Is it better to prioritize radicals & kanji?

WaniKani Requesting Help
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I saw some people that do all the kanjis and radicals in the lessons and then gradually incorporate vocabulary once the reviews are not too high, so they level up faster

I’m trying the same, trying to not surpass 100 reviews per day, because it gets difficult to complete.

The issue is that I’m now in level 8, with around 60 pending vocabulary from level 7, and learning kanji and radicals from level 8. Is that ok? Should I complete all my vocabulary before starting with the next level?

This is my current level-up graph

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I feel slow and I’d love to go faster, but I don’t think I have time for more reviews in a single day. My accuracy is around 96.5%

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I think if you limit yourself to 100 reviews per day you won’t be able to go very fast.

At this rate just do level by level. Prioritizing radicals and kanji makes sense when you want to go at under 10 days per level.

If you want to go faster the first step is doing all of your daily reviews. As for lessons I would do radicals all in one go as those are easy.

My difficulty ranking for item types:
radicals < vocab < kanji

based on this you can do more lessons of item types on the left, and less on the right.

For me I would try to do 10- ish kanji lessons per day. And (on a separate day) 20-30 vocab lessons.

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Do you do batches of more than 100 reviews? or do you try to space it in the day in smaller batches?

I get anxious leaving undone reviews and try to finish all in the morning :laughing:

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At level 7, you haven’t even started having levels that have 3 kanji that look exactly the same, when you start getting to similar kanji and burn reviews 100 reviews start to feel like a mountain.

I’d stick to a set number of lessons a day, between 10-20, 10 is slow and 20 is break-neck speed in my experience. And then yes complete all the past levels vocab at the same time you are doing the current levels kanji.

Say you want to do 15 lessons a day. Add the 30 kanji from L8, and 80 vocab from L7 (the level before). That’s 110 total, divide 30 kanji up across 8 days. That’s like 4 current level kanji a day and 11 vocab. Then you’ll have a few days where you are just doing L8 vocab while you wait for the L8 kanji to get to guru, And then you’ll start L9 with about half the vocab finished, and you can start the process over again.

p.s. always start the level by doing the radicals though.

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I did reviews 2 or sometimes 3 times a day. Batch of 100 sounds good.

If you do lessons and reviews at roughly the same time every day you will have naturally forming batches of reviews at certain times of day, eg 60 in the morning, 100 at lunch time, 30 in the evening.

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I’d say that’s completely fine and normal, especially when going fast! When leveling up, you’ll also unlock vocabulary from the previous level at the same time, after all (since vocabulary is unlocked when leveling up Kanji to Guru).

However, I would personally avoid having any level 7 vocabulary left when leveling up to level 9, for example. I prioritize lessons in this order: Radicals > Kanji > Previous Level’s Vocabulary > Current Level’s Vocabulary, and I use the Advanced Lesson Picker to do it that way. I’m also going at a breakneck speed, though, and will likely slow down soon as I am reaching my limit. This pace is perfectly fine on good days, but it needs to be sustainable on bad days too!

If you can’t do more than 100 reviews per day, you simply can’t expect to level up fast either. I suggest taking your time—that’s fine! I took a two-year break from Japanese after burning out from attempting to do way more than I could handle. If I had taken it slower instead, I might have stuck with it and been far above the level I am now haha.

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Prioritizing radicals and kanji worked for me in the beginning, but I’ve recently started noticing that my brain started to offload kanji without that additional context that vocabulary gives you. It became more difficult to read new vocabulary and do reviews for such kanji.

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If you want to go fast, then you really should prioritize radicals first. Clearing those in in reviews unlocks the rest of the kanji for that level. Clearing the kanji unlocks the next level. So back when I was doing a level every week or so, I’d prioritize the radicals. Then make sure all the kanji was in the reviews when the new stuff unlocked. Then I’d shotgun the vocab in the space between then and the next level unlocking. Making sure all vocab lessons were done before the next level unlocked. Including the new vocab from the past level.

Generally I’d do 200+ reviews a day. So if you want to go fast, 100 reviews per day is simply going to cut it. If that’s the limit you want, then speed is not for you and the tactics to prioritize it might not really align with your goals/schedule.

I’d suggest at least doing the radicals and then mixing some of the new kanji with the last batch of vocab you inevitably get struck by on leveling up.

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