Is taking this long even acceptable

I saw seeing a good few things of people talking about time and all that so that made me want to check for myself and well… image

obviously early on there was long breaks and inconsistency and all that but i thought over the past half a year or so i was being a lot more consistent and making real progress but seeing all the the averages and everything I’m not so sure now…

10 Likes

Honestly, you’re the only one that can answer that question. There’s nothing wrong with taking your time and we even have a dedicated thread for it:

That said, you really want to take a look at how much time you’re devoting to WK and what kind of level up speed fits your goals.

24 Likes

Learning at your own pace is very important for not under- or overwhelming yourself in the long run with returning reviews and leeches. At times, i was also very insecure when i heard that some people have an average level up time of 7 days or something in that range, while i was going much slower. So i started to accelerate and burned out over the course of a few levels, which led to piling up reviews and me losing motivation because accuracy was getting lower and lower. It then takes a lot of effort to tackle a 500 - 1500 review pile over the course of a few days. So most importantly: Don’t look at other people’s level up speed, because your learning style may differ from others’.

Here’s a tip however that worked for me to get my average level up time down:
When reaching a new level and doing new lessons, make sure to time them so that you do the first review of new items on the same day. For me, when i do new lessons late at night, then sleep and do the reviews in the afternoon of the next day, i forgot a lot more, as opposed to when i do lessons in the morning and the first review in the evening. The fast review seems to make items stick more, at least for me.

Here’s a screenshot of my level up times in the 30s and 40s which varied wildly! And you can see the burnouts there as well…

15 Likes

Exactly. If you’re just learning for fun, then don’t worry about your speed. If you’ve got goals, however, then you need to consider if you’ll reach them in an acceptable amount of time. What’s acceptable is only up to you, but some goals might not even be achievable in a lifetime with that pace, so you just have to evaluate where you wanna be and in what amount of time.

12 Likes
7 Likes

If you’re okay with it, then it is acceptable. Any type of progress is still more than no progress.

Yeah, typically people make a lot of progress in the first few weeks of learning, because everything is new and absorbing it is fun that way. But not everyone is like that of course.

Now if you’re not okay with it then there things you can do to change that. Maybe the amount of lessons you do on a day is too low, or you don’t review on a consistent basis.

1 Like

I want to become proficient in japanese… That’s why I’m doing this after all.

I really need to do some serious reflecting on how I tackle goals in general as considering how few other obligations I have right now, this is very difficult to justify…

I’ll try to not get discouraged at least

5 Likes

You’re good

My average over the first 5 levels was a little over 100 days.

It’s a multi-year journey. Don’t worry about being the fastest. Being fast is not the goal here.

9 Likes

Well… Depends on the person

6 Likes

Eh, that’s fair I guess, but I think if you take a 200 day break after lv3 it’s safe to assume you’re not speedrunning WaniKani at least :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

9 Likes

Speedrun any%+200 days on level 3 achievement

I think I took a 200-300 day break somewhere around 11 personally. I just came back with more resolve a couple years after starting and being slow, even though that’s definitely not the norm.

3 Likes

If there’s no rush, then whatever suits you. Besides, I don’t know your personal situation. Maybe you’re studying, or working, maybe you have some family issues. Lots of things can happen that can get you down.
Now, if I were to say Is this aceptable? Well, I think not. If nothing meaningful is going on right now, then maybe you should be a little more disciplined.

5 Likes

Because… Why, exactly?

If all the time I want to spare WK a day is 5 minutes, just because I can’t be arsed to do more, surely that’s my business?

6 Likes

Consider this:

There are 60 levels on Wanikani. You already have ~5 done, with an average of 92 days per level.

Finishing the remaining 55 levels, unless you change your average, will take over 13 years.

If you’re just doing this for fun, then maybe that’s fine. But I assume you want to finish sooner than that.

I recommend that you identify what is making this take so long, make concrete plans to combat that, and turn that into a habit. Are you doing your reviews every day?

11 Likes

Frankly, no. Unless we want to stick with the platitudes such as “no rush”, “take your time”, “everyone has their own pace”.
A pace like that makes no financial sense if you’re subscribed to anything but lifetime.
A pace like that makes very little sense if you want to make real progress. It is true that there is no right answer. But there are clearly wrong answers.

Now, that’s regarding “pace”. If however this was a one time break, then only you know why that happened :).

17 Likes

I’ve historically had trouble with self-discipline (and not the best with outside discipline either) so it’s definitely on me. I need to find my momentum and keep it.

1 Like

There are many braggarts on this site with speed. I don’t mean to sound too condemning since a lot of people are just excited, but I find most of these warp-speed leveling guides to be not much more than “look what I did.” I’ve been doing this a few years and would get frustrated with my own times, only because there’s so many threads on here talking about leveling up as fast as possible–and for what? Did you actually memorize all of that stuff, or will you forget it down the road after you blew through it?

Go at your own pace. I reached 60 and reset, because I didn’t feel comfortable with a lot of kanji I saw later, even after I cleared it. Levels mean nothing, only what you learn and retain. Go the pace you feel comfortable with and feel like you’re retaining information.

15 Likes

What do you mean? OP asked for everyone’s opinion here. And I said whatever suited them is best.

1 Like

Im doing reviews every day but certainly not enough. I should probably be trying to get it to 0 everyday.

Also I really do appreciate all the dicussion and differing opinions. I know youre all doing your best to advice me from your own personal experiences and it means a lot. <3

6 Likes

There’s a fair bit of disconnect between “whatever suits you” and “this is not acceptable unless there’s something important going on in your life” though.

But it’s probably best if I drop it here. Discussions of this sort never go well.

Depends on how many you have. If it’s more than you can reasonably handle in a day, spread them out or they’ll come back just as hard. Adjust the pacing of your lessons to match. Aiming for 0/0 always is going to bite you in the ass later on when the workload picks up.

4 Likes