Does this look like a typical wanikani experience? 100 seems too much to handle at once. I’ve had done up to 45 or so in a day so far.
Should I go on to go through every one of those 100 lessons in one sitting? If I choose to do so, will I have 100 items added to my review queue in addition to the 40+ that I currently have? What are my options?
A lot of people throttle their lessons to 10 a day or something (5 a day for me). Others throttle by stopping lessons if their Guru count goes over some number. Others always take all their lessons as soon as they get them and try to keep reviews and lessons at 0/0 all the time.
If your accuracy is high you should be able to handle a lot of lessons without huge review piles. If it is terrible, like me, if you do too many lessons at once, or don’t manage your Guru count, you’ll end up with huge review counts every day
Yea that’s pretty normal. I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing them altogether, I would say do about 10 - 15 a day. I only do a max 10 a day, and you don’t have to do lessons every day as well.
What is considered to be a good review accuracy? My lowest accuracy is 95%. The other ones are 98, 99-ish.
By throttling you mean using an user script to handle that?
I throttle just by limiting the number of lessons I do per day, and watching my counts. I only do lessons first thing in the morning. I’ll look at my counts and decide if I want to add more items or not. You might be able to handle that with scripts if you want (and there is a script). I don’t use any, so I wouldn’t be able to help with suggestions there.
I would say 95% is amazing. I drop as low as 50-60% sometimes. I can’t say what would be average, or if that number would even matter. Everyone is different, and people do things with user synonyms, scripts, and study which affect their accuracy in different ways.
Also, if someone tells me I should learn n things per day with x accuracy or something is wrong, I give that some serious side-eye. Everyone’s situation is different. All this is very easy for some people, very difficult for others, and people have different time and resources to dedicate. In the end all that matters is to figure out what works for you to make progress without burning out. There isn’t a right or wrong way
Isn’t the Guru count over some number a good thing though? I would imagine I would do a lot more reviews when I have many items in Apprentice and do more lessons when I had many in Guru.
Or am I missing something?
If you have 1000 items in Guru and end up getting them in large review waves with low accuracy, you could end up with 500 or more items back in Apprentice pretty quickly. So you’d have at least 1 day with over 500 Apprentice reviews, plus whatever is coming in from higher SRS levels. For me, as I get tired dealing with that, my accuracy will go down, and more items from higher SRS levels will end up in apprentice. Then that wave of items comes back again and again in future reviews. It turns unmanageable pretty quick.
That is bad for me. But I won’t argue if it is good or bad for others. What works for you works for you.
it doesn’t matter that much whether you use the number of guru or apprentice items as your speed-indicator. the apprentice count will be more reactive to daily fluctuations, while the guru count will reflect week-long trends better. which one works better for you depends on your preferences.
the point is that you want to keep the daily workload relatively stable, so you want to aim to keep your speed-indicator relatively stable
If you have 1000 items in Guru and end up getting them in large review waves with low accuracy, you could end up with 500 or more items back in Apprentice pretty quickly. So you’d have at least 1 day with over 500 Apprentice reviews, plus whatever is coming in from higher SRS levels. For me, as I get tired dealing with that, my accuracy will go down, and more items from higher SRS levels will end up in apprentice. Then that wave of items comes back again and again in future reviews. It turns unmanageable pretty quick.
That is bad for me. But I won’t argue if it is good or bad for others. What works for you works for you.
it doesn’t matter that much whether you use the number of guru or apprentice items as your speed-indicator. the apprentice count will be more reactive to daily fluctuations, while the guru count will reflect week-long trends better. which one works better for you depends on your preferences.
the point is that you want to keep the daily workload relatively stable, so you want to aim to keep your speed-indicator relatively stable
That is very helpful, thank you for explaining 
It is normal, but totally up to you on how to tackle them. Do it all or a do a lesson a day.
I’ll do five lessons if I have a 90%+ review accuracy, and probably one or two a day until I reach that 90%. If I’m hitting 50% on reviews I don’t touch the lessons at all.
Yeah, that’s pretty good.
I used to have such stats at first too, but then I started overwhelming myself with lessons/new words (not just from WK), and the accuracy started to somewhat nosedive.
It got as low as 83% on some items - which is actually still respectable.
To illustrate, check the red line where I started grinding Anki (~25 cards a day) in addition to ~10 lessons on WK:
Eventually, the reviews started piling up and thus the workload exceeded my mental capacity lmao.
So the moral of the story is, don’t tempt yourself to take on too many lessons.
Your brain will thank you for it later.
you have lots of answers here but yeah, it’s completely normal.
i use WKstats a lot to plan my lessons. I burned out once so i restarted and decided around 2 weeks per level and 10 - 15 lessons per day.
looking at this for my current level
i have already spread out my kanji so that the last one to guru will be in 3 days from now. I do vocab on day one and 2 - 4 kanji a day after that. vocab appears in smaller chunks that way. i know it’s the same numbers but i find it less overwhelming.
i try to end a level with as few vocab carrying over as possible. next level has 150 items so i can finish that level in about 13 days doing 12 lessons a day, spreading out the 33 kanji between day 2 and day 9.
i try to get to 0 lessons/ 0 reviews once per level at least. there’s a thread for this. if you’re not disciplined like me, it forces you to pace yourself and keep your reviews in check if you want to keep a streak of achieving that 0/0 once per level.
Trust me, it is. Expect something like that when you level up though
I do 20-35 lessons per day, if I level up I usually do everything till the radicals so I can have new kanji asap (not that I recommend this method), but yeah for me 100 is pretty normal.
It’s very usual to have that many when you just level up. I’ve never done the lessons in big batches. I usually do 10, 15 at most. That makes my leveling up speed around 15 days which comfortable for me.
100 Lessons just means you have 100 available lessons. It doesn’t mean lessons that you must do those lessons right away. Set your own pace. It’s tempting to rush as fast as possible to “level up”, but it’s more important you learn in a sustainable way that keeps your learning.
When I last leveled, I was taking my lessons slow so I started my latest level at 150 lessons. Instead of overwhelming myself, I’ve been doing between 5-15 a day and now I’m down to thirty. One time, I did fifty lessons in one sitting and I found I spent the following week really struggling to remember the new words which wrecked my confidence and enthusiasm. Slow and steady is now my current pace.
In any case, good luck and have fun!
Where can I find that graph? Is it an user script?
For most of WK, I did about 10-12 lessons per day, using
Lesson Filter userscript to give me 4-5 kanji and 6-8 vocabs, and my level up time was under 2 weeks on average. Note that it is not “default” WK order of radicals, kanji, vocab in lessons, but many prefer to mix it this way. Learning brand new 10 kanji per day would be too difficult for me (kanji are getting slightly more complex as you go :), so adding vocabulary lessons, which are from the previous level, was reinforcing the previous level kanji on one hand while having easier lessons at the same time.
So I always had lessons in the queue, and was ignoring this number, focusing on getting reviews to zero each night.
Good luck!
I like your strategy. It seems to keep constant the amount of effort you need to put. And two weeks to clear a level is a good pace. You do need to use a script to select what kind of lesson and review you take first, right?
I think I cleared my radicals and kanji way too fast. Now I have tons of vocab words from the previous level lingering around. I did the reviews in the order Wanikani presented them to me though.
