessons a day and making sure I review in the morning and nights, sometimes the weekend I might do 20 lessons. I like that pace generally, it ensures that I have a good amount of new words daily but also have some free time to do other things. In general, I try to keep 60 items in apprentice and 250-300 in guru.
I used to do 15 per session, 2-4 sessions per day.
Max speed, least fatigue is
(the number of vocab) / (the number of days per level).
Plus pre-drill kanji
(the number of kanji) / (the number of days per previous level).
And always do all kanji at level up, in one session. (Not the case for vocab, since vocab aren’t essential for level up.)
Before I talk about my personal experience, here is a caveat: everyone works at different paces, and one of the cool things about WaniKani is that you can figure out your own pace. Use the early (and easier) levels to figure out what your pace is, and adjust your WaniKani experience to it. It involves a bit of trial and error but, assuming you are dedicated, a bit of trial and error in the first 10 levels makes the next 40 levels much better.
For early levels, where I knew many of the kanji already, I would do all of the available lessons as soon as possible. This was very hard and resulted in an uneven WaniKani schedule (i’d have 2-3 days of 200+ reviews, and then a few days of practically nothing).
After I caught up with what I knew, I picked a number of Apprentice items I was comfortable with, and did lessons whenever I was below that. For a while I chose 100 items, but now that I am further in and am trying to focus on non-WaniKani study tools, I keep it at ~50. The idea behind this was that Apprentice Items are the items I will review AT LEAST every day, so with 100 Apprentice Items I have 100+ reviews every day. Now I have 50+ reviews every day (usually in the 70-120 range), etc.
With my method, WaniKani is slower than a lot of other people’s, but it works for me and I haven’t grown tired of using WaniKani in my multiple years here.
I didn’t know any Kanji so it’s all new for me!
I’m also studying using other tools so I’ll probably stick to ~50 items in Apprentice I think.
Thank you for all the replies!!
All the other comments are correct, I would go farther and say it also depends on what your goal is. If you did all of them as they became available you’d level up every 8-9 days (assuming you got them all right).
I have a goal of reaching level 30 in one year, that means I have to level up every 12 days. I try to take them in groups of 30 or so, and the reviews don’t get unbearable for me, but it still isn’t actually fast enough. I’m averaging around 16 days per level, meaning around level 24-25 after a year.
So the question is, what is your goal? If it is to get to level 25 in one year, 10 a day won’t be enough. If you are happy with your rate of progression, that is what really matters because everyone will learn at different rates. If you want to go faster, take it up a notch.
I always do all the radicals & kanji as soon as I level up and then I try to get in 10-15 new vocab each day.
I also do about 20 new flashcards each day on an Anki 10k deck, so I don’t feel too bad if my vocab on WK is a little behind since I am supplementing it elsewhere.
Is it bad I haven’t really thought about a target level for the year?
After reading all your great advice though, I’m gonna try bumping it up to 20 a day to see how I fare (the problem is my memory is horrible so I usually need 1 or 2 more reviews after to start getting them right).
EXCITING STUFF THOUGH I think getting to 15 by the end of the year is a reasonable goal for me.
I’m using Anki as well for some extra vocab! How long did it take you to get to level 6?
I’ve been here for a few months, and I’m trying to go as fast as possible. I did know some kanji and a fair bit of the vocab by “ear” in the first ten lessons, and have been taking a class in Japanese along with doing WaniKani.
All that to say - I do every lesson as soon as it is available, and do around 80% of the reviews as soon as they are available (some I end up doing late, because, life). This means I’ve been leveling up an average of every 7 and a half days. This pace has been working great for me - but it does mean I “cheat” a bit with the new kanji now that I’m here in level 20, and while they are apprentice, look at them before answering. This is because I find the vocab a much easier way for them to stick in my mind, and by the time they are guru-ed, I’m ready to combine them with others I know. At early levels, this was easier to do, as I knew more vocab words that already used those kanji. I’ve also been doing heavily dictionary dependent reading and translation for a while, and the faster I can get away from that, the better.
Two things I’d say - get on the KaniWani and WaniKani Statistics API sites ASAP, too! KaniWani drills vocab, but in reverse (gives you English and asks for hiragana), and the statistics site helps you track your progress very effectively.
My average level-up time is about 11 days, so maybe 2 months?
I have reset my account so I did have prior knowledge, so that may or may not have helped. I was about level 15 before the reset iirc. Life is more stable now, so hopefully no more resets for me! Haha
At what level were you able to start reading (even at a dictionary dependent level)? Also, any personal recommendations for learning grammar? I’m kinda bouncing all over the place with resources for grammar at the moment.
Also I got on KaniWani and the stats website! KaniWani really showed me what I don’t know LOL so I’ll be using that to know both sides. The stats website is really interesting too! Good to know where on the JLPT I am haha
Thanks for all the help!
WOOO for no more resets! And 11 days is really good!! Hopefully I can see more of my own stats when I finally get past level 2 lmao
Early levels I did as many as possible to get it going. Now, at level 5, I’m pacing the lessons a little. Someone said to keep your apprentice items around 100 items, and that works well for me. Sometimes it gets closer to 130, and that’s doable too.
I recommend using the Genki textbooks to study grammar. Its a very popular beginning textbook.
I would also highly recommend getting the HelloTalk app and talk to natives! Even if you don’t know much, you can just say simple things like 好きな音楽は何ですか or 猫は好きですか etc and see all the different responses! I think seeing real life usage helps with learning grammar.
I personally do all of my lessons as soon as they appear. I spend about 20-30 minutes every morning doing my reviews and every couple of days a new set of lessons will take ~30 minutes. Occasionally it could take me a bit longer to get through my reviews, or I’ll do a review session in the evening if I have spare time. I find it pretty manageable.
WK already does a pretty good job of throttling you and forcing you not to go too fast, as long as you keep up with your reviews. Many of the stories of people getting overwhelmed happen when someone doesn’t do their reviews for some reason for a number of days, and the reviews all pile up and feel overwhelming. In studying kanji, like learning most things, consistency is key.
I’d say try doing all of the lessons as soon as you can and see if it’s too fast for you. If you get to level 5-8 and find you have too many reviews every session, then you can scale back your lessons and your number of reviews will taper off after a week or two.