It's taking me too long to level up

I’m regularly only getting anywhere from 33% to 55% correct on reviews. :frowning:

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This could be happening for a lot of reasons… Personally I’m not in a hurry to finish WK fast so maybe any advice I give will be rubbish :laughing: But I find that taking too much new vocab at once doesn’t help me, maybe 10~15 new words per day is just enough.

Also, are you using KaniWani? I think it helps me remember WaniKani vocab better.

My internet is a bit weird right now. What is kaniwani?

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It’s like a reversed WaniKani. You feed it your WK data (use the API for it) and you’ll get the vocab in English and you have to type it in Japanese. I think it accepts hiragana only but the best way is to install the Japanese keyboard on you computer so that you can convert it to the kanji.

KaniWani is basically an SRS system that forces you to recall the answer in Japanese when given the English vocab. AKA WaniKani in reverse. I believe it’s free, I think you just need to feed it your WK API key so it can keep track of where you are

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What percentage are you guys getting correct in reviews?

These are my stats, but as you can see, I’m not the least worried about leveling up quickly :sweat_smile: this is why I bought lifetime.

Also, when I’m doing reviews, if I get something wrong I re-read the mnemonics, etc. It’s worth it taking some time to make your own mnemonics, it might help you :slight_smile: and the scripts are also very helpful.

My stats from WKStats are probably super inflated since I’ve recently reached lv60, but I would say don’t be too bothered if you’re not getting the correct answers. WK’s SRS is built to help you with the ones you struggle with, and to get the ones you know out of the way quicker since you don’t need extra time on those. I personally didn’t get bothered by any mistakes I made, I just kept on moving along. Or if it was particularly bad for some items I’d focus on them more

Also how many lessons did you take on? If you did all of our lessons immediately, maybe that’s too quick of a pace for you. As a person who grinded WK as fast as I could, I did all of my lessons ASAP, but I knew that this would make me weaker in remembering some vocab. My personal goal was to learn all the kanji, so I knew what I was sacrificing

If you want to learn everything, then maybe slow down your pace. If you’re struggling to level up as it is, if you take more time on individual items then at least in the same amount of time it takes to level up now, you’ll understand the items one by one as opposed to throwing yourself into a wall until you magically level up

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I feel like there’s just too many vocabulary lol. One level has like 130 vocab!

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Yeah that’s fair, but it’s all meant to help you reinforce the meanings of the kanji and give you some practical uses for them. Technically you can get around it by using reorder scripts to prioritize kanji first.

Leveling up is only based on kanji, so if you reorder so kanji comes first, you can even technically ignore vocab. I personally didn’t do that in favor of just taking it all on so I can have 0/0 lessons and reviews, also to get some exposure to the vocab in general since it’s nice to have

I think I saw something about people making a lesson picker userscript recently? So maybe if that’s out/coming out you might find it useful for picking and choosing what you want to learn. I think the intention is to use it to help avoid learning very similar looking vocab at the same time, but you might benefit from it to get just a few vocab for each kanji as opposed to all of it

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This can be done, but at the same time, what’s the point, right? I think the main goal is learning vocabulary, not leveling up. Also, the vocab reinforces the kanji and vice-versa.

I don’t know about the script, I think it might be broken. But there is a WaniKani feature for that, which for some weird reason isn’t linked anywhere on the dashboard: https://www.wanikani.com/subject-lessons/picker

Oh, btw

Congrats! :tada:

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Yeah I didn’t mean to encourage solely focusing on kanji and ignoring vocab, my b lol
It’s definitely better to use them to complement each other like you said, I definitely still did that even though for me the fun part was just blazing through to get to kanji. But I knew what I was sacrificing

Though at least since I gave myself exposure to the lessons, whenever I find stuff in the wild that I forgot, I tend to be like “oh yeah I learned that before, silly me” and have an easier time remembering it because of the lessons I took in the past.

Also thanks!

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Here’s mine, and I’m going at the fastest speed possible:

I think for every person, the correct pace is a different one. While others prefer it a bit slower, others go brrrr and crash through WaniKani in one year.

So, I think the best advice is to figure out what pace suits you. I think what @milila said is a good starting point: 10 to 15 lessons a day, and don’t worry about not levelling up too fast. The most important aspect is, after all, that you are able to recall all the stuff you learn later on :wink: The lesson picker (which @milila already mentioned) might also help you.

And I know that it feels frustrating to look at all that vocab that you’ll have to learn, but, as I’ve already said, you don’t have to do them all at once, just pick a pace you’re comfortable with.

(Also, about your accuracies: I’ve been told that as long as my accuracy is above 80 to 85%, preferably 90%, I’m good to go, so I think that might be a good accuracy to focus on getting. Later on, you’ll probably get better just by doing WaniKani because you’re getting used to the whole system and the language itself.)

I hope this helps, and I wish you good luck for your Japanese journey :smiley: :heart:

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It’s taking me about 2 weeks to a month per level! :frowning: That seems too long?

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Nah, two weeks is fine. I’ve seen people here in the forums that needed 6 years to finish WaniKani :slight_smile:

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If you just do the math though it will take me 5 years at a pace of 1 level per month and half that if one level in 2 weeks (2.5 years). That’s a hell of a long time LOL.

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Speaking as a person who sped through the levels, even if you were able to do it like I was, my memory of a lot of vocab and kanji isn’t particularly great.

If you truly want to remember all the stuff you learn, take it slow. That pace isn’t particularly bad either. For me personally, just getting the initial exposure and having fun with the lessons is what I wanted.

I mentioned earlier that if I actually needed to know WK vocab/kanji when reading, I could just look it up and I’d remember what I learned on WK and that would make it easier to jump back into things as opposed to learning it completely from scratch

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Now that you have learned about KaniWani and the lesson picker, maybe prioritize the radicals and then kanji when leveling up, and then split your vocab during the day? If you feel that 15 words is not enough, maybe do 3 x 10? Morning, lunch, evening, for example.

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Have you heard of our good man jprsjkfdjkfdjkfdjfks and his ultimate guide to WK? :slight_smile: I recommend reading part 5 and 6 especially.

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Yeah splitting things up throughout the day is really helpful for giving you time to focus on individual items more, while still getting a lot done.

I forgot to mention in my lv60 post that I started doing that as of the last few months
Especially since if you break it down to smaller sets between different hours, the SRS will give you a break between reviewing them, on top of the fact that you give yourself time to focus on the lessons better

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