So, I hit a massive wall here. I have been level 22 for 3 months now.
Back around october / november, I had few days when I could only do few reviews, things piled up, and somehow I got about 500 of items to review at once. Than I had a lot of misses, and I also started burning items which has noticable lower success rate as well. I slowed down from 20 to 10 lessons for about a month and things started to cool down a bit.
Than as november was ending, I decided to go all the way down to 1 lesson per day. I still do reviews as often as I can, ending each day with 0 reviews if I can. The reason was to lower workload before Christmas because there is a week when I cannot do much of this and I didnāt want to come back to 2000+ reviews.
After Christmas, I had about 500 reviews, and when I caught up, I relaized I had about 1000 items total in apprentice / guru stages. So I stayed at 1 lesson and I did my reviews. But things didnāt cool down yet, I am still at about 50 apprentice, 500 guru, 300 master and 1800 enlightened items.
As you can see things are VERY unbalanced at the moment. Iāll wait until I have no more than 300 items in apprentice / guru, than go up to 10 lessons again. I guess I at least solidified my previous lessons, so I remember the words much better now.
At what level did you hit a wall like this? And what did you do?
Iām at 113 apprentice, 650 guru, 505 master, 1071 enlightened, 2922 burned items.
I donāt think it is particularly unbalanced though I am slowing down lessons until apprentice items drop below 100.
Iām on track to complete Level 33 after about 24 months. I am not sure at which specific level I hit the wall but WK definitely got harder from the late teensā/early twentiesā levels and harder again from the late twenties, so that now I am targeting one level per month till Level 40 and probably beyond.
The reason levels 21-30 and 31-40 are called Death/Hell is because thatās when your earlier stuff starts to come back for Enlightened/Burn and it feels overwhelming. I hit that wall at 24 I think, took way too much time off and just reset back to 1. Donāt be like me.
Itās OK to do zero new lessons if you want. Just donāt stop doing the small review chunks you mentioned.
I hit the same wall at level 21/22 a few years ago. Burned out, gave up and left WaniKani and Japanese. Came back a year ago, reset to level 1 and started again. Itās very common!
It sounds like you have a good plan now. Just get your reviews to 0 at least once every day. Youāll soon be ready to start climbing again! Just donāt give up!
Aside from the one big stack I have to do after I wake up, I find that itās better to do Wanikani every single hour when itās on max stack size since every stack after the first can be done under 5 mins
I like you hit a massive wall when I reached level 21 and it took me 244 days to complete that level. It was so hard. It was my longest time on a level.
It took me 91 days to finish level 22. I found it very difficult. I could have finished it longer but in the last few weeks I have plenty of free time.
I am now on level 23. I am now trying to avoid the problems before, and I make sure I go through my mistakes before doing any reviews. After that I do the reviews. I very rarely do all my reviews because I donāt have time. I do at least one hundred or even two hundred. After that I do the new lessons.
I had the same problem. Post level 20 gets much harder. I think I hit the wall around level 22. I kept fighting, but I found things got tougher post level 30. As it is, Iām doing a level every 2-3 weeks to keep my reviews at a reasonable level.
Itās ok to go slow and not do new lessons as long as you keep your reviews under control.
Indeed. But for me at least, another big reason is that I was already familiar with a lot of the Kanji and vocab through to about the mid-teen levels and then the fraction of difficult stuff ramped up a lot. I wasnāt speed-running before and I am doing other study around reading, listening and speaking so it is no big concern - just sharing my experience for othersā reference. I fully agree: itās good to slow down but still keep going.
Welcome to the club. Youāre definitely not alone, many of us have experienced the level 22 curse, see for example I have been in level 22 for ages for more suggestions.
Best of luck!
I think Wanikani should give a warning or an advice in their knowledge guide.
A lot of people get burned out around level 20. Getting more than 100 reviews per day is probably counter productive.
What works for me is the stop doing new lessons every 10 levels for about a month.
It decrease the number of reviews per day.
That way, I only have around 50 reviews per day, and I can focus on other important things, like grammar, reading and what I learned in the previous 10 levels.
I always do Wanikani as soon as I get out of bed so the only thing level 20+ changed for me is that the first stack of the day takes an extra 10 - 20 minutes
That seems expected for 20ish lessons a day to be honest, thatās about what I had most of the way (well my accuracy was only about 85% so usually it was closer to 110 in apprentice) (Actually, I see you slowed lessons for a while, which probably explains the lower than expected apprentice items).
I think itās fine if youāre feeling workload pressure to drop lessons for a while. Lessons and incorrect reviews increase workload, correct reviews decrease workload. And higher workload often does decrease accuracy.
It may also be worth using a userscript like the item inspector or my dashboard stage breakdown to pick out your apprentice items and do some extra study on them outside Wanikani to clear them off your plate sooner, or something like reorder omega to review them at a higher priority in Wanikani if you want to use the SRS to try help with that. The apprentice items will have the largest contribution to your workload since they cause multiple reviews per week (or per day even for app 1/2) compared to the 1/week frequency of guru 1 or 1/month frequency of master or 1/4 months of enlightened.
I agree with everyone in here. I remember that I hit a massive wall as well, around level 21/22 when I suddenly thought I canāt get through it anymore. It will get easier later again, but you really have to bite your way through these early 20 levels. It is totally fine to go slower and not do new lessons until you feel you can handle what you have got on your plate. Those kanji will stick one day. But this is also where I started extreme leech training, because I was getting desperate. Good news is, if you run multiple times against the wall, one day it will fall!
I didnāt realize it until reading through this thread but there is definitely a wall at around 20-30. I know because I was stuck there for 3 years as you can see
What I did during this time was just review everyday but not do any lessons because I felt like I couldnāt learn anything more, which was due to me doing 20 lessons at a time even irrespective of the review load I had. I didnāt understand the relationship between lessons and reviews at the time and paid for it in the burnout.
What I probably should have done was do at least 5 new lessons a day or less instead of 20 a day (as I was beginning to feel burnt out).
When I came out of the burn out, towards the latter half as you can see in the graph, I decided to build to do 15 a day from 5 a day and just keep that constant (which kept the review amount mostly constant as well). I started this during level 31-32 at around January last year and got to 60 last month. This was without the āspeedrunā strat of doing only kanji first btw, I just let WK give me whatever lessons it had, I did not use the advanced selector
So if I could do something different from the start of my WK journey, I probably should have done 10 lessons a day (clearing out reviews daily), I think I would have finished 1-2 years earlier still. I would also have had a much smoother daily experience and probably wouldnāt have burnt out.
It would have also helped me to start reading simple material earlier to really lock in the vocab from WK. I find that the kanji and words you learn from WK only really get āburntā for real when you see them in the wild after WK.
Iām currently level 29, and its proving to be a pain in the ass of a level, iām currently almost one month into the level, but thatās the maximum time for me to advance to another level 30/40 days max, my avg is 20 days or so.
I donāt really remember hitting a wall in the earlier 20 levels. But i also never had 500 reviews, which might be the root of the problem you are havingā¦Constant reviews, you have to do it everyday, religiously.
Without doing it everyday it gets much tougher to memorize and the review pile keeps getting bigger.
My advice is, stop the lessons for now, work on getting the Apprentice items down to less than 100, and create a habit of doing WK everyday, donāt matter what.
Wow, too much review time, haha, kudos to you for having the patience of reviewing for 2 hours everyday, i usually just do few lessons to avoid getting those gigantic reviews, i usually have around 100 - 150 reviews a day, and it takes me about 30/40 minutes to complete them
The first review of the day is always a huge stack. Now that I understand how Wanikani works, I do Wanikani every single hour that Iām awake because all the stacks after the first one will be super small and can be done under 5 mins, itās also less trouble for me to do Wanikani for 5 mins every hour than spend 30 mins in a bigger stack
