Cool, good to know! Looking forward to it.
Hah, honestly kind of looking forward to get into a position like that. Would rather have too much rather than too little. And yeah, I do stuff the hour it’s available. Basically been trying to level as quick as possible.
First, like, 10 levels were a joke to me because I started with some prior knowledge. Don’t let it get to your head, I’m nearing level 20 and most terms introduced at this point are new to me. At first I got a lot of review items incorrect, cuz of cockiness.
Though, the onslaught of counter-related items you get in the first 10 levels is something that’s commonly criticized, which I understand.
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Now’s a good time to understand what it takes to level up if you haven’t already.
In order to level up in Wanikani, you must guru at least 90% of the kanji for that level. In order to unlock a kanji, you must reach its level and guru all the radicals it depends on. This means that for most levels, you must go through two stages: First guru all the radicals on that level, then guru the kanji on that level that you unlocked after guru’ing those radicals.
For all levels except the first two, the SRS intervals are 4 hours, 8 hours, 23 hours, 47 hours (the later two can be approximated as 1 day and 2 days). This means that you don’t have to do reviews at every hour of the day, you just have to establish a schedule consistent with the 4 hour intervals.
Example schedule:
Friday 6am: Level up, do new radical lessons
Friday 10am: Apprentice 1 radical reviews
Friday 6pm: Apprentice 2 radical reviews
Saturday 6pm: Apprentice 3 radical reviews
Monday 6pm: Apprentice 4 radical reviews - radicals are now guru’d unlocking the last few kanji. Do all the kanji lessons immediately.
Monday 10pm: kanji apprentice 1 reviews
Tuesday 6am: kanji apprentice 2 reviews
Wednesday 6am: kanji apprentice 3 reviews
Friday 6am: kanji apprentice 4 reivews - level up and repeat the cycle.
That’s roughly the schedule I followed for a while. As you can see, it’s not so hard. You just have to understand how the intervals work.
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I’m actually completely new to vocab, so this is all stuff I’m doing for the first time. Oh okay, guess I’ll see when I start getting close to finishing the first 10 levels! Should be fun.
Don’t worry, I didn’t know any Japanese before starting WK either.
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Yeah I’ve read most of the stuff for newbies so I think I have a basic idea of what it takes to level. But that’s a good idea, I should probably make a schedule. Still been adjusting to the slower pace after I finished the first two levels, probably better to get some consistency soon.
Four months ago, I was in your shoes (I started WK on Jan 1st). It seems like forever when you first start out, but time flies.
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Ah, those were the days…
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Heh, was learning vocab a New Year’s resolution? Yeah, I’m probably being too impatient.
Well you could say learning Japanese was a New Year’s Resolution. I don’t really make formal resolutions, but I had decided New Year’s was a good time to start, since it makes a nice easy to remember date.
Japanese has proven much more difficult than I expected, but I am making progress, slowly but surely.
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If you would like a graphical understanding of how much your workload can increase: take this time-machine graph of my WK stats:
Highlighted is the day I hit level 4.
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It takes maybe a month, but you will get to a point where enough is enough. Here’s a graph of my progress over time. The long plateau is when I got overwhelmed and did nothing for a number of months. You will get there if you stick through the “this is not fast enough” period. The vertical cliff is when I reset to level 2. The good thing about what I did is I’m burning items early. The bad thing is I lost about 4 months, which at my pace is 6 to 8 levels.
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I nearly got Leebo’d.
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Oh, how’d you get something like this? That’s super cool to be able to look at. And really helpful actually, thanks! Is the y-axis total items? Or items per day?
And Y-axis is total items.
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Yes. Y is total items. Interestingly enough tkyk started about where I did. Although I estimate I’d be in the mid 20s had I not taken time away. 45 is a pretty insane pace starting less than a year ago.
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Just the other day someone made a topic asking how anyone could possibly cram all the content into their head to go the max speed for these first levels.
I imagine that’s the person WaniKani imagines as a new user. Someone who doesn’t know any kanji at all. I had N3 when I joined, so it took about 4 months to start seeing kanji that were new to me, but it was a good review.
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I definitely thought people speeding through was the norm on WaniKani, until I started reading the forums after getting bored from waiting. Was definitely surprised at how wrong I was lol.
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