I'm level N3 but I just started using this site. Do I really have to start from the beginning?

I care. What are the reasons ?

Levels 1 and 2 have accelerated review timelines, so they can be done in 3 days 10 hours. A bunch of levels after level 45 (and 1 before then, I believe) have so few radicals that if you do all the kanji immediately you’ll get to 90% without waiting for the usual second wave of kanji from those first radicals. These also can be done in 3 days 10 hours.

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Well, there’s at least one alternative. It’s just very unlikely that they will implement it.

Ah, but you still wouldn’t be able to skip :wink:

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Well, I think people mostly want to skip because it takes a lot of time to go through material they already know. OP also has a deadline.

Going through everything is a nice review anyway. At twice the radical speed, levels quickly become all fast levels. OP would reach the part they care about way before their deadline.

Another possible alternative, specifically for cases like this, and one I’m sure has been suggested before, would be to let people manually change an item’s SRS level.

Of course, this has all sorts of potential problems, like people lying to themselves like “oh, yeah, I saw this yesterday” or “yeah, I see how that vocab works, I won’t forget it”; people skipping radicals too aggressively and killing mnemonics; people setting things to, say, master, knowing they’ll still have to review them (which is good!), but being way too eager and auditing a thousand items on the first day, unwittingly setting themselves up for a nightmare scenario a month later; and people marking all of the kanji and none of the vocab, leading to very long stretches of not getting to the material they want, possibly lying to skip it, or getting swamped with words chosen to reinforce kanji, not augment their everyday Japanese.

It’d work fine for those with strong self-control, but it’s not hard to imagine a lot of people trapping themselves and then leaving with very strong feelings of mistrust towards the platform. It doesn’t seem like a good business decision, even though not implementing it does exclude people in OP’s position.

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If you like the style of this site, you can always just use HouHou with the same SRS levels as what they have on here. There you can do whatever items from whatever JLPT list you find and even change their srs levels as you please.

Be warned, Jisho is not a very reliable source ime. Both for what words are common, what words are usually written in kana, JLPT level, and just all around the fact that it sometimes doesn’t even have words. Also sometimes it lists it as a part of speech that it isn’t really. Its good 99% of the time, but when you get down to more specific stuff outside of definitions, it can get sketchy.

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Yea Jisho can be quite unreliable at times. While it can be a very great resource for looking things up, sometimes it just doesn’t give the full picture. That’s why I’d like to move to a pure Japanese dictionary whenever I can, but that’s probably still quite a long way away for me.

Let’s be honest here. We all thought that WK was slow at first. But like someone said it’s snowballing really quickly. Normaly people who wants to go fast will just power to the level then get exhausted because they have to many review.(not everyone) So yeah it can be boring to go through review that we already saw but it’s help us remember them. Someday I wish I had less review but then I remember my goal and do my best to do them when they get out.

Wanikani is made to make you retain information efficiently and slowy so you won’t burn out and keep a good pace. Fast people won’t get bored because of the huge number of vocab on the site. But again it’s not for everyone. This technique is better to me than my old technique of learning 5 to 10 kanji a day.

Everyone learn differently and it’s cool. Just use the methode your the best with. Good luck with your japanese study.:slight_smile:

I think just the great community we have here is worth it.

The important is not the time to get there but to even arrive there.

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Yeah, here’s this too: Wanikani isn't slow

Also, yeah, maybe it’s not the best way to spend your time if you’re already N3 and looking to review specific kanji. That said, there are other tools for that.

I would say that if you start now and reach level 27 before you to go to Japan, you’ll probably be studying more relevant/new material exactly when you’re going to need it (namely, when you start actually encountering those kanji all around you). It wouldn’t be a bad future investment.

Idk what level I am. But doing wanikani I realized that I knew more words from the getgo then I thought which made me feel good. I learned a good bit from music lyrics too

Since WK has it’s own kanji order, you will most likely encounter a bunch of kanji that you don’t know early on. However, you have to be aware that it involves a Spaced Repetition System, so there is some waiting around to do, which I personally think would be good for you since you can also study grammar and other things in the meantime. It isn’t a free resource though; if money isn’t a problem then I would say go for it, try it out (maybe pay for the first month?), you can see all the levels once you get a suscription (you can see the contents, but you still need to level up to get their corresponfing lessons and reviews) and figure out if it’ll do for you; if money is a problem and you’re not convinced once you’ve finished level 3, I would say it’s better for you to try other resources like anki or memrise.

On the ‘skipping levels topic’, it would be a good feature for WK to have, but it’s certainly not being done in the near future; and I think even if they did implement it, it would include some sort of testing and wouldn’t just allow people to customize WK.

Aaanyway, I also started WK around N3 level, and I have found it really helpful, there were many kanjis that I thought I knew but I only knew one reading or I could only recognize them in specific words, now I can figure out the reading (and sometimes the meaning) of completely unknown words, so I personally do recommend it.

Good luck with your studies and have fun in Japan! :smile:

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I was not quite N3, but definitely well beyond N4 by the time I started using this site.

I even made a thread like this to ask about the early levels.

It’s a little slow at first, but it winds up being fine–even useful. Even the early levels helped to give me an understanding of radicals, and useful mnemonics for them, beyond anything I’d gotten in my previous classes.

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