How often should I do: Lessons & Reviews?

WaniKani
1

Hello!

I am “active” in WK since March 2019, since I’ve reached Level 3 have bought the year subscription. I’ve learned almost every day 1x (in the evening) and as you can see I am currently at Level 5 with learning Kanjis.

But I am at some point where I am asking myself some questions which maybe you can aswer me:

  1. Should I do every day new Lessons?
    1.1. And if so, should I then learn every new lessons even if there are many…?

  2. Is 1x per day too few?
    2.1 How often should I learn?

Maybe you can help me with answering some questions…

Best Regards,
Menschlich 「人間性」

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How many lessons per day you want to take will depend on how much free time you have; how big of a workload you can handle. The more lessons you take, the more reviews you will have.

If you want to go at maximum speed, you need to take 20-25 lessons per day (there are some levels where you can go even faster, but that’s not something you need to worry about until later).

However going at full speed takes a lot of time, and you can easily end up doing 200+ reviews everyday at that speed, which can get overwhelming and lead to burn out. For a more reasonable but still steady pace, you can take 10-15 lessons.

Basically the idea here is that you can use the number of lessons to adjust your pacing. If you are feeling overwhelmed, reduce your number of daily lessons (or stop them altogether until the number of reviews gets under control). On the other hand, if you feel you can handle more reviews, take more lessons.

There’s no need to take all lessons as soon as they are available (but of course, you can if you have the time and energy to handle the workload spike this will create).

Now, the title of your post also mentions reviews. It is usually suggested that you do at least two review sessions per day. This is because the way that wanikani works, new lessons you take will be reviewed at the interval of 4 hours, and then 8 hours.

So for example, you can build a schedule where you wake up at 8 am, do lessons, then do your first set of reviews at 12 pm, and your second set at 8 pm, which matches those intervals. This is recommended because these intervals have been adjusted to be in the general period of time where you will be close to forgetting them, and reviewing them at that time will help with memorization.

This is a general guideline. You will need to adjust depending on your own circumstances.

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I think what’s most important is how much you can handle. The general rule of thumb is to keep your Apprentice count between 100 and 150, depending on how much time you’re devoting to WK. Another common tip is to spread out your lessons along the amount of time you expect to spend on a level. For example, if you have 100 lessons and generally complete levels in around 10 days it could be a good idea to do 10 lessons a day so that way you have things going at a manageable pace. (If I’m misremembering something, someone please correct me!)

As for the amount of times you do reviews a day, that’s up to you. As I said before it depends on how much time you’re spending on WK. You can complete it at a fine pace clearing out your reviews once a day for example.

I got sniped! Damn!

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For lessons, as many or few as you feel comfortable with during reviews. If you feel like you have too many reviews, do fewer lessons. If you feel like you have too little reviews, do more lessons.

Regarding reviews, it’s suggested to do your reviews 2 times daily, preferably 4 hours apart. It’s okay to have a couple of days a week where you can’t quite manage it, but that should be your goal.

Welcome to the WK family! :crabigator:

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When I first started, I was doing 10-20 a week because I didn’t really have a study flow down and was having trouble finding what worked for me in how I could get the kanji to stick in my brain. After trying different study techniques, I finally (just recently) got my flow and now I try to do 5-10 lessons a day along with the daily reviews which I am pretty comfortable with. With a full time job I don’t find this too difficult and also keeps my brain on top of kanji. Good luck! :high_touch:

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I’d suggest doing reviews whenever you have them, due to the timed nature of WaniKani’s review system. The number of reviews you get depends on how many lessons you do, so I stop doing lessons when I have too many reviews.

When I’ve got my reviews under control, I like doing 10-20 lessons a day. I usually check in a few times a day, because I’m constantly online and it’s a nice filler when I’m bored, but that’s what fits my schedule.

Like others say, it’s up to you. As you level up, the reviews start stacking up, and you might feel overwhelmed. Or maybe you might have a few days with nothing better to do. It’s easy to adjust until you’re at a speed that feels right for you

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Take a look at this guide created by @jprspereira

Particularly, part 4, 5 and 6 relate to what you’re asking about here. This will arm you with information about the inner workings of Wanikani, and you can use that to decide on your goals, how often you want to level up, and how big of a load you can handle for your schedule.

I understand your desire to hear some suggestions about how many reviews to do, but all of us can really only tell you about our experience based on our circumstances which will be different from yours! Once you understand how to set a schedule, just try something and see if it works for you! if it’s too fast then you can slow it down or vice versa.

Best of Luck with your Kanji learning!

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