How much studying daily to go from level 5 to level 15 within a year?

I am 318 reviews and 59 lessons into the hole. -__-

I feel pretty demotivated because I work, go to college, and have other goals I am working towards so I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew and fail a daily study goal for WaniKani. I was doing great studying for 15 minutes a day last year, but then school and other things consumed my life lolol.

Would it be possible to reach at least level 15 this year if I only do 15 minutes of WaniKani daily? (After I spend over an hour going through the missed reviews and new lessons) Or does this need to be more like 25 minutes to an hour a day of studying WaniKani?

Thank you for the help friends.

  • Moo
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It’s been a while since I got a WaniKani subscription so I might not be helpful here.

Don’t overwork yourself. I know how it feels wanting to learn as fast as possible, but I also know how it feels to become burnt out by it.

Check your priorities and if you deem it possible, take a vacation from WaniKani for you to take care of the more stressful stuff out of the way.

  • meow
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Thank you, your response was indeed helpful! (The meow cheered me up LOL)

Vacation might be a good idea, though I feel obligated to get rid of all of these reviews before winter vacation ends and I go back to school x__x

You started it first :grin:

Doing the reviews wouldn’t hurt, yeah.

Again, just think about it, and take a wise decision, if you end up getting frustrated because you have all these resposibilities AND the WK reviews and lessons, you’ll eventually end up thinking of your lessons and reviews as a chore instead of something you really enjoy.

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I’m not sure if it’s really quantifiable by “x minutes/day”. It might be better to think along the lines of “x lessons/day”. I do 10 lessons a day, and that gives me a review load that works out to about 30 minutes of work a day. So maybe you could do 5 lessons a day and see how that feels?

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Also check out the statistics page here to see what your pacing has been until now (you can ignore your current level if you’ve been on it for a long time, I have a couple of levels that are hundreds of days long). So you can see if your previous pace will put you on track to gain 10 levels this year, or if you need to increase (or if you can decrease and still be ok).

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Yes, you would definitely make it to level 15 by then, if not even faster. But it gets painstakingly difficult if you take breaks and forget stuff, which is why staying on top of it is the most important part of all.

I’d say, if you at least try to pop onto Wanikani a few times a day, then it would be more manageable as you would have small stacks of reviews verses larger ones.

Even if you broke it up into small fifteen minute sessions, or whatever makes it easier. For me it takes about ten minutes to go through 100 reviews, and I pop on several times throughout my day at work; so if you do the same then that might help to work in tandem with your lifestyle.

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This will all depend on how fast you type and how accurate your answers are :smile:

And as mentioned by other folks: a better way to pace yourself is using number of items/day and using the statistics page to gauge how fast you normally go through a level.

12 months to cover 10 levels should be feasible with 15-20 mins per day if you’re disciplined enough to do it every day. With some scripts (reorder and override are the most helpful), you can speed up some more by concentrating on the radicals and the kanji, with lower focus on vocab, although it’s not really recommended for maximum absorption.

Great idea, I haven’t thought if it in terms of lessons before. I think I will try a week of 5 or so lessons a day then increase or decrease it as needed. Those stats were also helpful. Thanks! :3

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If it starts getting overwhelming, you can always stop taking lessons until your reviews get more manageable again. If you have over 300 reviews at level 5, don’t do any lessons until you clear them. Not letting your reviews pile up is probably the only thing on which everyone on the forums agree. If you can’t find the time to tackle your daily reviews, use the mobile app and break them down into small chunks throughout the day.

However, keep in mind there’s also the danger of going too slow. After 6 months more or less, you start burning items, and then they leave your review pile for good. If you’re not seeing those items anymore in your studies outside of Wanikani, you run the risk of forgetting them. Going too slow in the beginning means you’re not able to interact with much native material for quite some time. Also, keep in mind that at 10 levels per year it will take you 6 years to finish WaniKani, which itself is only a small part of learning Japanese.

Doing 10 lessons per day means you’ll take about two weeks for each level, which is a progress of 26 levels in a year. It’s a decent pace, and in a few months you’ll have enough kanji and vocab under your belt to start interactint with natives and native materials. At that pace, you won’t ever get 300 reviews in one day as you have now, assuming you clear them every day.

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