i remember how perplexed i was, because they just look so out of place 
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I am amazed too. Also this communitiy is so wholesome. Esp in times like these, it rly warms my heart 
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I feel you! I spent 46 days in level 9 alone (so far my overall average is ~14 days based on WK stats) mostly due to crying from overwork before my long-awaited freedom resignation last January.
And good luck sticking to your current speed! It definitely requires commitment! Fighting!
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thankyou 先輩 let’s do our best 
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i can’ t wait till i’ ll be a level 60 too, i will remain in this forum reminiscing about the good ol’ time when kanji were hard. 
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A lot of kanji are made up of each other, with one representing the meaning and another one representing the the pronunciation. Check it out. This script lets you see which part is the phonetic one, it’s very helpful.
This is what it looks like when you enter a character’s page. It also appears when doing a lesson on that kanji.
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The number of reviews you get it based on the number of lessons you do.
The best advice I got was to do the same number of lessons each day, however many that is (I do 15) and do the reviews every day (3 times a day: breakfast, lunch & sometime in the evening for me).
The longer you leave reviews, the more they pile up. The more lessons you do, the faster they pile up.
I end up with 3, 50 item reviews a day:
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Same here. Definitely helps. Although I stopped doing it around lvl 12, just to see how good I am in recalling kanji without writing it. So far, so good. I still occasionally write down some of the more confusing ones. But the first 12 levels of writing every single kanji and vocab instilled in me a proper stroke order. Now, I can correctly “guess” the stroke order, in like 95-98% of new words.
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I found ConfusionGuesser script helpful to quickly compare kanji you have mistaken with the one you mistook it for.
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I had this problem too around when I was hitting your level, and it’s pretty stressful–it does get easier over time, but I still have moments of stopping and going ‘wait, which one was this again…?’. The main thing I can think of that helped me was really focusing on an individual radical of the kanji that distinguished it from another, or zeroing in on what the small difference was between them and associating the meaning with those small differences. Stuff like focusing on the left-hand side of 役 and 投, that ‘throw’ has the fingers while ‘service’ has the waiting, or that 末 appropriately has the longest line on its end, while 未’s longest line isn’t there yet and so on…
A lot of the more similar ones still trip me up–sometimes I find it helps to try and think of the reading first and the meaning later. Reviewing them to find differences when you notice you’re mixing them up, and writing them down, are all good tips too. Overall, as long as you keep at it, I’m sure you’ll get there! がんばろう!
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this is really useful, thanks so much. let’s do our best
i’ ll give it a try, thanks
yhea, i think that writing kanji is really really imporant
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oh i see i see, this is really helpful
That’s actually a great tip, cheers!
I felt the same thing between 8-12. I am not sure what exactly changed at that point but now that I am past that small hurdle I have adjusted the number of lessons I do per day, as well as how I do the reviews/lessons in general. I had to slow down a lot for these levels as I felt like I wasn’t retaining as much as Id have liked.
Don’t feel too bad - you have kept up a good pace! Maybe just give yourself a extra day or two on leveling up and use that extra time to do some extra review. Immersion could help as well. If you can find material that uses similar vocab to match your level you might find that will help with retention. The work you do around those levels seems to pay off around level 13/14.
Below is my graph that shows my path through those levels. I also work full time so I had other things to manage when I ran into that wall, but I’m glad I stuck to it because things are back to a more manageable routine!
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I also dislike when things build up, so I usually check how many reviews are coming down the line. If I see a day will have 150-200 at the end, I try to take little study breaks from work to tackle them in smaller chunks - taking 10 minutes to do a few reviews a few times a day is a nice mental switch from my work tasks and it’s not as overwhelming. Nothing more annoying then having to sit down for a huge long session, or getting distracted and having to redo the ones you only did half of!
I also take longer to do my lessons now once I got to about level 7 or 8, then I have less reviews adding up per day. Every day or other day I’ll tackle 5 lessons at a time so I’m not slammed with a giant avalanche of reviews afterward - or I’ll do all the lessons at once on a Friday night or Saturday morning so I have the weekend to deal with the worst of the reviews before I’m back to the weekday grind. It takes me longer than it did to move through the levels but I bought a lifetime membership to take the pressure off myself to finish by any kind of due date.
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Nothing really to add other than the fact that I sympathize with you, OP. Been on level 9 longer than any other level. It felt like for a whole week I was literally getting every kanji wrong every time. Was absolutely miserable. Currently at 26/34 kanji passed so I am definitely making progress, though I still find myself missing the few kanji left in this level. I also find myself missing a lot of old, returning kanji/vocabulary; it’s getting tougher and tougher to keep up.
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i just got to level 10 an hour ago, i really hope it goes better
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anyway i get what you are feeling, that’s why i’ planning to start reading soon, i don’ t think you can really retain kanji if you don’t use them.
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