I’ve been using Wani Kani for a little while now but I feel like I’m going kind of slow. I hit level 11 a little while ago and found out about Wani Kani stats, on there it says it takes me about 18 days to level up. Is this slow or average because it feels like it takes forever to level up.
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The fastest you can level up is about 7 days. That’s honestly a difficult pace to keep if you don’t have much free time so many people don’t go that fast. 18 is a bit long though for level ups but it really depends on what works for you. I recommend reading this guide to get an understanding of how things work and a solid example of a schedule.
My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 
)
There’s also groups of people who take wanikani at a slower pace for their own reasons. How fast you should level up depends on your own situation and goals. Just make sure you don’t pressure yourself into going faster than you can handle, you’ll just burn yourself out.
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~7 days is the minimum, 18 feels a bit on the slower side.
This can be because of a lot of things though. Is you accuracy low? You might want to think about a better method of memorizing items then, because you will slow down even more when you get more and more reviews.
Do you only do 1 or sometimes 2 reviews a day? My advice was always that you should do as many as you can, and 3 is a healthy minimum.
Do you forget to do your reviews sometimes? This can be a huge problem so make wk a habit as quickly as you can.
Or maybe you take a long time to finish the lessons on a level? There are calculators to determine how many new lessons you need a day to keep to some pace, but a recommended amount is definitely 20.
Every two weeks, which meets my goal of spending about 2 years with the site. That translates to about 50 minutes a day on the site I think.
The speed you go at just depends on your own goals. If you are bored and you feel you could handle more then feel free to do more lessons!
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My accuracy is kind of low I think. It’s like 66%, I do reviews twice a day like 200~ in the morning and like 100~ at night. I do all the lessons for a level as soon as they are unlocked. Does it make a difference if I do my reviews throughout the day or is it the same thing if I do them twice a day as I am now?
I do like 200 reviews in the morning and around 100 at night. Should I do the reviews as they become available or does it not make any difference?
That accuracy is indeed low, shooting for 80% should be around your average.
And 2 reviews is way too few if you do 200 and 100. That’s probably one thing that lowers your accuracy as it’s quite easy to lose focus during that many items. I try to keep my review counts below around 50 at worst. I’d suggest try out the “whenever you can” option, and see if it helps.
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Between 15 days and 2 years. Just go at a pace you are comfortable with. My recent spurt has me going about 15-30 days per level.
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Doing the reviews once they become available (or as soon after as you can) will increase your accuracy for sure. The purpose of the SRS is to give you reviews right before what you learned is likely to exit your short-term memory.
I can’t remember what it was like in the 10s and such, but I can say that as you go on, doing all of the lessons as soon as they unlock will become unsustainable. It’s a personal thing, but I find if I do more than 20 lessons in a day, then I forget a lot. So I do no more than 20 lessons a day, and keep my apprentice count no higher than ~120. After I started doing that, my time for level ups jumped from about where you were at (level ups every 18 days), to where I average between 8-10 days.
While it initially felt like I was slowing myself down, it actually increased my speed by virtue of increasing my accuracy from around 75% up to an average of 90-95%.
All this is to say, though, you should go at a pace that YOU find comfortable. You don’t want to burn yourself out, and if you are too bored by a slower pace of lessons, then you can increase your number of lessons. Just keep in mind, if you have a lower accuracy because of that, it slows you down in the long-term.
The important thing with WaniKani, and language learning in general, is that it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and the purpose isn’t to finish as quickly as possible, it’s to make sure you absorb and understand what you are learning.
がんばって!
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Doing all of the lessons as soon as you level is not recommended especially if you do not know the kanji / vocab from prior knowledge. It may have been okay in the lower levels but if you continue doing this, your accuracy will likely continue to drop from an even bigger workload. In my year and a half of doing Wanikani all the way up to level 60, I have never had to do 300 reviews in a day (at most around 200 around 40 and up).
10 - 20 lessons per day (whatever is comfortable) and a reorder script might be helpful. I usually did my big reviews (80 - 100) in the morning and late evenings. I might do smaller chunks throughout the day if I know I will be busy in the mornings / afternoon.
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It sounds like accuracy is your main problem. Spread your lessons out more and do reviews more often and that might help
Personally, I have settled into a high pace now with level ups every Friday evening. However, I only came to Wanikani three months ago after already taking lessons for five years. So, naturally, I already know a lot of the vocabulary, although I did not know how it was written in kanji.
I would very much advise against doing all your lessons as soon as they become available. That is usually quite overwhelming on level up. What I personally do is to do as many lessons as I need to do to get the radicals for the new level. (I could reorder to prioritize the radicals, but I don’t do that out of personal preference.) The next morning, I do the kanji lessons. After that, I spread out the vocabulary lessons while generally following the advice from the ultimate guide. The advice I mean is the one to time your lessons so that the first two reviews become due at convenient times. The first one is after four hours and tge second one right hours thereafter. So, I do lessons either in the morning, followed by reviews in the afternoon and then in the evening, which schedules all further reviews {if successful) to the evening, or I do lessons in the evening, followed by reviews before going to sleep and in the next morning, which locks in further reviews to the morning.
This method allows me to get the first reviews always done right when they become due and, thus, align with the intended srs intervals.
Since going for seven days can br really stressful after level up, I would recommend not aim at that unless your accuracy is very high; mine is 98.4%. at the moment. Instead, try to limit your lessons such that you can do the reviews once to become due and get an accuracy of at least 85%. This will probably be faster in the long run and an excruciating number of additional reviews.
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I think this may be hurting you quite a bit. Many people will do anywhere between 10-30 lessons per day (30 is fast, 10 is a bit slower) and make sure to keep their reviews at 0 each day.
On top of this, keep an eye on your Apprentice items. It is widely recommended to keep less than 100 Apprentice items if you want to keep from overwhelming yourself with reviews.
I’ve seen people say they do 20-25 lessons per day and they still level up pretty fast. I personally keep it at 10 to 20 and I’m happy with my pace.
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I see, so I should do like 20 lessons a day when I unlock them next time instead of all at once. Also, did you do reviews in big chunks like 100 in the morning and like 100 at night or something or did you do small amounts throughout the day?
20 lessons is a lot to do in one day. I do about 15 a day, and this gives me an average of 11 days per level.
I do lessons at 8 am, Review the new items at 12 pm, and then do all the rest of my reviews at 8pm-10pm.
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I like to concentrate my reviews to the morning hours and the evening hours, except the first review of new items, which naturally goes to the afternoon for later evening items. However, I still spread out the reviews a bit. Doing twice 50 is much more bearable than once 100 in my opinion.
Anyway, I generally do my reviews whenever they come up and I have time. Concentrating them is just a consequence of scheduling lessons the right way.
One more thing, when pacing yourself, keep in mind that your review load will increase going up the levels at steady speed, even with a high accuracy. At some point, your prior levels’ master then enlightened and finally burn reviews will add to the pile.
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I was pretty consistently around 11-15 days for most of Wanikani. I think you should worry less about the average and more about how long you want to spend on WK overall.
An 18 day level up time puts you at around 3 years total and that’s probably close to the average time someone takes to complete WK. If you want to finish in less, than see if you can improve the level up time by a few days.
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The amount of lessons you do is directly influenced by how much time you have and how easy the workload is at your current level. If you know you will be free for the next few months, you can do more lessons per day. However keep in mind that doing lessons in large chunks means that they will come back in large chunks when you are ready to review them.
A manageable pace would be to split up the amount of lessons you want to do by the number of review sessions you want to have per day. For instance, let’s say that you wake up in the morning and want to do 20 lessons today. Using Wanikani’s review forecast on the homepage, you can see what time reviews will come in as well as how many at certain times. If there are 2 large chunks of reviews say in the morning at 10AM and another at 7PM, you can do 10 lessons after your morning reviews and another 10 at 7PM.
If you continue this routine over an extended period of time, you will know exactly when you will have to review as well as an idea of how much is in each review session.
For me it just naturally happened to be 70 to 120 cards in the morning and anywhere between 10 to 50 cards in the evenings. There is a huge gap in the amount of reviews because if I am feeling overwhelmed or if I know I am busy, I will intentionally do fewer lessons (say 5 to 10) to immediately decrease my short term workload.
Having a routine in Wanikani lessons will help with your long term workload (I am referring to when cards come back for review after 6 to 12 months to be enlightened / burned). At the beginning, dealing with these cards are fairly simple since there won’t be a lot. However, at around level 35, they will come in droves and it will be demoralizing when you fail some of them and they are knocked down in the burn progression. Its just a matter of coming to terms with this and trucking on. You will eventually encounter these difficult vocab / kanji in the wild so you will have even more practice when you interact with native materials.
I do about 10 lessons a day (sometimes up to12 or 15) and I’m leveling up at around 15 days. I do a big batch of reviews in the morning, around 50 or so and a couple of smaller batches at midday and night (I usually have around 80 reviews a day)
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That’s true there are around 9000 total items. OP is already level 10 so minus maybe 1800, at an average of 180 per level.
7200/20 a day = 360 days to all items learned (but not burned)
7200/15 a day = 480 days.
7200/10 a day = 720 days.
Life does intercede. It’s not always possible to learn as quickly as we want to learn, but it is good to know that there is a major difference in time to complete if you do less lessons per day.
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