Up until about level 15 I always had maintained 0 new lesson every time I pass on to the next level, but as College requirements got more hectic and hectic I could only squeeze finishing the new kanji and radical lessons and limiting myself to at least 5 vocab lessons a day. Now that I am on level 21 I just amassed a 300+ lesson backlog which I am trying to thin out this holiday. One thing I can say for certain is that this setup helps me recall kanji(reading and meaning) from previous lessons. I know that this may defeat the purpose of the SRS but 6 levels in I think this setup is helping me retain a lot. What do you think? Should I go back to my old setup where my vocab and kanji are in sync or should I continue this new found method of mine.
Whatever works for you man. Different strokes for different folks. If you feel that it is a solid strategy, then go for it. Just know that at the current rate of doing only 5 vocab lessons per level up, you’ll have about 4000 vocabulary in your lessons when you hit Level 60.
Lol forgot to put that the 5 lessons is per day, yet again since college reqs. are easing up again and I am up to 30 lessons a day as of the moment.
I guess its true hahaha just hoped that I discovered this method much earlier.
Glad to hear you’ve found a method that works for you!
Personally, learning the vocab for lesson X close to learning the kanji for lesson X seems best for my retention. that being said, having a bit of a lag between the two in some ways reinforces things a little differently than if I learn the vocab IMMEDIATELY after the kanji. An example:
I got 析 to Guru II a couple of days before learning the vocab for it, 解析 and 分析. I had somewhat forgotten the meaning of the 析 kanji after not having reviewed it in the past couple of days, but the new vocab helped me stick it back in my head.
I use the userscript to customize how many of each lesson type is batched, and I’ve found a batch of 6 items with 4 vocab and 2 kanji to work nicely. I sprinkle in vocab only sessions to catch that pile up too.
I did that from around level 35 to get familiar with as many Kanji as possible. I now changed my approach and am working through a pile of 1300+ lessons before moving on to level 47. This way I can learn the most important vocab for the Kanji, which helps learning, memorizing and speaking (which I try to focus more on) a lot more.
Ah. You’ll catch up to your current level then in about two weeks!
Kanji lessons only teach you the most frequent reading of the kanji. Vocab lessons is where you learn the other less frequent readings. I don’t think it is a good idea to delay vocab lessons indefinitely because you will miss out on an important part of kanji knowledge. If you insist on delaying vocab you should plan some time where you pause the kanji and work out the vocab backlog to keep on track with the less frequent readings.
If college severely limits the WK time you may try to keep the workload down by stopping lessons when you have more than 75 or even 50 apprentice items and resume lessons when the apprentices are below this target. Most reviews are for apprentice items. Keeping their number low will cut down your review workload without abandoning vocab lessons.
I never have zero lessons in queue, but I have a rule to finish all vocab from previous level before starting new radicals. For example, I’ll finish L28 vocab before starting L30 radicals.
This means that I get reinforcement for L28 kanji when they are between guru1 and guru2.
Also it means that upon level up I do not touch new material for few days, working on vocab backlog.
My level up time is dependent on amount of lessons in previous levels 
I was going too fast in addition to not doing a lot of vocab lessons (partly due to too many leeches) and the more lessons I amassed, the less lessons I did. I ended up with about 800 vocab lessons and there was no chance I was ever going to work through them, so I did a reset.
I’d say definitely do the vocab lessons… a small pile is fine, I guess. 300 seems a lot though, see if you can get this down over the holidays and then reevaluate.
The vocab is there to reinforce the kanji after all (and you’re paying for it, too). Some kanji I fail almost everytime when I get them as a lone kanji review, but have no problem when I see them in a word. And in my opinion that’s the more important part.
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