How many new words a day keeps the doctor away?

[vi9ke]

Seriously though; how many new radicals/kanji/vocab should I learn eveyday? I have been doing 15 mon-fri (75 a week) and taking the weekends off but that seems to be a bit too slow. Should I do over the weekends as well (105 a week), 20 mon-fri (100 a week) , should I learn everything as soon as I unlock new level or something else entirely? I want to do it a bit quicker but I don’t want to be overwhelmed.

[Leebo]

I think you can imagine that only you can know what will overwhelm you.

I strive for the minimum level up time and do all my lessons before leveling up. Some people spend years on the site without reaching level 20.

All we can say is, keep increasing your apprentice total until you find that your percentages are taking a hit.

Do you know what your percentages are like now? Do you use the stats site?

[setyoursightsnorth]

I usually do about 20 lessons a day. I typically have about 100 items in my apprentice group at all times. I have really slacked the last couple days because of Golden Week, but that is usually the standard that I hold myself too. I find that if I stick to it, I tend to level up every 15 days or so!

[Tizzysawr]

I generally do them all as I get them. I level up on tuesdays at 7am (I get up early specifically for that), and immediately do new radicals/kanji/a few vocabulary items to fill up the last session, then go back to sleep.

Wake up four hours later, do first rad/kanji practice, then get on with the vocab lessons, which I do throughout the day in bursts of 10.

I do study outside of WK tho, and I often find some of the vocab to either be intuitive or stuff I already know, so generally out of say, 70 vocab items on level up there are at most 10 that are difficult for me. The first vocab practice usually has a higher than usual fail rate, of course, but after a day or two the few difficult words have been filtered so I can figure out which ones to focus on. I don’t see much of a reason to let lessons sit there undone, since the way SRS works means whatever is more difficult you’ll see more often anyway. But to each his own I guess, maybe all this would be more difficult for me if I had less time and less experience with the language, so I do get how other people can’t. I spend at least 2 hours a day studying both on WK and with external sources (Anki, Minna no nihongo, Shin Kanzen Master, reading books, playing videogames), and that’s a luxury most people can’t afford.

[AnimeCanuck]

If you haven’t already adjusted your workload to something that feels a bit quicker and still balanced for you, I’d like to suggest increasing to 20 items Monday to Friday, +5-15 (depending on your mood) on Saturdays. If you’ve been enjoying Sundays “off” (and still doing reviews) keep that up. ^^ Everyone deserves a break.

EDIT: 20 a day, every day gets you about 14-16 day levels. That was how it was for me when I was doing that. I’ve slowed down since then. ^_^;