A rule of thumb… (well, maybe… it’s open to debate)
But it’s better for you in the long term to have zero lessons before leveling up, therefore you can more readily put in practice the kanji you’ve just learned.
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I try to keep my reviews at 0 and never do any lessons if I have reviews pending. Recently, I’ve been keeping my lessons at 0 too because I like leveling things up in big groups, but I don’t think keeping them at 0 is important and if I get busy or feel overwhelmed, I won’t.
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Here’s the order I do my lessons to allow myself to proceed at the fastest speed possible while still keeping my workload as even as possible (if that’s what your aiming for):
At the beginning of a lesson: All vocab left from previous lesson and radicals
After 3 correct reviews of all radicals (1 day 12 hrs): half of this lesson’s kanji (usually about 15-17 lessons)
After radicals guru’d (3 days 12 hrs): remaining kanji
After first round of kanji guru’d (5 days): all available vocab reviews
Then the process starts over after the remaining kanji are guru’d (7 days)
Now this assumes 100% accuracy and that you do reviews right as they appear, which is of course unreasonable. I personally use wanikani override to prevent getting any of the limiting factors (kanji/radicals) wrong so I’m not slowed down. This works well for me, because I am less likely to get lazy if I have a schedule, but definitely isn’t the best fit for everyone (for one, free time can be an issue). Feel free to try it out, but remember to just take it at a pace you’re comfortable with. It’s better to take it slow and stick with it for the long run than to go fast and get burned out early on.
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No, not at all.
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I usually like to maintain that sweet 0/0 streak, but if I’m not really in the mood I just try to finish the vocab lessons for a level before I get to the next one.
Of course, I’m not representing that very well at the moment, seeing as I have 78 lessons … b-but I just leveled up, it’s not my fault!
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I’m new to this whole thing, but I think of reviews as mandatory stuff to do first, as it’s finishing work to which you have already committed. If I have time and energy, I can start new lessons and get them to 0, but that’s less important and is closer to a fun optional activity.
And on the same note starting a lesson is also committing yourself to do those reviews, so it’s not something to do when you have some free time now, but rather when you estimate that you will consistently have free time in the next weeks.
Did I get this right?
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Depends on your style. One piece of advice I found early was to just try to keep your apprentice queue within the realm of 100 items–going too far under and you’re doing less than you could be, but too far over and you can get inundated.
It’s a little slower, but it keeps progress steady. I also made up the personal rule to generally not do more than 30 new lessons a day, unless they’re mostly intuitive or already known vocab, so you might find a sweet spot that works for you too.
With WK in general though, the answer is always going to be “It doesn’t matter as long as you’re doing it regularly.” There’s no race, and no restrictions on how you use it. You’ll know if you’re progressing or stagnating.
(I do spend most of my time at 0/0, but after a level-up or if I’ve had some stragglers getting guru’d? Yeah, there’ll be lessons sitting around for a few days.)
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Right now I have over eighty lessons. I leveled up several days a, but I really am not done with the previous level kanji. Several of them have dropped back down because I’m struggling with them. I will NOT let myself start the next level’s items until I feel stronger about them. And I’m very slowly working through the vocabulary of the level I just completed.
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I envy those who can do more than ten new lessons a day. I do my reviews first. If I do badly (less than around 88% right), I don’t do any new lessons until I improve. Then I do 5 lessons. If they seem easy, I may do 10 or even 15. ( I usually find radicals to be easy.) I feel it is more important to know 50 kanji or vocabulary words well than to be fuzzy on 100. I am only at Level 5, so I am still getting to know my way around. I am middle-aged and not terribly computer savvy. I barely pay attention to the numbers for apprentice, guru, master, etc. I just try to learn at a comfortable speed and avoid doing too much and burning out.
I wish there were multiple-choice exercises where a VERY SIMPLE sentence in Japanese would be given and you could choose the correct kanji or vocabulary word to fill in the blank. Example: In Japanese, it would say “Grandpa is 90___ .” The correct answer would be the kanji for “Years old.” I think it would help to use the kanji as well as memorize them.
The example sentences they give are usually too complicated for me. I need simplicity.
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how many lessons you have is completely irrelevant. it’s the reviews you want to keep at zero.
apart from that, keep the apprentice count low if possible, and in extension, guru. how low is a thing that depends on your pain tolerance. personally, i’ve been doing all my lessons ASAP, but i’m also used to learning japanese and can work through huge reviews without breaking a sweat, because i find it fun.
had a 70er review stack this morning and found it disappointingly short.
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People say this all the time, and it puzzles me, but I guess it’s just a way to say throttle the lesson rate. Or maybe a pull-system where every time one passes the gate, you put another in (just with the gate set at the apprentice-guru transition, which seems kind of arbitrary.) A real full-system pull model would add one in every time you burned one, but that only works once the queue is full, which takes months.
I’m one of the crazy people who doesn’t throttle lessons, I just make myself do them all on the first day. That does result in some crazy review load ups and downs, but so far I like it that way.
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When you fail gurus, they’re back to apprentice, and this indicates they didn’t work out for whatever reason, and there might be an underlying problem. this is a sign something needs work.
sometimes it really is nothing to worry about, and some levels just throw lots of lessons at you.
i don’t throttle anything either. with just one exposure, no practice whatsoever, you have 60% retention already. just throw things at the wall and see what sticks, but why stop there? continue throwing stuff, and just keep up the reviews. that’s exactly how all the 60-in-1-year people made it.
and i also believe that the longer you draw this here out, the more the site loses it’s value. there’s a thousand slow ways to learn the kanji, and this one’s paid.
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Hi there nice icon.
I was going to answer the OP with a big NO. Then I read this:
Your lesson load really depends on your ability to memorise the new content. If you’re overwhelmed by it, you have to stop. Watch out for the discounted lifetime membership at Christmas time. That reduces the imperative to take on too much material.
I levelled up three days ago, with 80 new lessons. I do them in batches of six, either first thing in the morning (to get 4 hour and 8 hour review done on the same day) or four hours before bedtime (to do the four hour review before bed). As at today, I have 11 left in the queue.
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and i also believe that the longer you draw this here out, the more the site loses it’s value. there’s a thousand slow ways to learn the kanji, and this one’s paid.
It’s also automatic.
You can go half the speed the site sells itself on and it’s still a fast and fairly effortless way to learn to read nearly 2,000 kanji, freeing you up for focus on other areas of study. Just, lest anyone think the site is only valuable for its speed.
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I consider doing lessons at a similar pace to my levelling important because the lessons don’t just reinforce the readings but teach new ones. I also find I retain the kanji themselves better when I can associate them with vocabulary. So I do a pace that keeps me levelling up at ~maximum speed (minus sleep) and zeros out before each new batch of kanji/radicals/vocab. I do think people underrate the importance of doing the vocabulary on here though. If I couldn’t do the vocab, I would slow down.
I think the most important thing is figuring out what pace one can handle, both upper limits and lower limits, while keeping up with other things in their study and life. The more lessons you do, the more reviews you’ll be doing for quite some time. It’s okay to not be able to keep up with that, especially if you’re working on other things at the same time.
As for keeping reviews at zero as mentioned above, it depends. The higher the SRS level, the less not doing your reviews immediately means. The problem is that procrastination lets them pile up and they become progressively more daunting.
For those saying quality > quantity, I’d like to respectfully disagree, with regards to WK. First off, what you are learning on WaniKani is a translation anyway. You are only learning some aspects of the word, the rest are learned by going and encountering them in the wild. To read more advanced materials, you need vocabulary and kanji (as well as grammar). Encountering things in the wild is what will make them feel really solid.
Secondly, the SRS system provides an inbuilt mechanism for revision that adjusts itself to your accuracy. The only problem is if you build up too many reviews, which can be met by stopping lessons.
Finally, as you level, you’ll see vocab that uses that kanji again and may even introduce new readings for it, which are also important. Old kanji come back for reviews anyway.
But of course all of this is just encouragement to find your own pace - figure out how fast you can go and how slow you need to go in order to meet your goals, and try to go at it steadily, since your rate of work will be returned to you over and over again, for better or for worse. If it’s too much, do fewer lessons and work on getting those reviews down. If you think you can push yourself, do more lessons and see how it goes.
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I mostly agree.
Vocab is definitely the best way to retain kanji; I do 100% of any vocab lessons available (except when they’re stuck behind kanji I don’t want to introduce to the queue yet). Honestly I wish WK worked in the opposite order: first introduce vocabulary, and then point out which kanji are common among those words, and then point out which radicals are common among those kanji. In real life, I can remember the form of whole words I’ve been presented with even when I don’t know the individual kanji; I don’t know why WK is structured as if it believes that were impossible.
The part I don’t quite agree with: I think it’s important to set a pace you can (almost) always keep up with. If you can only finish a fraction of the reviews each day, that stretches out the SRS intervals, which directly leads to longer burn times, and indirectly lowers accuracy, which also leads to longer burn times.
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The way WK works is fine by me, but I wouldn’t mind if it worked the opposite way for that reason - the best mnemonics are ‘oh, so that’s the [kanji-reading] in [word]’ in my opinion. Even if I’ve straight up never seen the kanji and the word is almost always written in kana. I guess that’s how one acquires kanji in the wild - I write words down and then notice the kanji in them.
Hm, that’s pretty much what I said, except it’s true that, say, doing a burn review 1 hour late is much less of a big deal than doing your first apprentice review an hour late. It sucks if I conveyed that confusingly, since that is 100% what I believe too. I defended quantity because it’s just unfortunate to see people miss out on potential progress because they think they must master a kanji card before moving onto the next one, when the system is designed so that, once you have a pace, you can just learn and review things at that pace and not waste days - and to expose you to kanji again and again through vocab, which you have to level to get. That lets you do things like read earlier, which puts everything you learn into context.
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i’m a little bit slow as a learner, but i made the experience, that learning process get’s dusty, if i keep my lessons too long without doing them. i always do some until i feel i reached my limit, and let the rest waiting for me for the next day. the earlier you are beginning to do your lessons, the faster you learn the words. but like other ppl’s said, your review list can be overwhelming. so there is probably no perfect solution haha very subjective
(p.s.: i won’t get new lessons until next month, because i need to subscribe first! hopefully gonna know my reviews until then www)
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i believe the mindset plays a big role here, too:
people don’t go into a lesson session of “5 per day” or so, so they remember better.
they do it to lighten their workload.
it’s still 2000 kanji and 3000 words, dragging it out only makes the pain of having to deal with it longer.
sure, you have a job, you have kids.
you want more time for other japanese activities, but the one biggest obstacle in learning japanese is the inability to read words, even words you already know. completely new words then require extra energy, which can be minimized by doing kanji and vocab together.
connecting 2 facts simultaneously is just faster and more stable, since they reinforce each other, and the closer they are time-wise, the better it works out for your fledgeling neuronal connections.
this means, cram as much as possible in at the same time, at the risk of forgetting 40% - which leads me to my next point.
we are culturally primed to not fail. we strive for perfection while telling our kids that failure is the mother of success.
this then means we already understand Intellectually that having less than optimal retention is not a bad thing.
quite the opposite: SRS will feed you the same information again, which is additional exposure, which, in the long run, changes the odds of success in our favor.
all this is perfectly clear to anyone who ever tried to devise a strategy for learning here.
and yet, getting an item wrong feels bad, having it drop ranks feels like punishment.
i get that. i’m in the same boat as you. i feel like shit when i had a bad run. this is some sort of self-damaging hypocrisy on an emotional level we all have to combat, we’ve been primed like this, we’re the victims of stupidity on a civilization-wide level.
coming back once more to the topic of workload:
our goal is to attain literacy in a script that takes native kids 9 plus years to attain, in order to assist our adult brains in acquiring a foreign language that’s considered to be among the hardest to learn for natives of romance/germanic/slavic language families.
reading is the one skill that gives you the benefits of precision, working at your individual pace, and exposure quality and quantity on an unmatched niveau, IF we can make the input comprehensible on some level - which
we indeed do, even without speaking any japanese whatsoever.
to give you an idea of comprehension level: my japanese wife can read a chinese newspaper and
get the gist of it’s contents, despite speaking no chinese at all, and only being able to read a certain portion of the characters, and that right there is a game changer.
add to this the simplicity of japanese pronunciation and the regularity of the spelling, and you have an easy win in the study department.
yes, you want the language in it’s entirety.
not just 1 out of 4 (or 3, if you discount writing) skills, but listening can be done anywhere anytime. it’s a physical skill, and it doesn’t matter if you listen to NHK or かわいいみふぃー.
your listening will take the same time, because technically, it’s only the ability to hear the sounds (not many for the japanese language), word boundaries and details like pitch where it matters (it doesn’t always matter).
speaking can only get better by speaking, for which you need grammar and vocab first - and the single most important skill to acquire those is reading.
so the most efficient holistic method would teach you kanji with some vocab first. then add grammar, all the while bombarding you with speech, and your own speaking comes last.
what this means is, no, you do not need to reduce your wk workload to make time for other studies.
you’re much better off hammering away till you’re done or feel (in your late 40s) that wk’s diminishing returns reduce the time/knowledge ratio to the point that it makes more sense to start on grammar, while reading, and
you’ll find out that your brain, being the amazing pattern recognition machine it is, already decoded a huge
chunk of it on it’s own while you were reading.
this also means that a certain dedication (i also like to call it pain tolerance) is needed to actually finish wk (and become literate, and develop the skills needed to keep learning new, non-wk kanji effortlessly without SRS), and at that point, your journey has just begun.
there is no shortcut, no clever strategy, that could make it faster or less painful. no amount of self-consolation
by feeling happy you’re able to finish genki 2 or yotsuba is actually going to distract from the fact that you’ve cheated yourself and your culturally primed reptile brain of way faster progress and that you’d long have been on a way higher level, had you put up with 300 reviews (one hour max, if you do your reviews without angst-fed long thinking times) per day for a mere year - assuming you’re in the “pacing myself camp”.
you’ll be very aware of this on an unconscious level, and the frustration will start to grow, as evidenced by an extremely high rate of early quitters here on wk.
yes, it might feel better to convince yourself of the importance of a balanced approach. your adult self will experience satisfaction by thinking quality beats quantity
in language learning. but you’ll get at some point that you were wrong.
this wall of text is coming from someone who’s been studying japanese for 8 years, been living in japan for 6, and who thinks he’s a pretty competent speaker (with imperfections), who tried to avoid climbing mt kanji all these years, but now knows better - in fact, has known better all along.
if i could help at least 1person with this essay, it was worth it typing this on my phone.
edit: typos
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